Report from the Midwest CW Resistance Retreat

By Jake Olzen
The last weekend in April, over 200 Catholic Workers and friends from the Midwest gathered in Chicago for the 8th annual Midwest Catholic Worker Faith and Resistance Retreat.  This year’s retreat was focused on “The Cost of War: At Home and Abroad.” The retreat was a mutli-faceted look at the overwhelming challenges our world faces, many because of the U.S.’s imperial ethic of violence and coercion. 
A panel discussion on Catholic Worker Peace Teams and other positive responses to injustice and violence were presented.  Catholic Workers walking with people in the West Bank, Gaza, Iraq, the U.S.-Mexico Border and the nonviolent resistance to injustice that the different local communities are a part of.
As Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer shared with us Sunday morning in his talk “Violent Theology, Violent Hope, Violent Imperial Nation: Hopeful Alternatives Rooted in the Nonviolence of Jesus,” the times we live in are perhaps not far off from the times Jesus lived in.  Currently, we are living in an empire in serious decline and what do we root our hope in during these difficult times?  According to Jack, Jesus invites us to live in the midst of authentic hope: community; love of enemies; the practice of nonviolence; a spirit of new possibilities; the breaking down of barriers.  We are not to just be announcers of doom and gloom but to share the good news of alternatives to militarism, empire, and violence.
For us, much of our hope and resistance is rooted in community.  These are dark days we live in and hope is hard to come by.  We were blessed to be able to celebrate Mass together as a community.  To share in the Word of God and break bread and drink from the cup as a Catholic Worker family is truly a gift and something many of us look forward to.  The spiritual sustenance that comes from our Eucharistic liturgy gives us life to continue practicing the works of mercy in our homes and resisting the works of war. 
On Monday morning, over 60 Catholic Workers arrived at the Federal Building with signs announcing the works of mercy and denouncing the works of war.  With guitars and mandolin, we sang songs while folks handed out fruit, donuts, water, juice, coffee, clothes, and war tax resistance leaflets to passersby.  Seven people staged a die-in to depict the works of war in front of the Federal Building while twelve people entered inside.  With their hands painted red to show the blood on our hands, five people stood in the windows of the lobby with shirts saying “Stop Funding War.”  Others fell to the floor as we prayed around them and encouraged people to turn away from the works of war and begin practicing the works of mercy.  Seventeen of us were arrested and cited and released after a couple of hours. 
As unemployment and ecological destruction continues to soar and wars are endlessly waged abroad in the Middle East and Central America and the violence at home increases on the border and against the poor, people will be searching for a moral conscience and a sign of hope.  In a spirit of prayerful discernment, may our communities be that light for the world and the salt of the earth as we continue to be open to God’s command to love one another through the works of mercy, the growing and sharing of food, nonviolent resistance to injustice and the proclamation of the peaceable community.

