Stories From Monday Mornings at the Catholic Worker House

“CATHOLIC WORKER” is shorthand for a movement, a place of hospitality, and a one-penny newspaper started by activist visionaries Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin in the early 1930s in New York City. They imagined urban and rural communities where poverty and loneliness could be alleviated by compassion, connection, shelter, and meaningful work rooted in the teachings of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. Catholic Workers are also the people who dish soup, pour coffee, sweep floors, and work for peace at more than 100 loosely affiliated Catholic Worker houses around the world.

Kris Brunelli has been involved in Catholic Worker communities since 2011 when she started serving soup in New York City’s East Village. She met her husband, Marcus, while they were live-in volunteers at the Denver Catholic Worker. Now the two live in Harlem and volunteer at two Catholic Worker houses of hospitality: St. Joseph House and Maryhouse. Marcus is one of a dozen St. Joseph Catholic Workers that Brunelli interviewed for this story.

Between the clang of ladles and the splash of dishwater, community is born and reborn each day. Although people experiencing hunger and homelessness come to St. Joe’s for obvious needs, everyone who walks in the doors needs something. “We volunteers need community — need it just as much, if not more, as the guests who come and eat,” Brunelli says. “We would be lonely without it— lost, even.” — The Editors

Hideko

AT 8 IN the morning, my husband and I knock on the graffiti-splattered, candy-blue door. Most Mondays, alongside other St. Joseph Catholic Worker volunteers, we help serve breakfast to roughly 80 people. Since 1968, off First Street and Second Avenue in the East Village, people have found community.

“Come in! Come in!” Hideko says.

Five feet tall, a black braid down her back, she smiles over her shoulder. “The boss” several days a week, Hideko asks if we want to help make sandwiches — and heads back to the door when someone else knocks.

She stays busy. Originally from Japan, she’s worked on the Japanese translation of Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s 2021 edition of From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, as well as for Democracy Now! Japan, and regularly organizes protests against U.S. military bases in Okinawa. She is “stubborn.” She says, “you have to be to do this work.”

Dorothy Day, the Catholic Worker movement co-founder, has been quoted as saying, “Jesus said, ‘Blessed are the meek,’ but I could not be meek at the thought of injustice.”

Hideko, who is in her 70s, is a New York City Community Chorus member and recently went to a cherry blossom party in Queens to play the sanshin , a traditional Okinawan instrument made of snakeskin. She shrugs apologetically when I express envy, suggesting that there are perhaps more opportunities for seniors than for millennials like me.

Norma

NORMA, FROM JAMAICA, tells us she always had to go to Sunday school. I tell her that most of what I’ve learned about the West Indies comes from Jamaica Kincaid. “‘Girl’ is one of my favorite short stories,” I say.

Sorting string beans, she replies, “I don’t have time for that. I only have time for the Bible.”

“I don’t know how to read the Bible,” I say.

“Just read it,” Norma says, sighing. “Pray first, and then ask the Lord to give you the wisdom for what you’re reading.”

Soon, she’ll head to the Dominican Republic for a missionary trip.

After St. Joe’s, she has a long day ahead of her, starting with Bible study.

“We always had to work hard, you and me,” Lyn says to her.

Norma laughs. “When I was a child in Jamaica, before I went to school, I had to fetch the water, one pan of water on my head and two in my hands. I had to walk miles to school. That’s working hard.”

We circle up, and Hideko nods to Norma, whom she’s asked to pray.

“Instead of us, Lord,” Norma finishes, “let them see you, Jesus.”

Lyn

LYN TELLS ME about the time in the 1990s the police confiscated her mace on the subway — as a rape survivor, she says, that was deeply disturbing. Understanding trauma and housing insecurity herself, she feels connected to the people who come for food, for shelter, for community.

Often carting home-baked cornbread, Lyn comes to help with breakfast, lunch, and dinner. She pays her rent with a small catering business and deals with a perpetual ceiling leak in her housing authority apartment. Lyn has a mantra: “I either walk with my PTSD or I walk through it. But every day I walk.” She lives with purpose; she promised God she would when she feared she might lose her life.

Lyn looks at everyone already eating and through the open window at those waiting for their first cup of coffee, a bowl of soup. A face or two peek inside. “The line is so long today,” she says.

She tells me about her siblings, both gay. Raised with “open tables,” she says her momma always stretched meals so that anyone, anyone, could come to eat.

She tells me she’s praying for me. She tells me she knows I need a hug. Texts me when I leave: “Get home safe.”

She intervenes when Gerry becomes impatient with someone whose phone keeps ringing. The man doesn’t understand. She explains in Spanish what Gerry is saying — only nicer — and then resumes her position behind the cauldron of lentil soup.

Gerry

WE CAN ONLY serve 23 people at a time; the kitchen closes at 11 a.m. “C’mon, fellas,” says Gerry, who staffs the door. “There’s a long line of folks outside waiting to eat.”

He’s seen, knows, what hunger, desperation, and drugs can do to people — he once “saw a guy pull out a knife outside of St. Joe’s over a peanut butter sandwich.”

In 1995, he was 45 and living in a subway tunnel.

“The transit cops used to go through the tunnels and chase homeless people out.” People would go to the Bowery Mission, but once some friends of his walked in the opposite direction and he followed. “Carmen was here — the Grand Poobah of the establishment,” he says. That year, Gerry moved into St. Joe’s.

He’s heard that Dorothy Day lived on the 3rd floor until she had difficulty getting upstairs and they moved her to Maryhouse a couple blocks away — where her room is kept as it was. “If I had met her,” Gerry says, “and I knew what was coming for me, her toes would’ve been kissed. This place changed my whole attitude.”

