A Journey North

 [This article was first published in the Lent/Easter 2025 edition of our newsletter - read the rest here!]

In the spring of 2020, the initial Covid-19 measures meant that most guests of Giuseppe Conlon House were moved into hotel accommodation if no alternative was available to them. During this time, I accepted a gracious offer from the Methodist minister and activist, Dan Woodhouse, to join him living at his manse in Brighton, East Sussex. Nora and Sam Ziegler also moved from GCH into this little community around that time.

During the next four and a half years, we became involved in projects relating to assistance for asylum seekers, feminism and transgender rights, support and maintenance in our local church, union organising, housing hospitality and outreach work. Much of this engagement was inspired by the writings and lives of Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin, and the fellowship contained in the Catholic Worker movement.

An aspiration that Dan and Nora envisaged was the acquisition of a medium-sized Brighton hotel (many were available for purchase) and its conversion into affordable accommodation for low-income residents and a day centre for the city’s homeless. Additionally, space would be made available for study groups and community organisations.

On the Sunday following the death of Queen Elizabeth, Dan, a republican, did not lead prayers for the royal family, but gave space for members of his congregation to do so. This minor, dignified action was seen by a small number of people as offensive. Their objections eventually led to a prolonged controversy and much duress for Dan.

Fortunately, Dan and the community accepted a kind and generous relocation to the Wirral, west of Liverpool, where Dan is currently minister to five churches. The reception given to us was warm and enthusiastic in every possible way. We now live together in a large home we have designated Rimoaine House, in memory of a beloved and much-missed brother of our family who died suddenly and tragically young. Often a victim of petty and bureaucratic discrimination, Rimoaine, throughout his life, was a stoic and joyful companion to family and comrades. May he find eternal love.

We are now six people sharing a corner house with two rooms set aside for either visitors or emergency housing. We attend different churches and pursue various interests. We have had visitors stay on many occasions and welcome guests from the Catholic Worker communities.

Dan devotes his energy to ministering to his churches; Nora is editor of Bad Apple, an interfaith anarchist quarterly, as well as compiling interviews and research into the life experience at Giuseppe Conlon House. She also works with the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust and is studying to be a lay preacher. Andy is involved in fundraising at a local church popular with youth and those with special needs. Rob is a volunteer gardener at Birkenhead Park while applying for full-time employment. Sam is exploring becoming a youth football coach, and I continue my studies into twenty-first-century Christianity.

As a community, we gather each weekday morning for prayer. Cooking and cleaning are shared, we make decisions together in weekly house meetings, and we sit together for dinner Monday through Friday.

Often in conversation, we recall with great affection those who came in the evenings as local volunteers to prepare communal suppers at Giuseppe Conlon House. Residents and visitors shared good cheer and fellowship over delicious dinners prepared with real TLC. We were introduced to new dishes ranging from spicy jollof rice to Korean fish pancakes. Meals were followed by varied discussions. A monthly visit by Bruce Kent invariably produced lively discourse and amicable sharp repartee.

We receive the London Catholic Worker newsletter and greatly value the work at Giuseppe Conlon House. Like all who have seen for themselves the dedication and service provided to those lacking resources, we pray that Giuseppe Conlon House continues as a shining example of charity and hospitality to those in dire need of assistance.

 I’ll close with a passage from The Long Loneliness: “But the final word is love… We cannot love God unless we love each other, and to love we must know each other. We know him in the breaking of bread, and we are not alone anymore. Heaven is a banquet and life is a banquet, too, even with a crust, where there is companionship. We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community. It all happened while we sat there talking, and it is still going on.”

Dedicated to the memory of Edwin Kalerwa, Pilgrim.

Paul McGrail

Hope in Spite of Present Difficulties

[This article originally appeared in the Lent/Easter 2025 edition of our newsletter; read the rest of it here.]

We seem to be constantly living with the contradictions of hope and difficulty here at Giuseppe Conlon House.

