Mainstreaming Nonviolence Toolbox:

Building a World Where Everyone Matters

 This blog by Ken Butigan highlights ideas, books, videos, websites, projects, campaigns, organizations and individuals offering new directions for mainstreaming the power of nonviolent change.  Click here for more about mainstreaming nonviolence.

Experiments in Nonviolence in the Back of the Yards

The Su Casa Catholic Worker is located in the Back of the Yards neighborhood in Chicago. I was asked to present at a “roundtable” there last night for the community and its friends from across the city.  About thirty of us engaged the modest topic I had proposed to Chantal deAlcuaz (the community-member who organized this exchange): “What would a nonviolent culture look like – and how do we get there?”

We are called to inculcate respect and the deepest values of the human spirit in an increasingly spirit-bereft industrialized, technologized and depersonalized culture.

We do not begin with a clear and unified picture of such a thing but many different images, feelings, and visions. Slowly we share our pieces of the truth: A call for new narratives imagining an alternative to the “violence believe system.”  An exploration of anger as threat and anger as fuel.  An invitation to  strengthen our “risk muscle,” our vulnerability, and our connection.  The power of silent prayer and inner peace.  The urgency of now and the need to act.  The awareness that all of us must be part of the design, including those we don’t agree with. The reality that violence often occurs when needs are denied and go unmet; a nonviolent culture will not emerge until these are addressed. The crucial need to dismantle inequality; the simplicity of one little tool at a time.  The call to transform fear.  The invitation to give everything away and go for it.

A hundred years ago, when the former Franciscan friary that now houses this Catholic Worker was built, a series of Slavic enclaves dominated by Poles, Czechs, Lithuanians, and Slovaks emerged with the establishment of the Union Stockyards and the numerous railroad lines in the area. 

Since the 1970s, this area has become predominately Hispanic. Su Casa began as a shelter for refugees fleeing war in Central America.  Today it offers hospitality to five Spanish-speaking homeless families of Chicago, many of whom are women and children escaping domestic violence.  It also partners with its neighbors to make their community a better place, and – with the spirit of Dorothy Day hovering – it engages in educational and social action activities concerning social justice issues related to its ministry.

Dorothy Day is alive and well at Su Casa.

“The Catholic Worker Movement,” writes Catholic worker historian Phillip Runkel, “is grounded in a firm belief in the God-given dignity of every human person. 185 Catholic Worker communities remain committed to nonviolence, voluntary poverty, prayer, and hospitality for the homeless, exiled, hungry, and forsaken. Catholic Workers continue to protest injustice, war, racism, and violence of all forms.”

But in the 1930s Dorothy Day’s friends were bewildered when the bohemian anarchist made what was, to them, an utterly shocking move: becoming Catholic. What, they wanted to know, did the hidebound, reactionary and medieval Roman Catholic Church have to do with her radical politics and freethinking creativity? 

Though this did not compute for them, it did mysteriously for Day.  Her decision must have come to her in a flash, less a logical position than an intuition – an acute sense that a strange metamorphosis was in the offing.  The anarchist became an alchemist, engaging in her own life a unity of opposites and the intense creative tension it exacted – a tension that would release enormous energy for change both in the church and the world. 

Committed to progressive politics and the struggle for a better world before she became a Catholic, she now saw issues of war, peace and justice as “Catholic issues.”  Although she recognized that the Church was often conservative and supported the structures of power, she also saw that it was the community of the poor and the dispossessed — the “little ones,” as she said.

Her longing for change was now rooted in something deeper than an apparent dichotomy of politics and narrowly defined faith.  Instead, it was grounded in a searing conviction of the nearness of the presence of God, the God who has passed through this world and entered our suffering flesh.  Her spirituality was deeply incarnational; each person was worthy of dignity and honor as actual or potential members of the Mystical Body of Christ.  Rooted in the philosophy of personalism espoused by Emmanuel Mounier, Day believed that Christians are called to inculcate respect and the deepest values of the human spirit in an increasingly spirit-bereft industrialized, technologized and depersonalized culture.

Hence the importance of community.  “We have experienced the long loneliness,” she wrote, “and we have learned that the only solution is love, and that love comes with community.” 

This spirituality of compassion, incarnated love, voluntary poverty and guarding of the dignity of all human beings was the basis of Day’s nonviolence.  She espoused pacifism during the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s and World War II in the 1940s.  She took part in countless nonviolent campaigns and demonstrations, including the refusal to participate in civil defense drills in New York.  (These repeated nonviolent actions led, after several years, to their being canceled.) 

Her nonviolence was an integral part of a comprehensive spirituality seeking to restore the “image and likeness of God” to the human person in the midst of the enormous changes which both self and society have undergone in this century.  In the end, her theology and spirituality made her an optimist.  She often quoted Julian of Norwich: “The worst has already happened — and it has been repaired.”

And what was one of the fruits of this engaged spirituality?  A shift in the church itself.  As Mark and Louise Zwick write in “Dorothy Day, Prophet of Pacifism for the Catholic Church,” “One of Dorothy Day’s great gifts to the Catholic Church and to the United States was her drawing together of Catholic biblical and theological resources to establish pacifism and conscientious objection as a legitimate stance for Catholics and for Americans.  Today this is not just a teaching of Dorothy Day. The U. S. Catholic Bishops affirmed pacifism and conscientious objection as a legitmate expression of Catholic faith in their 1983 peace pastoral, The Challenge of Peace, giving Dorothy Day credit.”

It is this legacy that Su Casa is living out as it contributes in its own way to an emerging nonviolent culture in this time of crisis and opportunity.

Photos: Su Casa Catholic Worker.

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