Anniversaries, Change and Renewal

Martin Newell reflects on the past, present, and future of the London Catholic Worker.

Giuseppe Conlon House, Print, Sarah Fuller

In May we celebrated the 92nd birthday of the Catholic Worker movement, launched as it was as a radical newspaper on May Day 1933. We also celebrated some other significant anniversaries that will pass this year: 25 years of the London Catholic Worker, 20 years of the Urban Table soup kitchen, and 15 years of Giuseppe Conlon House. Trying to see Christ in the least of his sisters and brothers who we welcome, and to advocate and witness in solidarity with them and others who are also the “crucified of today,” remains the animating and challenging force among us.

It might sound like an impressive story of continuous life, work, and witness. On the other hand, since I moved back into the house here, only one other person remains. Both guests and members of the live-in community that is the foundation of our life and work come and go. Like the human body that completely renews itself with new cells every seven years, the community here is a living organism. As I write, the Catholic Workers here are myself (Martin), Thomas, Moya, Harry, and James. Naomi will have joined us by the time you read this. I will have moved out nearby, but will still be working for the community at least part-time for the time being.

The newest good news is that Thomas and Moya have said they want to commit long-term. This is a real blessing. Deo Gratias! It is a gift from them, and a real commitment, because none of us are paid a wage. We give of ourselves freely in return for little more than subsistence living, and the joy and challenges that life in

community, in a house of hospitality, brings. Some of us are planning to move on in the next few months and others are expected to join us. And that is how it goes. But we look with hope for more who are willing to make that long-term commitment—even the “lifers” who may discern that this is the vocation that God has in mind for them.

Dorothy Day once wrote, “It really is a permanent revolution, this Catholic Worker movement of ours.”

She was adapting Trotsky’s call for a permanent revolution to the personalist idea that the Kingdom of  God, or the revolution, is not so much something to be aimed at for the future, as something to be lived out each day, each moment. She saw in this movement an attempt to do that, to be a permanent ferment in society, bringing God’s love to bear on the critical issues of the day.

We are still trying to do that here. The constant changes mean that there is another way our community and our movement continue to be a permanent ferment. Life in the house here never ceases to change. Not only do people come and go, but the way we live and work and have our being here changes as well.

When we first moved to Giuseppe Conlon House in 2010, we spent a lot of time cleaning and fixing and

organising the place, and collecting what we needed from so many different places and people who gave us donations.

It did not always go straightforwardly. I remember borrowing a van to pick up two rolls of carpet we were offered. But the carpet rolls were about twice as long as the van, so we had to leave them behind. And we had perhaps our most difficult day when local councillors and governors from the school opposite came, thinking we were going to bring “disruptive elements” into the neighbourhood. And I guess we have—just not in the way they were thinking of.

We ran the basic night shelter in the hall for nearly five years. For the first three years we were also supporting our other works started a few years earlier: Dorothy Day House, Peters Community Café, and the Urban Table. The Urban Table is still going—20 years this year, now independent. After five years the community at the time had the imagination to re-organise the space here so that nearly all the 20 men staying in the shelter could have proper beds in proper bedrooms for the first time. But it was still a (more comfortable) night shelter, three and four to a room for the guests, and sometimes for short-term volunteers too.

Lots of activism came through the house too. In the early years, it was mostly Christian peace witness. Then there were women’s groups, refugee groups, and community groups. Later, pre-Covid, it was most notably Christian Climate Action, Extinction Rebellion, and Palestine Action, whose nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience all owe a debt of gratitude to the hospitality offered here, and the networking a community makes possible.

Now, we have twenty-five people staying here. Fifteen live in the communal house setting where nearly everyone has their own room—ten guests and five Catholic Workers. And since March, ten men have also been sleeping in the basic night shelter, back in the hall. The place is full and busy again. After the money spent, and the work done, on the extensive renovations of the last few years, the buildings look better and it is a better place to live.