Nonviolence at home

By Diane luetgeb munson
Many families with children have a special place in their home reserved for a common disciplinary measure, the “time out.” It is often a chair, a corner, or a room for children to sit and contemplate their actions until they have cooled off and apologized.
At my best friends’ house as a child, instead of the lonely corner, we were sent in duos or groups to the “friendship bench.” This innovative model of discipline was some of my first experience with nonviolent conflict resolution. The bench was a place to sit with and talk to the person you had wronged, to ask forgiveness and to come to a fresh place together. I spent some quality time on that bench, if you can imagine, and was most often the one doing the apologizing.
Living in a Catholic Worker house with many people from many backgrounds makes conflict resolution a necessary and regular task, much like any other large household. We have long been proud, and yet not surprised, by the lack of violence within the Dan Corcoran and Bethany Houses. There are good reasons for a track record that is not too common in shelters or even in other Catholic Worker houses. The largest parts of the equation seem to be creating an atmosphere of respect for all people combined with the constant work of modeling good communication. Patience is also helpful. In addition, attention to friction between guests or community members allows for a fair number of potentially rough situations to be addressed and resolved before they erupt.
Many of our guests come from backgrounds that have unfortunately exposed them to violence in a myriad of ways- from their homes to the street, from the battlefield to prison. Surprisingly, however, many people who do not grow up experiencing violence are absorb it through their televisions in alarming ways. Truly, no one is able to live in a world free from the reality of people harming one another. Despite the constant bombardment, be it through memory or media, we have often witnessed the transformative work of nonviolence within our houses.
A few years ago we had a rather heated conflict between two guests at the Bethany House over a bicycle. Like most of the day-to-day arguments that any of us have, the article in question was rather insignificant and in this case did not belong to either of the people arguing over it. As accusations and then threats started flying, I, along with my community members, Becky and Michael, managed to corral the two parties to the table.
Our dining room table is as close as we may ever come to a friendship bench in the Bethany House- in addition to sharing our meals there; the diversity of opinions unearthed by conversation is often laid out on that large simple table. It is where we come together as a household to break bread; a place everyone is equal as we come together to share in one of our most basic human needs.
At this point in the conflict, the guests were not only angry but well beyond the size that could have been contained by our scrawny communal arms. We did not want to see anyone, including ourselves in the middle of a fight. With a bit of composure and with a lot of communal support, we were all able to wade through a dialogue, which involved each of the guests sharing their perspective on the situation, while the opposite party listened. We also allowed for a fair amount of silence, and distilled the events of the day into a determination that neither party was either right or wrong. What was clear was that both men were in dire need of individually giving and receiving apologies, which was achieved before we left the table. And then life went on, as we all continued to live under the same roof for quite some time.
Like many philosophies, nonviolence is both visible and applicable on an infinite number of levels. While we use the word to explain how we have managed to keep the Catholic Worker a safe and welcoming place, we have all heard about the strengths of nonviolence in larger struggles.
Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. are often quoted icons of nonviolence and are perhaps the most recognizable due to their “success” in achieving their goals without aggression or weaponry. However, there are countless others who, by choice or necessity, have taken up a cause and decided to address their opponents with only the utmost respect and civility. Villagers in remote areas of Palestine have confronted occupation with nonviolence for years.
Along our own southern border, many have fought discriminatory immigration policies by aiding those who have recently come to the country simply by providing food, shelter and transportation. Endless numbers of people have struggled to demonstrate to our government and our communities that war is never necessary, and in doing so have been ridiculed, arrested and jailed. People the world over have used the power nonviolence to resist injustice for as long as there have been injustices, and the struggle continues.
Nonviolence is a beautiful idea, and an even greater skill to practice. None of us will ever do it as well as we would like, because it is impossibly hard. Being nonviolent does not just mean that you must go to jail for protesting wars. It goes beyond simply restraining from physically hurting others, which is where the real challenge comes in. In striving to live nonviolently, one is making an attempt to be respectful of others, at all times, and to make an effort to stop violence and injustice whenever possible. But, many of us who proudly proclaim to live nonviolently continue to tell jokes at others’ expense, struggle to treat our partners and loved ones as kindly as we should, and avoid confrontation rather than resolve a disagreement.
Perhaps that biggest consolation is that a small effort can make a big impact. Those who offer hospitality in Catholic Worker houses are not typically looking for life changing results or they would likely not stay for very long. Nonviolence, however, can move mountains- or at least very large tempers on the verge of disastrous choices. In an environment where people feel safe and welcome, they most often make others feel the same. The Catholic Worker has the undeniable gift of clean, beautiful space and generous, kind volunteers to give people a place to let down their guard and embrace nonviolence on a personal level, which is where it must always begin.

Many Gifts of the Bethany House

By Eileen Hanson

As I sit here tonight, a few weeks before I move out of Bethany House, I am reminded of the many blessings I will leave behind in this place.
The doorbell rings, and though the house is quiet, and I am ready for bed. I go to answer the door. It takes me a while, so by the time I open the door, I see a young man riding away on the sidewalk. Noticing me, he turns and asks, “You got anything to eat?”
I’m thinking, “Do we? Yes.” Am I tempted to tell him to come back tomorrow? Yes.
But I don’t. I say, “Why don’t you come on in”. We have more macaroni and cheese than we can eat, maybe this guy was sent here to help us.
As he gets closer to the door, I realize I know this guy. He has stayed here a couple of times. He is deeply troubled, and I’m not even sure he’ll remember me. But, obviously, he remembers this house, and that is the important thing. At 9:30pm, he’s riding around town, hungry and cold and he thinks of this place.
It’s a strange feeling, to be glad that someone rings your doorbell when you’re ready for bed. But really, it’s one of the reasons I have found (still find) this place so hard to leave. When you look out at the world and see what’s going on, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed, like there’s nothing you can do.
Well, here, we don’t have that problem. It is a difficult world. We acknowledge that reality everyday. But there’s almost always something we can do.
This young man told me, after talk of the NBA All-Star game, that he’s back in town for court. I can only think that this young, black, and seriously mentally ill man has little good prospects in the court system. His situation seems daunting. I’m glad I didn’t close the door. And I’m glad we had that macaroni and cheese.
Each day here, often several times a day, we have just such a chance to do something to ease someone’s journey. I didn’t really do much for this guy. The only difficult thing was deciding to be open to the possibility that his visit was a gift. Otherwise all I did was microwave a bowl of noodles and offer him a glass of water.
But just by being present, we can lighten someone’s load.
I think probably regardless of our living situation or place in the world, we always have those opportunities.
Many times, God calls us out of our comfort, calls us to set aside our priorities in order to hear what God has in store.
I have had lots of days to learn and re-learn that I should not try so hard to be in charge of my priorities. Christ comes in the most distressing disguises and it’s often difficult to see these ‘interruptions’ as gifts. Sometimes they just seem like interruptions.
It is hard to imagine moving out of Bethany House. The constant lessons of hospitality and living in faith have been a part of my daily life for so long. Fortunately, I will remain part of the Winona Catholic Worker community, so I’ll have the opportunity for refreshers for a long time to come.

