In my last column, I began introducing the Catholic Worker Movement, founded in 1933 by Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin. The movement is best known for its Houses of Hospitality, which, in widely various forms, offer food and shelter to the poor.
It’s easy to see these houses as a form of social services, just one more instance of our society’s efforts to “meet the needs of the most vulnerable.” And indeed, who can find fault with feeding and sheltering people?
But Day and Maurin’s vision for the houses was a fully Catholic vision. Which means that, although there may be some similarities, when viewed from the outside, between what they established and institutionalized charities, the true nature of a Catholic Worker house is quite different. I’ll unpack some of these differences here and in upcoming columns.
The first one is that Day and Maurin envisioned “agenda-less” hospitality. In other words, everyone is worthy of food and shelter just by virtue of being a human being. You didn’t have to first attain certain moral qualifications, or be “clean” or sober, or be trying to better yourself or be looking for a job, or anything like that. And the reason is that you don’t have to do those things to deserve food, shelter and clothing. You deserve those things because you are a human being. And agenda-less hospitality simply offers them on that basis.
There are limitations, of course, to what any house can offer. No house can take in everybody, and many, including the one that I help run, are simply not able to take in particular kinds of folks. In our case, for instance, it’s because we have lots of children running around, which limits both the attention we can give each guest and the sorts of lifestyles that we can accommodate. So, we have to be selective. But this is not because a person who struggles with anger or addiction doesn’t deserve our hospitality, it’s just because certain behaviors are not a good fit for us right now.
You might think the idea that everybody — without qualification — deserves food and shelter is uncontroversial. But our culture so often combines a sort of moral puritanism with a certain work ethic that even the most tolerant of us might find ourselves quietly outraged by the thought of a person not living “responsibly” having the necessities of life doled out to them.
You’d be surprised how many times the first questions I’m asked when someone learns about our little hospitality house are: What do we require of the guests? And do we help them get jobs? It’s not about that, I explain. It’s about answering the question, as an old friend once put it to me, “Is that a person?”
Even the guests themselves feel the need to prove to us that they are “good people” or “not lazy.” We don’t mind, of course, if people want to get jobs or just see our hospitality house as a way to “get back on their feet.” But what we tell them is that they can stay as long as they like, that they don’t have to prove anything to us, and that we hope for friendship more than anything else. It’s a measure of our culture that those sentiments are usually hard for them to believe.
Agenda-less hospitality is more controversial than you’d think. There is still, deep in our culture, a desire to distinguish between “us” and “them.” It’s an unspoken piece of popular American morality that because I have a job and a house I am “better,” in most cases, than those who live on the street.
This is one of our pet prejudices that the Gospel explodes. We are all sinners, none of us deserves God’s hospitality, his welcome. And yet, in Christ, we receive it, unworthy as we are. None of us receives what we deserve, and if we judge others, we are only asking God to judge us with the same harshness (Mt 7:1). If anything, riches and comfort — if our Lord’s words are any indication (Lk 6:24) — are what we ought to be concerned about; not addictions, lack of work or laziness. The Gospel, Dorothy Day would often say, forever takes away our right to discriminate between the deserving and the undeserving poor.
And that’s just the first difference.
Miller is director of pastoral care and outreach at Assumption in St. Paul. He has a Ph.D. in theology from Duke University, and lives with his family at the Maurin House Catholic Worker community in Columbia Heights. You can reach him at colin.miller1@protonmail.com.
