Notes on Failure
- Thomas Frost
- 2 days ago
- 4 min read
“Certainly the Catholic Worker movement has failed.” Dorothy Day wrote those words in a 1947 editorial reflecting on the movement’s first fifteen years. There are plenty of grounds to contest them—look at the miracle whereby this movement, with no structure, no consistent leadership, and of
ten no money, has persisted for almost a century and now in more than one hundred communities. Countless people have been housed, fed, and clothed, and their dignity upheld, in spite of all the efforts of the State, the economic order, and the devil to deny it. But this, of course, was not Dorothy’s point. She was reflecting on all that had been left undone, and the extent to which the Revolution of the Heart had not been fulfilled—both in the flawed individuals who made up the communities, and in the Church which had largely ignored the movement’s original call for a house of hospitality in every parish. The labourers were very few, and not always effective, and the need was unfathomably great.
In addition to our own house of hospitality, we ran our own night shelter between February and November last year. We provided ten beds and accommodated twenty people across the year. Every night without fail we provided a freshly cooked dinner, a warm bed, and breakfast to people who would otherwise have spent most nights on the street. Beside our own work, it was enabled by the many people who gave their time as volunteer cooks, and all those who provide the donations which pay for the heating, water, and food. I am very grateful to all those who made it possible to stay open, and for the privilege of doing a little of God’s work in proclaiming the good news to the poor—all the works of mercy are forms of evangelism, because the good news includes the fact that it is not necessary that anybody in this city should have to sleep outside in the rain, if we love our neighbours enough to invite them into our homes.
Still, we were always conscious of how little we were offering people—a folding bed in a rundown old church hall which we couldn’t keep as warm as we would have liked, with one shower and two toilets down a steep flight of stairs which were difficult for some of the guests, and having every morning to leave until night, whatever the weather. It was much less than they deserved. If we are welcoming Jesus into our house in the guise of the poor, it is surely appropriate to feel a little shame at the paucity of our hospitality for the King of Heaven, even if it is because we have little to offer. Nor were we ever in a position to welcome the guests as equals – with a limited service, there was more conflict, often about use of the shower, and we had to mediate. Ensuring that the guests had an environment in which they felt safe obliged us to wield authority and enforce rules. Catholic Worker communities generally want, as far as possible, for guests to be equal members of the community, but this is rarely achieved in practice. Certainly, in the night shelter the hierarchy between those giving and those receiving hospitality was always very apparent, so that beside our anxiety about the quality of the service, I felt a less useful anxiety about whether we were being ‘real’ Catholic Workers, which is, I suspect, more common in our communities than we generally acknowledge.
By October we had come to the very difficult decision that we would not be able to keep the shelter open over the winter. The primary reason was that, straightforwardly, we were running out of money, and while a grant and an exceptionally generous donation have improved our situation in the last couple of months, the extra cost of the shelter, particularly in heating the hall through the winter, might have caused us serious problems. The other reason was that, on top of all our other work, many of us found the shelter exhausting, mentally and emotionally. The shelter was never intended to be permanent, but having extended it from its initial three months to the eventual ten months, it had become part of our life, and while the decision not to open in the first place would have been relatively easy, the decision to close it after nine months of operation was very difficult. I, for my part, was left with a sense of failure, which was to an extent irrational. Considered objectively, we did a very good job with our very limited resources, and the guests expressed humbling gratitude for what we had done. We were, moreover, very happy that all of them moved on to other accommodation rather than the street. Still, those whose cases were not resolved still face an indeterminate period of destitution, reliant on night shelters and the generosity of friends, and at the mercy of an inhumane border regime. Some of them may still be among the many thousands who will sleep on the streets of London this year.
It is difficult to feel a sense of success while these conditions continue. In the face of the vast suffering of this city—let alone the rest of the world—our efforts will always seem insufficient. Dorothy Day more than once reflected that Christ was a failure at the point of his crucifixion, and was victorious precisely in his failure; consequently, if we are setting out to follow him, we can expect to fail too, at least as the world understands it. The call is not to resign ourselves to these problems as though they were insoluble—in fact they are all solvable, and could be solved today if more people had a will to do so!— but to recognise that our sowing is worthwhile regardless of the extent to which we ourselves see or enjoy the reaping. This is almost a consolation. Still, I think it’s important for us to acknowledge, and allow ourselves to feel, the failure in our work, rather than strain to maintain an illusion, to ourselves or anyone else, that it is a constant unalloyed success. As Solomon knew, there is a time for mourning as well as a time for rejoicing.
Thomas Frost
