Margie Pfeil is an associate professor of moral theology at the University of Notre Dame holding a joint appointment with the Department of Theology and the Institute for Social Concerns. She is also a faculty fellow with the Ansari Institute for Global Engagement with Religion, the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, and the Klau Institute for Civil and Human Rights. She is a founder and resident of the St. Peter Catholic Worker Community in South Bend, Indiana.

Pfeil is the co-editor with the Rev. Don McNeil, CSC of Act Justly, Love Mercy, and Walk Humbly with your God: Vatican II, Pastoral Ministry, and Lay Formation for Mission (Andrews, McMeel, 2017); The Scandal of White Complicity in U.S. Hyper-incarceration: A Nonviolent Spirituality of White Resistance, co-authored with Laurie Cassidy and Alex Mikulich, with a foreword by Sr. Helen Prejean (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), and Sharing Peace: Mennonites and Catholics in Conversation, co-edited with Gerald Schlabach (Liturgical Press, 2013). Her research interests include Catholic social teaching, racial justice, nonviolence, ecological ethics, and ecumenism.

Over Zoom, Professor Pfeil sat down with Rebekah Go, the Ansari Institute’s Program and Communication Manager, to talk about the Catholic Worker community and its rootedness in Catholic social teaching. The following has been edited and abridged for clarity.

You are a professor at Notre Dame but you also co-founded the local Catholic Worker community, the day center Our Lady of the Road, the low-barrier shelter Motels4Now, and now The New Day Intake Center. Could you talk a little bit about how that came to be and – because that's a big, long question – could you start with your involvement with the Catholic Worker?

Yes, thanks. We started this version of the Catholic Worker, the Saint Peter Claver Catholic Worker, in 2003. We bought our first house in September of 2003. At the time, I was collaborating with Michael Baxter, who was also on the faculty of the theology department and Ben Peters, who had graduated from Notre Dame. We talked with those who were running the Holy Family Catholic Worker – a Catholic Worker Home that already existed in South Bend – and they were basically winding down. They had taken in a family and that house became the home of that last family and they didn't want to displace them. So they said, “sure, start another one.” So we found a house on West Washington and moved in. Our first guests were a Latino family of eight on the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe on December 12th of 2003 and we have had guests ever since then.

We then moved from West Washington to where we are now on South St. Joseph Street in April of 2006. In the meantime we had people coming to the front door with empty milk jugs asking for water because their water had been turned off and asking to take a shower and for food. So we talked with the Center for the Homeless and Broadway Christian Parish and Hope Ministries [other service providers in town], and we asked if there might be a need for a day center of some sort where people could get these services. They said, “yes, especially breakfast on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.” So we set out to find a space and found the building just behind the Center for the Homeless that is now Our Lady of the Road. We opened that in December of 2006 and started serving breakfast.

Things have evolved over the years but we now think of Our Lady of the Road as the apostolate of the Catholic Worker community and that 11,000 square-foot space has accommodated a number of things. In 2011 we started a food cooperative, called the Common Goods Co-operative to connect people in the city in need of healthy, affordable food with local growers. Now it is open once a month and it's all volunteer run. We also have a wood shop at Our Lady of the Road called St. Joseph's Woodshop. We have slowly been collecting equipment and tools so that anybody interested in woodworking could use that space. We also envision making caskets there for people who might not otherwise be able to afford burial and also for people who can afford burial but might like to make a donation to support the work. We have already made a number of coffins for people who couldn't afford burial. Then there's a chapel there: the Chapel of the Holy Spirit opened in 2017. We have Mass every Wednesday night at 7:30 pm and a Taizé service once a month. Then we offer laundry services and showers in addition to breakfast, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. There is also a large area for donations so if people are in need of clothing, or if they get a place to live and need some basic appliances, we usually have some things we can offer.

Tell me a little bit more about you and Mike Baxter deciding to start a Catholic Worker. There must have been some prompting right?