Usually, it is a long, slow grind for those who are guests living here with us, but in the last year, six of the men living with us were granted ‘leave to remain’ and were able to move on with their lives, despite the roadblocks of bureaucracy, the housing crisis, and the ‘hostile environment’. And we were able to help one to get compensation from the Windrush scheme. Lots of work on our buildings has also created a more pleasant, safer house to live in, thanks mostly to Tom, Richie, and Francisco, as well as Jurgen’s team. Tom and Natalie moved into their own home so they could welcome their baby, Silas, after a year and a half of marriage and a real health scare. At the same time, we have a great new team of Catholic Workers who have joined us in the last few months. Francisco, Moya, and Dottie have joined myself and Thomas. Together, these changes have enabled us to re-open the night shelter in the hall, at the same time as continuing to welcome guests into the community house. We welcomed our first guests into the shelter when I started writing this article a few weeks ago. We will soon be full again, with a house abuzz with life, grace, blessings, and challenge.

In the Catholic world, 2025 is a Jubilee Year of Hope. Pope Francis is trying to remind us of the importance not of superficial optimism, but of hope as an active and theological virtue: a deep trust that God is good, that God is love, and that Love has come into the world, and continues to do so with each child born and each act of generosity, care, or tenderness. These are truths we witness in the midst of struggle in a house of hospitality, where we might be ‘entertaining angels without knowing it’ (Hebrews 13:2).

At the same time, living among refugees and asylum seekers, the fate of those trying to get to the UK and the EU is never far from our minds. We remember and pray for those who have lost their lives trying to cross the Mediterranean and the English Channel, in particular during our monthly prayer and protest vigil outside the Home Office. And Thomas has recently pointed out that according to the UN, more people are now dying in the Sahara than in the Mediterranean, at least in part due to EU and UK funding for north African ‘border forces’, who often simply take migrants out into the desert and leave them there to die.

It can be hard for us to reconcile times that seem good for our life and work, but are also times of sadness, loss, tragedy, anxiety, or anger elsewhere. Recently, the Tottenham Refugee Alliance had to give up on finding a house to rent locally where they could sponsor and welcome a Syrian refugee family. The rents are just too high: it was impossible for them to find anywhere within the Local Housing Allowance (or Housing Benefit cap, in ‘old money’). As a result, we have received a good share of what was left of the money raised for that project. We are sad that they were unable to find a house, but grateful to receive the resources they had collected.

Reading the Times

I went on retreat at the start of Advent. It was a challenging and fruitful time, as I pondered where God has brought me to and where I am being led, in the midst of so much uncertainty, as so often seems to be the way with Catholic Worker life. Of course, the uncertainty is not just about our life here in the house. It feels like we are living in a world of so much uncertainty right now.

Jesus tells us to read the times. Reading our times at this moment in history makes me aware of the apparently powerful gods, idols, and demons of the new world order who blasphemously demand our allegiance, or at least seek to determine our futures. Uppermost in my mind right now are AI (artificial intelligence), the climate and environmental emergency, and Donald Trump and his allies both in the US and elsewhere, ‘moving fast and breaking things’ (or more accurately, breaking people), and his frenemies like Vladimir Putin, playing chicken with nuclear threats and preparations for war that should be no more (Isaiah 2:4). The times feel very dangerous as well as uncertain. We all are being played in a high-stakes game of Russian roulette. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists recently moved the hands of the Doomsday clock to 89 seconds to midnight, the closest it has ever been. We will write more about this in our next newsletter, when we have had more time to reflect on what is happening.

When I was a teenager, I told my Dad about a news story reporting that the Soviet countries would not let their people leave. I said “that’s terrible isn’t it.” He replied “well, if they did let them leave, we wouldn’t let them in”.

 These seem prophetic words today, revealing that it is not human nature that has changed, but the situation.

