About the Oscar Romero Catholic Worker House. . .
People often ask me: What is the Oscar Romero Catholic Worker
House? That question should be easy to answer, but it
isn't. Peter Maurin, who co-founded the
Catholic Worker movement with Dorothy Day in 1933, used to say
that the
"Catholic Worker is not an organization, it is an organism."
I think that is a good description. We are not an "organization"
in the way that most people think of organizations. We
don't have officers and a board of directors.
We aren't incorporated. We make decisions by consensus. We don't
have
membership cards. We barely have a mailing list. We're not
officially a
"person of record under canonical law". We are an
autonomous lay community within the Catholic tradition. There is
no Catholic Worker hierarchy that tells us
what to do and
what not to do. People don't get permission from someone to start
a Catholic Worker house. When we decided to start this
work, we just started this work.
It's that simple - and that complex.
Catholic Workers are personalists, that is, we believe in taking
personal responsibility for living the teachings of Christ, all
of them, especially the hard ones. Dorothy Day said,
"The Sermon on the Mount is our Manifesto!" That is a fine pious
statement, but we take it literally, or as literally as we can.
Each Catholic Worker House is independent and autonomous and
self-governing. We all practice the spiritual and corporal
works of mercy, and we work to build a
civilization of life and love. We believe in and practice social
justice, and we hope
that if we practice it hard enough, we will eventually get good at
it.
Our particular apostolate is in the area of community
and household food security. We deliver food to people in need who
don't have transportation to get to a regular food
bank.
We encourage gardening and home preservation of food and the
planting of fruit and nut trees. We help people buy
food directly from Oklahoma farmers.
We do other things, as needs and resources present themselves.
We also work for justice and peace in the world. We promote
environmental sustainability and stewardship. We helped organize
the Oklahoma Food Cooperative ( http://www.oklahomafood.coop
).
We compile and distribute
information on sustainable, simple, and frugal living (http://www.bettertimesinfo.org
and
http://www.energyconservationinfo.org
),
and we publish the Better Times Almanac of Useful
Information
(http://www.bettertimesinfo.org/2004index.htm
). We host groups of students from Catholic universities,
who visit us for
a week of immersion in poverty, social justice, and environmental
sustainability. We meet irregularly for prayer and study.
We are helping start the Oklahoma
Worker Cooperative Network.
Who, you may ask, was Oscar Romero? He was the archbishop of San
Salvador, who was murdered by his own
government because he defended the poor. We have taken
his name because we wish to follow his holy example of being
a forthright defender of justice and peace.
How can people help? We can always use help delivering food to
the poor. We meet, generally on a Saturday morning, at
the Dorothy Day Center, 4909 N. State Street,
which is on the east side of the St. Charles Borromeo property, at
9 AM. To
find out which Saturdays we are delivering in a given month, call
our help line at 405-557-0436
and listen to the recorded
message. Each month we deliver to more than 300 households, and
there is a lot of fetching and carrying and work involved
with that.
If you know of people who don't have transportation, but need
food, feel free to give them that number or call in
their address and contact information yourself. We can always use
donations of food. Food can be left at any time on the
porch at 1524 NW 21st Street, or taken to the church
offices at Epiphany Church. If I am not in, just tell the church
secretaries it is for the Catholic Worker House. We especially
need donations of peanut butter. That is an important food
for the poor, and one of our major expenses
each month is buying peanut butter. Another good item to donate is
spaghetti
sauce. We also need blankets, towels, socks, gloves, hats, for
distribution to the poor.
We can also use donations of money to help fund this work.
Because we are not incorporated, donations to the Oscar Romero
Catholic Worker House are not tax deductible.
Dorothy Day was firmly against
giving tax deductions for donations to Catholic Worker Houses.
This is because for Catholic Workers, the means we
choose to achieve our
ends are as important as the ends themselves. If people want to
donate to a Catholic Worker house,
they should do so because it is the right thing to do, not because
the g
overnment gives them a tax deduction.
The other thing that we need is for more people to live just and
sustainable lifestyles. Mother Teresa used to beg the rich to
"take less, so that there will be more for others."
How we live impacts the world around us. If we live lives of
conspicuous consumption, greed, and gluttony, then that doesn't
happen in isolation. Others will
have less because we
take more. The problem of poverty is not just a problem of the
poor, it is also a problem of those who aren't poor.
Our advice is simple: do what you can, with what you have, where you are. That is what we are trying to do, and we invite you to help. Ad majorem Dei gloriam!
Robert Waldrop, founder
Oscar Romero Catholic Worker House, 1524 NW 21st, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma 73106