'A Sense of The Miraculous'

We said goodbye to Barbara and Jim Allaire this spring; they are moving to Boston to be closer to their two sons and four grandsons. The Allaires have been involved in the life of the Catholic Worker community here in Winona since the very beginning (nearly twenty years ago!), so saying goodbye hasn’t been easy. But there have been blessings alongside the sadness of their departure: the blessing of many happy memories, and with those memories, a realization of the many gifts the Allaires have given us over the years.
The most obvious of these is the Winona Catholic Worker itself; we probably wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for them. When Mary Farrell was trying to decide whether to join the Catholic Worker community in Duluth or begin a new community in Winona, the Allaires tipped the balance by offering their help if she chose the Winona option. That was back in the spring of 1991. Within a few months, a very eclectic group of about twenty people was meeting regularly in the Allaires’ living room to lay plans for buying a house. Within a year, that same group was making repairs and painting walls and moving furniture at 802 West Broadway, which would become the Dan Corcoran House.
For more than a decade, Jim and Barbara were part of the “core” of the Winona Catholic Worker community. They offered input on key decisions, cooked food, welcomed guests, fixed broken doors and pipes, organized retreats, edited newsletters, shared prayers, scrubbed floors, did overnight hospitality, and managed to find room in overcrowded refrigerators for one more bucket of potato salad. When it was time to open a second house for single men, they were down at the bank and—once again—moving furniture and painting walls down at 832 West Broadway, which became Bethany House. When it was time to press part of the garage into more useful service as a prayer room, they came with hammers in hand to help Brother Jerome tear down old walls and put up new ones. And once that work was done, they gathered in the prayer room every Monday evening with other faithful friends to pray and sing and break bread together.
All of which is a long way of saying that they really believed in the vision of the Catholic Worker movement: that we are called to extend the warm hand of friendship to every woman, every man, and every child, because God has done the same through Christ. They each shared that vision widely; Barbara often worked the Catholic Worker into the high schoolreligion textbooks she edited for Saint Mary’s Press, and Jim co-authored a book with Rosemary Broughton (Praying with Dorothy Day) and created a website for the Catholic Worker (catholicworker.org) that has reached millions of people. More importantly, they lived that vision, concretely, by engaging our guests in a spirit of friendship. Often that meant simply sharing conversation over a meal or a sink full of dirty dishes and soapy water. Sometimes, they forged lasting friendships that extended beyond the walls of our houses of hospitality.
“That’s what I will really miss,” Barbara told me as she and Jim reminisced. “The prayer and the meals, and meeting people of all kinds and sharing life with them, and all of us feeling so at home. There was so much fun and laughter and joy.”
“It was day after day of blessed work,” Jim said, recalling the early days when the Dan Corcoran House was just getting going. “There was so much involvement and commitment by so many people, it was exhilarating. And there was such a sense of the miraculous.”
“Just when we needed something, it would show up,” Barbara added. “Or just when we needed a particular skill that none of us had, someone would show up and offer it. It was truly amazing. It seemed like every day there would be some wondrous development, some gift, some graced experience.”
That eye for the graced and the miraculous, that ability to see God’s hand at work even amid hard work and sorrows, is also a gift, one they have brought to the Winona Catholic Worker community repeatedly over the years. And it is one that we know will serve them well in Boston—not only as they spend time with their children and grandchildren, but also as they continue to extend the hand of friendship to those who need it most.
As they prepared to leave, the Allaires offered a blessing for the Winona Catholic Worker.“My wish would be that the wider community—everyone who brings food, everyone who stops over and gets to know someone there, everyone who shares in the hospitality—that all those people who really own the Catholic Worker would see it as their way of witnessing to the love of God,” Barbara said.
“And it would be my hope, too,” Jim added, “that each person who participates in the work would be changed for life—that it would leave a trace on their soul.”
Thank you, Jim and Barbara—thank you for everything.

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