The registration of Giuseppe Conlon House CIO as a charity gives the work of hospitality a more reliable foundation, and hopefully access to more resources. But visitors should not be fooled—it is only comfortable in comparison to how it was before. We are still dependent on community members and volunteers willing to make a personal sacrifice, work hard, and do what is needed, as well as generous donors of all kinds, for whom we also thank God, to keep body and soul together and the roof on! May we continue to allow ourselves to be inspired by the Holy Spirit, and may the Spirit too bring us not just what, but who, we need. Amen.

Common Good and the Border

Community member Thomas Frost writes on his experience volunteering in the Maria Skobtsova House in Calais.

Refugees in the Korem Camp, Sebastião Salgado, 1984

 What surprised me most about Calais was how ordinary it was. You could easily spend a week or two there as a tourist, as people often do, and have no idea that it is the site of a humanitarian catastrophe caused by the brutal British-French operation, costing hundreds of millions of pounds, to prevent migration across the Channel. Great effort has been spent keeping migrants, and violence against migrants, out of sight. The proliferation of walls topped with barbed wire, and former public parks filled with boulders to prevent the pitching of tents, would not speak of the tear-gassing of children, of their being fired at with rubber bullets, of masked police sinking boats filled with terrified people by slashing them open with knives, or of the denial of medical treatment for injuries to those who didn’t already know about them. The authorities have decided that, for the sake of the common good in their countries, migrants have to be treated as though they were not human beings, and so, to avoid offending those who would see them as humans, they keep their practices largely hidden.

Even within political movements advocating for migrants there exists a tendency to overlook the dignity of some people for reasons of pragmatism. Most people in this country will still acknowledge that we have some collective responsibility to “genuine refugees,” so it is tempting to focus exclusively on the stories of those we might expect to be regarded as “genuine”—often children and those fleeing relatively well-publicised warzones—in the hope of convincing as many people as possible that some change of policy is required. A focus has been on the creation of limited “safe, legal routes” for at least some people to claim asylum without making the dangerous crossing. While the existence of such routes would be an improvement on the situation as it stands, they will fail to solve the problem just to the extent that they are limited.

Those excluded will continue to take dangerous routes, or remain in intolerable situations from fear of violence. The Refugee Council, against the overwhelming majority of groups working directly with migrants, supported August’s “one in, one out” deal between France and Britain on the basis that it would create an extremely limited route of this sort. Since under the deal equal numbers of migrants would be forcibly expelled to France, we might consider exactly what judgments need to be made about the dignity of the deal’s victims and the value of their interests for it to be regarded as supportable.

Christianity should provide a model for political thinking. Attention has to be continuously redirected towards the more marginalised and most easily ignored if we are to have a politics which genuinely reflects human dignity, and to think about the Cross should always be to think of these groups. Unfortunately, Catholic thinking on borders and migration has become very confused. If you are unwise enough to search the internet for the Church’s teaching on the matter, you will find a series of articles referring to paragraph 2241 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC), which, after it refers to the obligation of wealthy countries to welcome foreigners in search of security (including economic security), states that political authorities may restrict the exercise of the right to migrate “for the sake of the common good to which they are responsible”. Even publications more sympathetic to migrants have taken this as a general authorisation for the illegalisation of migration whenever it might adversely affect the social or economic situation of the receiving country. More alarmingly, J. D. Vance has cited it to justify the spectacle of cruelty currently being carried out under the name of immigration enforcement by his government which, unlike most of its European counterparts, no longer feels a need to conceal its brutality. These being the stakes, it is worth thinking carefully about what the “common good” really involves.