A man starts yelling, almost unintelligibly because of a speech impediment; Gerry walks over, says, “Right, right. I hear you, man.” The tension dissipates. Sounds of silverware, of soft chatter, of “Coffee! Coffee!” resume, like in any diner.

“I come from the street,” Gerry says. “I tell them, ‘I am just like you.’”

Carmen

WEARING A T-SHIRT with “Disarm! Disarm!” written colorfully across it, Carmen rushes back and forth, grabbing two coffee mugs in one hand, a hot bowl of soup in the other, as Freddy Mercury sings, “Find me somebody to love / find me somebody to love ...”

During house arrest — after six months in federal prison in 2021 for nonviolently breaking into a nuclear arms facility with other Plowshares activists, leaving behind messages such as “Love One Another” — Carmen stayed a few blocks away from St. Joseph’s, where he’s lived for 35 years. He wasn’t allowed to visit.

He was allowed to go to Old St. Patrick’s cathedral. Three times the monitoring device went off while he was in church; each time he’d call his probation officer: “You just interrupted Mass!”

Tom

WHEN I ASK Tom if he has grandchildren — I’d just been speaking with another volunteer about theirs — Tom says, “Oh, no. I’m gay.” He laughs, full-bellied. “Back then, my partner and I couldn’t even get married!”

He says his mother recently passed at 97: “She’s up there with my dad and all her family — who were probably wondering what the heck she was still doing down here.”

Tom doesn’t avoid church per se, but he “consumes it with care.” Hurt in the past by his experience of “treacherous,” “misguided” church teachings on homosexuality, he says his own spiritual enrichment comes from personal reading and reflection.

Tom lived at a Chicago Catholic Worker throughout the ’90s, working as a nurse’s aide for about as long. He eventually moved back to New York to care for his parents. Now, with no one tying him to any one place — his partner of 16 years, Greg, has also passed — life is an open door.

He comes most days. But on Friday mornings, he volunteers at the nursing home where his mom died — which he loves, despite the “ungodly” commute.

“Dorothy Day said, ‘Look around you and find something that needs to be done and make yourself useful and do it!’” he says. In striped suspenders, he stands with hands clasped behind his back, waiting for someone to need something.

Dimitri and Zygi

ZYGI PASSED THE sidewalk soup line in October 2020 (the soup line moved back inside on Thanksgiving 2022) and saw there wasn’t any tea. Now he comes a few times a week to make sure there is tea and to brew the coffee (often with a bit of cinnamon). “It’s one of the most important tasks,” he says, proudly.

Dimitri lived in an anarchist community that welcomed refugees in Italy before coming to live at St. Joe’s for a couple of months. A Russian-born German, looming over most of us at 6-foot-3, he apologizes to Zygi for assigning the job to someone else one morning.

After a couple more apologies, Zygi seems to forgive him.

Marcus

ALL OF US who come here need something. My husband, Marcus, experienced homelessness as a teenager. He’s just earned his law degree — to be a public defender — and needs to get out of his head. As a former homeless organizer, being here reminds Marcus why he pursued law school. But, one morning, there are too many volunteers: We bump into each other, competing to bring the next guest their meal. When Marcus says he’s just taking up space, Bud says, “Stay, or I’ll miss you!” — but Marcus tosses on his backpack and heads out to study for his bar exams.

Bud

FOR 20 YEARS, Bud worked for a dinner theater company, doing improv as people waited for their salads, picking on people who resembled celebrities. He was even accepted into clown school. His kid, 34 now, was the reason he couldn’t do it; he would’ve had to be on the road for a year with the traveling circus.

We are still serving outside in 20-degree weather when I ask if he’d like to come up to our place in Harlem for dinner sometime.

“I can’t,” he says. “I work 24-7.”

A joker with religious convictions, Bud spent years in a minor seminary and wanted to be a priest — a Carmelite missionary.

When he finally makes it up to our place for dinner, he talks about the summer he spent with the Sisters of Charity in Calcutta (now Kolkata) — how he found himself bathing a disabled man who’d defecated on himself, how, even though they couldn’t communicate verbally with each other, he proceeded to somehow locate the man’s bed and carry him to it. He fed someone who couldn’t feed himself — held a plate under his chin, carefully brought the bread to his mouth.

Bud has been at St. Joe’s for 15 years. Voluntary poverty, he says, means being able to go back to India on short notice. One suitcase, a backpack. To leave nothing material behind.

John and Rocco

JOHN AND I tag team at the sink. A bagpipe player and sign maker, John’s been doing dishes here since before Bud moved in. The two of them started a conga line as they served, singing “Happy birthday.” I find them — both in their 70s — dancing to Wilco.

“Spoons!” Norma whispers over my shoulder. “We need more spoons!”

Gerry says, “Five more minutes, folks!”

Dimitri turns the music up. Someone hands me their dirty plate. “Thank you,” they say.

One day, before he leaves, a man I’ve never met makes the sign of the cross over me, blesses me in Spanish. Someone else is eight days sober — that’s why he’s clean shaven. Another prays silently over his food. The only woman at a long, crowded table says, “Hats off to the chef!” After being street homeless for a year, someone finally gets into a shelter; in another year, he’ll qualify for an apartment.

“It’s humbling,” Rocco says.

For the past three years, he’s cooked the meals on Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter. Recently, he suffered a stroke. Now, he walks over, cane in hand, from his childhood home in Little Italy. He sits up front as we prep, asks for coffee (cream, two sugars).

He chats with “the people.” He likes to “see the guys.”

Eventually, he slowly stands, heads to the door. “Thank you!” he says, waving.

Many of us, finishing our cinnamon coffee, holler back: “Thanks, Rocco!”