I did my undergraduate at Notre Dame in the eighties and then I came back in the nineties to do my doctorate. Then I got a job teaching at St. Joseph's University in Philadelphia in 1999 – I was ABD [all but dissertation] and graduated from Notre Dame at the end of that academic year in 2000. While I was in Philadelphia there were three Catholic Worker communities and one of them was connected to my parish, St. Vincent de Paul, in Philadelphia. So I started hanging out at those. It was the first time in my life I had ever lived alone. I lived in a row house apartment on a long street with a big hill in Philadelphia, and I just remember looking down my street thinking everybody probably has their own toaster and their own vacuum cleaner. And I just thought, wow! I missed living in a more communal setting and I felt suffocated by the redundancy of everybody living individually on their own.

Then 9/11 happened and – I’m originally from a suburb of New York City – I was really affected by that and remember the next day I woke up and I thought I either have to join a monastery or explore living as a Catholic Worker, because those were the only two contexts I could think of that were rooted in prayer and committed to active nonviolence in a communal setting.

At that point I began more serious conversations with two of the three Catholic Worker communities in Philadelphia about joining them and made plans to live at the House of Grace. They showed me a supply closet in their medical clinic and they said, you could live here, and I said, “Perfect! This is what I want.”

Then Don McNeill, CSC (1936-2017), who founded the Center for Social Concerns [now the Institute for Social Concerns], called. He was a very dear friend and mentor for me from my undergraduate years. When I was a doctoral student, I team taught with him. He called and said, “I'm getting ready to move to the Pilsen area of Chicago to minister there,” and he wondered if I would be interested in coming back to Notre Dame to help connect the Department of Theology with the Center for Social Concerns through community-based learning courses, as he had been doing.

So I came back to Notre Dame in 2002 and was a visiting professor that year and then became a regular faculty member as we were beginning the Catholic Worker. So, when I came back, Mike Baxter had heard that I had already been exploring life within a Catholic Worker, and said, “some of us would like to start a new community here in South Bend, would you be interested?” And I said, “absolutely.” So that's how it all happened.

Mike had experience starting Andre House in Phoenix. But speaking for myself, I really had no idea what I was getting into. When we actually started and had volunteers and people coming and were cooking for 40 or 50 people daily, I just felt such deep joy. I thought, “This is it for me. This is what God desires.” I remain convinced of that.

The work of the Catholic Worker is really rooted in Catholic social teaching’s idea of the “preferential option for the poor.” Could you explain this idea?

Sure. I'll just say that the Scriptural touchstones that have drawn me to the Catholic Worker are the Sermon on the Mount, in the Gospel of Matthew Chapters 5 to 7, and then Matthew 25. The Works of Mercy: “when did I see you hungry and feed you? Naked and clothe you?” I think both of those help to contextualize what we mean by the phrase, “the preferential option for the poor,” which is a relatively new phrase for a very old concept going through the whole Judeo Christian tradition all the way back to Genesis.

We look at the creation narratives: all of creation belongs to God and was created for us as interdependent and interconnected members of God's creation. If we see it that way, it helps to understand what Jesus meant in the Sermon on the Mount when he's talking about lending without expecting things in return and not worrying about provision. God provides for the birds of the air. Why would God not provide for you? There's a whole theology of abundance there, as opposed to scarcity. And there's care for the most vulnerable built into that – that those who are most in need can trust in provision. And that provision happens when all of us creatures cooperate together with the super abundance of God's grace and love.

God has loved each of us into being. Our response to that gratuitous love is meant to be a free gift of self and sharing of the goods of creation as God has provided for us. That, to me, is at the heart of what we mean by the preferential option for the poor. If all of us human beings did that, we would all be living in abundance. I am convinced of that.

At the root of the Catholic Worker here locally is our work on housing. I firmly believe that housing is a human right and human duty that serves the common good. Everyone ought to be housed and if we all came together as human beings - or even just here in this local community of South Bend together with Notre Dame - we could house everyone who needs to be housed. There's an invitation in the Catholic social tradition to see these basic issues of need and vulnerability through a lens of God's abundant provision.

