Finding family at the Catholic Worker

National Catholic Reporter, March 7, 2003 by Margot Patterson

On a chilly evening in late fall, a dozen people gathered around the dinner table at the Peter Maurin Farm in Marlboro, N.Y. It could have been a picture of America. There were young and old, male and female, white, black and Latino guests. Marvin Bu-ga-lu Smith was a jazz musician living at the farm and giving music lessons in the next town over. Lorenzo, an undocumented worker from Mexico, was in transit to a destination yet to be determined.

Everybody had a story.

Theodore Roosevelt Ridlon, commonly known as Slim, age 83 and mentally disabled, was the oldest member of the community. John Good's 5-year-old daughter, Serene, was the youngest person at the table. With Serene, there was less history to plumb, but she was history in the making, a sign of how Catholic Worker communities like the Peter Maurin Farm are changing. A movement based on voluntary poverty and community, one associated with single people more than couples, is increasingly family-based.

Look at Catholic Worker houses around the country, and these days you'll often find different configurations of family, not singles, running them. In Worcester, Mass., Claire and Scott Schaeffer-Duffy raise four children and run a house of hospitality. In Redwood City, Calif., Jan Johanson is raising a grand-daughter in a Catholic Worker house for teenagers where Johansen has lived and worked for 14 years. In nearby San Bruno, Calif., Kate Chatfield and her husband, Peter Stiehler, run a Catholic Worker shelter and soup kitchen for the homeless. In Houston, Louise and Mark Zwick are a married couple who for 20 years have run a Catholic Worker that provides housing, employment, medical care, and food and clothing for new immigrants and refugees.

As it approaches its 70th anniversary, the Catholic Worker movement is evolving in ways its founders didn't anticipate.

"The typical Catholic Worker in the past was single, worked in a soup kitchen, and resisted the war," said Larry Purcell, founder of the Catholic Worker in Redwood City, Calif. "But now there are Catholic Workers in suburbs and small towns. There are many more families than there were. The Catholic Worker tradition has not been hospitable to families. The struggle of how to be a Catholic Worker and a family is being engaged vigorously on a number of fronts."

Dorothy Day was a single mother when in 1933 in New York City she and Peter Maurin started The Catholic Worker newspaper. A passionate champion of the poor and a talented journalist who, before her conversion to Catholicism at age 30, was a personality in the bohemian world of Greenwich Village, Day had a searching, almost ruthless moral honesty that impressed those who came in contact with her. Tom Cornell, a community member at the Peter Maurin Farm who served as managing editor of The Catholic Worker in the early 1960s and who knew Dorothy Day well, remembers her as "extraordinary."

"She was the object of many men's attention. She wasn't just attractive. She was also sparkling and commanding." But it was Day's "authenticity" that set her apart, Cornell said.

"When you met her, you realized you were in the presence of a woman of absolute truth," Cornell said. "Everything she said and did came out of an honest perception of reality. We loved her. The reason she was able to exert the kind of authority she did is because we loved her."

From the beginning, The Catholic Worker newspaper spoke for the needs of the working person and the unemployed, attacked racism and anti-Semitism and presented the personalist ideals that would inspire the Catholic Worker movement. The latter evolved more by accident than design, with Peter Maurin opening the first house of hospitality in 1934. Maurin, who provided much of the intellectual ballast for the movement, died in 1949. Day died in 1980.

Today, said Cornell, there is no one in the Catholic Worker who speaks for the movement the way Dorothy Day could and did. But Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin's vision of living out the gospel by caring for the poor, protesting war and violence, and practicing community in an age of individualism is still going strong. That so many couples with children are trying to live out the ideals of the Catholic Worker speaks to the appeal of that vision, which these days seems as strong, if not stronger, when interpreted by families.

"I think a lot of Catholic Worker communities that have any kind of staying power have a dynamic duo at its core with the exception of the Catholic Worker community in Manhattan. That is its own kind of animal. It really is a community of single people," said Tom Christopher Cornell, 35, the son of Tom and Monica Cornell and the chief farmer-gardener at the Peter Maurin Farm. The 50-acre property in Marlboro provides residents at the farm and at the two Catholic Worker houses in Manhattan with fresh produce and has living space for 15 people.

The Cornells are an example of how durable Catholic Worker ideals can be. Tom and Monica Cornell have been active in the Catholic Worker movement since the 1950s. Monica's parents played a part in setting up the Cincinnati Catholic Worker, making Monica's children third-generation Catholic Workers. The Cornells have been at the Peter Maurin Farm since 1993. For a time their daughter, Deirdre, and her husband and three children also lived at the Peter Maurin Farm. Deirdre Cornell and her husband now run Aleluya House, a Catholic Worker house in Newburgh, N.Y., 10 miles south of Marlboro.