You may have noticed that there is another blog listed under my profile. This is the blog for the Columbus Catholic Worker. We are just kicking it off and I hope you drop by to visit. There may be other people posting to this blog besides me.
I am in the process of moving into an intentional Christian community. Our Columbus group has been in existence for about 3 years, and we are part of the Catholic Worker movement which has been going on since the 1930s.
We have recently signed a lease for the former convent at St. James the Less Catholic Church in Columbus. Three men are moving in, and we hope others will join us in the near future. We will host daily prayer in the mornings and evenings with a larger weekly prayer session. We will also be supporting the food pantry of the St. Vincent de Paul Society. There is a Bible study already underway there. The public is welcome to attend any of this or just to hang out, and we'll post dates and times for all of this in the near future.
We are looking to expanding the food pantry with hot meals or clothing distribution. We are currently researching possibilities for a medical or legal clinic. A key ministry we are looking to begin is care for the elderly in the surrounding community. There is a large Hispanic community that gathers at this parish, and we would love to work with them. A number of other ideas are brewing, and we'd love to hear yours.
The Catholic Worker movement has always impressed me. It weaves social justice together with direct charity. It combines community living together with voluntary poverty and spirituality. It is wholly pacifist. The unstructured network of communities across North America and the world provides the skeleton for the peace and justice movement today. The Catholic Worker is also a key inspiration for the new monastic movement.
Being a movement rather than an organization, there can be vast differences from one Catholic Worker community to another. One thing that binds all of these groups together is that they take their inspiration from the founders Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin, who in the depths of the Great Depression realized a true stone soup story and found themselves able to give so much through their own poverty.
Frank, I enjoy reading your blog entries related to Catholicism. I have never known much about it, and I'm impressed by what I'm reading about it.
ReplyDeleteHi Sarah,
ReplyDeleteI'm glad you like them. I always wonder what people think, having a blog that covers topics such as religion and environmental sustainability. For some people that is a natural combination and for others maybe not!
I like your entries on Catholicism since I grew up as one and you provide a different take on what I learned, or sometimes, you present something in a way that makes more sense than the way I interpretted it as a child. You make me like Catholicism again. I just usually dont comment because I don't have a lot of things to say on the topic, being the less knowledgeable one (and I know you judge the entries by the responses to it).
ReplyDeleteI'm not too much into the sustainability stuff, but I read it anyway and absorb what's been said. I love it when you talk about the stuff that you cook... gives me ideas...