I recently had a conversation where the person I spoke to said that they think that the primary divisions they see amongst Catholics are those Catholics who hold up their rootedness in Catholic social tradition and those Catholics who hold up their rootedness in Catholic Catechism. That person indicated that those two things - Catholic social teaching and Catechism - are different. How does one fit Catholic social tradition in the broader context of the Catholic Church and its Catechism?

Well, that's interesting, because I have taught those studying to become deacons in the Catholic Church, Catholic social teaching, using the Catechism. I was asked to teach them a unit on Catholic social teaching, and we used the Catechism which draws upon documents of Catholic social teaching and upon scripture.

Most recently, Pope Francis promulgated a revision to the Catechism on capital punishment, saying, “capital punishment is inadmissible” and there has been a development of doctrine in the Catholic social tradition on this issue that is reflected in the Catechism. I would love to engage such a point of view by noting the ways in which the Catechism does reflect the basic theological commitments of the whole Catholic social tradition from Scripture moving forward through the centuries of the Catholic Church. I would not give in easily to that kind of bifurcation.

There's no doubt that there's polarization right now in the Catholic Church here in the United States but I think we can engage one another through a lens of abundance and through a lens of the common good. I see it happen so often at Our Lady of the Road as people are washing dishes together after breakfast. I know for a fact that they don't share a lot of commitments ideologically, but there they are washing dishes. There's something about the works of mercy that bring people together across divides, whether those divides are political or theological, and that gives me hope because I see how God's Spirit is at work in the world.

The next big project after Our Lady of the Road was a bit of a surprise - and it happened right during Covid, is that correct? Motels4Now. Can you tell me about it? What is Motels4Now and how did it develop?

Yes, very much a surprise. We weren't looking for this. In fact, I had been thinking: “it's time to pass a leading role on to younger folks.” Then, COVID happened and we had a very large tent encampment of houseless individuals in three different locations downtown – but all within a block of our Catholic Worker houses in Monroe Park. So, during the pandemic shutdown of the summer of 2020 we had more than a hundred people living in tents with no running water, no sanitation, on asphalt parking lots. So we started weekly zoom calls with stakeholders: people living in the tents, neighbors, city and county officials.

We were there to say, “nobody has a ready answer to this, but can we talk about what the issues are and how we might address them?” And by August of that summer, one of our regular supporters from Our Lady of the Road joined the Zoom call and afterwards he contacted me and said, “it sounds to me like there is willingness on the part of the city officials and the county officials to think about how to approach this more systematically. If I also contribute some money, what do you think?” So I said, “Well, if you contribute some money, we would start moving people from the tents into empty motel rooms.” So that person put in $30,000, and then another long-time supporter read about that and said, “I want to match that.” Then we had $60,000, and we started moving people into three different motels. And that was the start of Motels4Now.

Then, one thing led to another and we were able to bring on Sheila McCarthy as our Executive Director and begin to build a staff of people. And now we are planning to build a permanent facility so the current motel operation would move into this permanent facility. For this reason, we have started another non-profit entity called the New Day Intake Center. The motel program will transition into that new entity and that new permanent location over the next couple of years.

The Holy Spirit has definitely been driving this because it is not something we sought. We stepped up during the pandemic shutdown to do this because it became clear in the zoom conversations that no other agency in town was in a position to meet the need at hand. The need - as it was identified was: non-congregate, low-barrier housing. Non-congregate because of Covid – this was before vaccines – and low-barrier because, these are people who are dealing with severe addiction and/or mental health issues who are not able to be housed by other agencies like the Center for the Homeless or Hope Ministries. Nor, for that matter, the Catholic Worker. Catholic Worker houses are also high-barrier. We ask people to be clean and sober because our houses are small communal living situations and we are not able to handle the kind of volatility that might arise from people dealing with more severe issues in their lives.

There was a gap in the continuum of care that everyone recognized and we stepped into it and we have been developing the capacity as we go and it certainly has been challenging. We never imagined that we would be taking on this work. Yet, it has been necessary work.

I remain hopeful that we can actually house everyone who is in need of housing – especially the people who are most vulnerable, especially the people who are dealing with addiction and mental health issues. Those issues should not preclude someone from being housed. When someone remains unhoused we, as a society, are basically saying we've given up on you. Your life is expendable. The chances of somebody ending up dead or in jail are very, very high. As a society, I think we can do better than that.