It is tragic that so many have to flee poverty, violent conflict, and persecution, which are fed by such things as the arms trade and climate change. On the other hand, at least they are allowed to leave and have the resources and ability to be able to flee. The poorest still do not have that ‘luxury’. And it is the same ability to travel fast and cheaply that so many Brits take for granted when going on foreign holidays that enables many from the global south to at least aspire to follow the wealth and the work to where it has been taken. Rich countries like ours are like King Canute, trying to hold back the tide of human movement. As we tell our house guests, if you look at the Earth from space, there are no lines around it. Borders that keep the poor out are not God’s creation or will. Nor are the injustices and suffering that both push and pull people to move. We pray that refugees are welcomed here. And equally, that they will not have to leave home in the first place and travel safely when they do, as we wish for our own family and friends.

The Pope of Mercy and Nonviolence

It has been an eventful twelve years. I was in the office here at Giuseppe Conlon House, getting

ready to move out after seven years as a full time Catholic Worker, making plans to start a Passionist

house of hospitality in Birmingham, when I heard we had a new Pope. I heard he had chosen the

name Francis, and had asked everyone to pray for him, a sinner. I didn’t want to hope because as

football fans say, it’s the hope that kills you.

After Francis’ first Papal Exhortation was published, “Evangelii Gaudium” – “The Joy of the Gospel”, a

circular email from a well known US Catholic Worker proclaimed “Holy Cow - the week the Pope

talked like us Catholic Workers". Two examples of Francis sounding like a Catholic Worker in that

letter come to mind: he called for a ‘poor church for the poor’ and for a church that came ‘out of the

sacristy and got its hands dirty’. Looking around me at the time, I thought – maybe we’re not doing

too badly at those here. And he actively practised what he preached, by his personal outreach to the

most marginalised, and by, for example, moving out of the Vatican Palace and into rooms in the

Santa Marta guest house, among the many from the world church who come and go there.

Francis continued sounding like a Catholic Worker in his advocacy for hospitality for the poor, for

migrants and refugees, for the practice of mercy generally and the works of mercy in particular, for

active nonviolence and an increasingly strong rejection of war. He declared the mere possession as

well the threat of use of nuclear weapons to be a sin, as well as making the Vatican one of the first

states to sign and ratify the nuclear weapons ban treaty (officially known as the Treaty for the

Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, or TPNW). That would have made Dorothy Day very happy,

although she might have felt a bit ambiguous when he mentioned her name among four

praiseworthy representatives of the American people – alongside Martin Luther King, Abraham

Lincoln and Thomas Merton – when addressing the US Congress in 2015.

Francis sounded like a Catholic Worker in day to day life too. He spoke off the cuff and made

mistakes and asked forgiveness as a sinner, in contrast to previously careful papal ways, perhaps

wanting to avoid the mystique of creeping infallibility. Asking forgiveness for our mistakes feels like a

regular part of CW life too: we are definitely not perfect, always trying hard to respond to immediate

situations and crises, and often making mistakes and asking for and needing forgiveness, and

struggling to give it too. Activists are strong minded and can be difficult people after all.

Possibly Francis’ most significant legacy will be his first Encyclical Letter, published in the run up to

the 2015 Paris Climate Summit. In “Laudato Si - On Care for Our Common Home”, he called us to

hear ‘the cry of the earth and cry of the poor’. His critique of the ‘technocratic paradigm’ echoed the

analysis of ‘the dominance of technique’ by Jacques Ellul, a Christian anarchist writer popular with

Catholic Workers. It sounded a lot like Peter Maurin’s call for a “Green Revolution”, but with longer

sentences.

More recently, Francis has tried to create a culture of mutual encounter, listening and dialogue in

the Catholic Church, in place of our own internal culture wars. Time will tell to what degree he

succeeded. Among the unfinished business many will list more progress on the abuse crisis and the

role of women in the church. We are praying the Holy Spirit leads us to a new universal pastor who

can find the way to continue and deepen what Francis started.

Jorge Bergoglio, Pope Francis I: Pray for us. May he rest in Peace and Rise in Glory.