The CCC itself refers, as it generally does when discussing political community, to Gaudium et Spes (GS), which defines it as “the sum of those conditions of social life which allow social groups and their individual members relatively thorough and ready access to their own fulfilment”. GS refers to the need, in an increasingly interconnected world, for governments to consider a universal common good as well as a common good within their own communities, an idea taken forward by Pope Francis in Fratelli Tutti. But even leaving that aside, while the provision of basic needs such as food, shelter, and clothing are necessary for human fulfilment, they do not constitute it in themselves. Human fulfilment, ultimately, is to know and love God; this is the end for which Christians believe we are made. And to know and love God is to know and love him in his creation, and particularly in other people. GS goes on to identify the perfection of human community in the Church, a community defined by the self-giving love of its members towards one another (GS 32). If, therefore, political authority derives its legitimacy from its contribution to the “common good” (GS 74), which is the creation of conditions in which human fulfilment is made most possible, the proper role of any political institution is not dissimilar to Peter Maurin’s mandate to “make the kind of society where it is easier for people to be good”.

Consequently, the idea that a border policy based on exclusion, let alone one based on brutal violence, could be a means of promoting the common good of its members is incoherent.

Our faith obliges us “to make ourselves the neighbour of every person without exception,” and “everyone must consider his every neighbour without exception as another self” (GS 27). We do not need to count up exactly how many people we are willing to let drown or starve to sustain the GDP, or preserve social cohesion, or win political concessions from right-wing governments, because as soon as we have decided to sacrifice some people for political ends we have lost the only legitimate basis for politics, which is to love all of our neighbours without exception. If we take our responsibilities seriously, we cannot accept any of the violence of the border, in its practice or its effect as a threat. Whatever life is left in our culture or political institutions will be destroyed by the very means that are being employed in a misguided attempt to save it. We will not save our country by turning it into a fortress surrounded by walls topped with barbed wire. We will be left with no country at all.

DSEI 2025- No Faith in War

Community member Moya writes on the London Catholic Worker's presence at the DSEI Arms Fair, resistance, and the demand for justice.

Police and Protestors at DSEI, Alisdare Hickson

Every two years, the Defence and Security Equipment International (DSEI) arms fair transforms London’s Excel centre into one of the world’s largest marketplaces for the weapons industry. And amidst horrific conflict around the world, the sale of weapons is booming.

The DSEI arms fair welcomes thousands of exhibitors and buyers, among them the militaries of Israel, Egypt and Iraq. Some of the weapons sold here will be used in the ongoing genocide in Gaza or in the catastrophic bombing of Yemen by Saudi Arabia. Britain has already licensed more than £8 billion worth of arms to Saudi Arabia since 2015, according to government statistics, fuelling attacks on schools and hospitals and plunging Yemen even deeper into a humanitarian crisis.

The arms fair sells weaponry from rifles and tanks to drones, warships, missiles, and surveillance technology. It also exhibits riot control gear like tear gas, advertised and sold to countries such as Egypt, known to use these weapons against protestors. In 2007, two exhibitors were expelled from the event for advertising leg irons, which attach to feet and restrict movement; they are banned for sale by EU countries to non-EU countries. Then, in 2021, Amnesty International reported the advertising of “waist chains and cuffs with leg cuffs,” a full body restraint also banned for sale. Even the few limits which are put on arms dealers seem to be easily disregarded in the name of profit.

To host the arms fair is to facilitate war crimes and enable genocide. Christ rebuked armed defence in Gethsemane: “Put your sword back in its place,” Jesus told Peter, “for all who draw the sword will die by the sword” (Matthew 26:52). This is a warning not just to us as individuals, but to our society; a culture that builds security on the trade in weapons inherits the violence it sustains.

As Christians we are not called to enable the machinery of war; our faith must take flesh in resistance. On the 9th of September, the London Catholic Worker joined many other faith groups for a No Faith in War protest outside the gates of the Excel centre. We organised a memorial service for the people who had been killed with the weapons advertised and sold inside, and for those who would continue to be affected. The protests continued to the 12th, with many people camping by the centre in witness. We pray, we resist, but as long as our government continues in its complicity, there will always be more to be done.

As Dorothy Day said, “Our problems stem from this filthy rotten system.” London does not need DSEI, just as the world does not need more weapons. What we need is the hard, costly work of peace: justice, reconciliation, food for the hungry, and homes for those who have none.