You mentioned earlier the Corporal Works of Mercy. Can you talk a little further about those?

When we talk about the Works of Mercy, these are rooted in the Gospel of Matthew chapter 25: 31-46. In that passage Jesus is saying: this is what it will look like at the end of time and He is talking about separating the sheep and the goats. He says, “the question will be, ‘when did I see you?’” Jesus says, “when you did it to the least of these, you did it to me.” “When Lord? When did we see you hungry and feed you? Naked and clothe you? Sick and visit you? In prison and accompany you?” And He says, “when you did it to the least of these, you did it to me.” Then to those who didn't act when they saw a person in that sort of need, Jesus says, “When you neglected to do it, you neglected to do it to me.”

My own theology is not very judgment oriented. I don't find that tremendously motivating. But I think Jesus is making a point to say, “do we look at another person in need and see that as an invitation to encounter Jesus - both within that person and within ourselves? And do we trust in God's love and grace at work at that moment?” It is a relationship. It is not only a one-way interaction of performing works of mercy on someone else as an object, but really it's God's merciful love at work on the part of both people involved.

It's God's mercy and God's love that is at work. And when you asked earlier about the preferential option for the poor, I love the late Gustavo Gutierrez's three page brief in the edited volume of his Essential Writings, edited by James Nickoloff. He says, “it isn't about loving the poor because they're good. People who are dealing with socioeconomic poverty are just like everyone else. What's really at stake is We. We are invited to love because we are loved by God and the other person is loved by God.

I think that's at the heart of these corporal works of mercy of meeting material needs: food, shelter, clothing. The spiritual works of mercy include instructing the ignorant and comforting the afflicted. What's really at work is God's loving mercy being extended to everyone involved in the situation and living into that merciful love together.

I think there's a lot of vulnerability on both sides of that sort of relationship - allowing ourselves to be loved. And there's a lot of fear of losing a certain conception of comfort or security. Yet I think these opportunities for building relationships are God's way of saying, “Hey, remember that you are all connected. You're not created to be separate. In fact, we would die without each other.” We are created by God, out of God's love, to love.

Back in the day when he was still a professor here at Notre Dame, Michael Baxter used to teach undergraduate classes and rumor had it one question he would often ask was, “is it ethical to own a second home?” Do you have an answer to this question: is it ethical to have a second home when we know that there are unhoused people.

I think it's a poignant question and I think it's only grown more so over the years as the perimeter of Notre Dame has expanded to include a lot of housing owned by Notre Dame alumni. These homes now are second or even 3rd homes that are used just for football weekends or as rentals. Yet we have people living in tents in South Bend. And the waitlist for Motels4Now is between 12 and 14 months. So I do think it's a very important question to be asking.

I would love to find a way to have a constructive and creative discernment process with those Notre Dame alumni who are those homeowners to see how we could talk about engaging in distributive justice. So that the wealth that they are enjoying can be distributed among South Bend residents who are in need of housing. For instance, there is an effort in South Bend to develop a Housing Trust Fund and I could imagine at halftime a QR code on the jumbotron inviting people to contribute to the Housing Trust Fund.

My experience has been that if I engage my friends by asking them whether their practices are ethical, walls go up quickly. But if I have a conversation directed toward stoking the moral imagination in creative ways, couched in a sense of solidarity directed toward the common good, people respond generously. I really believe that. And I'm constantly looking for ways to get people to think in those terms, because the income inequality gap has only grown year by year, even through Covid.

People talk about a downturn in the economy. I think, for whom is this the case? The stock market has broken its own record several times just in the last year, hitting 40,000 and above. We have to have an honest conversation about income inequality and our interconnection and the value and human dignity of every human being. I think this is deeply rooted in our faith commitment. And our Christianity ought to have more sway in shaping our moral imagination than our financial advisor or the state of the stock market.

Originally published by Rebekah Go at ansari.nd.edu on October 29, 2024.