Lessons Learned from 50 Years at St. Francis Catholic Worker

At the National Catholic Worker Gathering in Chicago on October 5th, attendees packed the Saturday morning plenary session titled “Lessons Learned from 50 Years of St. Francis House.” Panelists from different eras of the St. Francis House Catholic Worker community shared stories and reflections, providing insights into the daily work of hospitality and what enables a Catholic Worker community to thrive for fifty years.

The panel featured Lucky Marlovitz, who lived and worked at the house from 2000 to 2011; Ruthie Woodring, a resident from 1993 to 2002; Sam Guardino, a member of the live-in community from 1990 to 1993; and Denise Plunkett, who served from 1978 to 1982. Their stories ranged from humorous memories to hard-won lessons. Karl Meyer also participated in the panel; he read written comments that will be posted in their entirety separately.

The following excerpts are drawn from an audio recording of the event and have been edited for clarity and brevity.

Lucky Marlovitz

Discovering the Catholic Worker Movement via Dumpster Diving

Lucky Marlovitz lived at the house from 2000 to 2011. Prior to encountering the Catholic Worker, she had been doing forest defense in Northern California. Although she had been raised Catholic in Chicago, she had never heard of the Catholic Worker Movement—until she encountered one of the St. Francis Catholic Workers, Jack Trumkey, behind a health food store in the early 1990s.

“I went to the back of a health food store, and there was this guy, like all scientific, dressed up in a button-down shirt, aviator glasses, had everything all organized. And that’s how I learned about the Catholic Worker movement.

“So yeah, Jack, well, he lent me a rope to tie these organic carrots onto my back and ride away with it. And I said, ‘I want to return this rope.’ And he said, ‘I live at St. Francis House Catholic Worker.’ That’s how I found out about it.”

What She Learned from Community Living

The plenary panel was titled, “Lessons Learned from Living at the St. Francis Catholic Worker,” and she listed quite a few.

“Things I learned at the house: I learned how to say ‘no.’ As a woman, you’re supposed to be able to do everything all the time. So, I did learn how to say ‘no.’

“I learned how to say ‘sorry.’ I effed up majorly, like a lot of times in my years there. And it took a while sometimes, and I know it affected people in different ways. I learned how to say sorry to people, to take accountability for my actions, as much as I can.

“Giving thanks: I was thankful for the experience of living there, of the education. I lived with over 400 people. I did have to go and count once because I did a testimony for the State of Illinois, and I looked at the registry. I lived with over 400 people in that time. So I had experience with people from all over the world, with many people.

“I learned that I could live with many people, dozens of people, hundreds of people. But I really only liked to live with a few.” This line drew knowing laughter from the other Catholic Workers in the audience.

“I learned it was good to take breaks…. I know Dorothy Day would go do nonviolence, civil disobedience, and go to jail to have a break. I would go to Southeast Asia. A little different, right?”

She also learned to reach out to other Workers for support. “It’s so great to have support. So, the people who are in communities, just encourage people to ask other people for help, for support whenever you need it.”

Ruthie Woodring

From Appalachia to the Catholic Worker at 19

Ruthie Woodring was at the house from 1993 to 2002. She began by showing off her 50th-anniversary shirt and explaining that since she was born in 1974 and she is a trash hauler, she has been “looking out for fiftieth-anniversary things.”

She grew up Christian in Appalachia but lost her religion at age 17. She left college at age 19 to move into St. Francis House—in part to go somewhere where people weren’t constantly worried about the state of her soul and whether she was saved.

Revolving Doors and Learning Smells

One of her first “lessons learned” came while she and another worker were leafleting at the University of Illinois about getting Amoco to divest from Burma. She followed that worker into one of the buildings.

“So he steps in this door, I step in right behind him. The whole door thing moves, it hits me in the back. It sort of jams me into the frame. And he’s like, ‘Ruthie, what are you doing?’ I’m like, ‘I’ve never been in a revolving door before. Like, how do you get in this thing?’”

Woodring came to St. Francis House as a non-Christian from a family of teetotalers. At the time, the house had 18 residents and maintained an open-door policy from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. She recalls one cold winter day, returning from her bike messenger job to find 30 people gathered in the living room, with additional people in the basement.

“It was kind of a lot. And then people would be sometimes hanging out in the basement, smoking crack in the basement. And I mentioned the teetotaler thing, because we had a policy that you had to be sober to come inside the house. And so when I would open the door, and someone would want to come in, I’m like, I don’t know if they’re sober or not. And Terry Bacman—from St. Louis, Missouri, home of Anhauser-Busch—he’s like, where’d you come from that you can’t smell alcohol on someone’s breath? Like, where are you from?”

“I also learned what crack smells like. You know, you always mix it up with poop. Like, I can never quite distinguish the smell between bleach and poop, or crack smells and poop, or something worse.”

“So we decided that…having an open door from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. was just too chaotic of a household for the other 18 people who lived there. So we decided to kind of not be the drop-in center anymore, and just try to focus on creating a healthy, supportive home for those people who, it was their home. Seven, Love, Jimmy, Jack, those four long-term guests were there when I moved in, too. 

“And yeah, I gotta do a little shout-out to Jack. I had known about dumpster-diving behind grocery stores before I moved to Francis House, but my first week there, it was the day I moved there that the Walgreens freezer broke, and we went and got all that ice cream. And then also that week, I remember riding with Jack in his three-speed, in his big basket, with his pants clad, button-up shirt, and his shirt pockets, down to that cheese and wine store, and he’d open up that black garbage bag and pull out, cut off the cheese and nibble on them. That’s when I learned that cheese stays good, like, forever, basically.”

Having grown up in a large family with eight siblings, Woodring was used to communal living. At St. Francis House, there were typically about five Workers and 10-13 guests.

“I don’t remember having conflicts among the workers because the problems that the guests had were real problems, and so it wasn’t worth dealing with our energy. You know, I feel like in communal living situations where you don’t have a mission like that, you can just sometimes get caught up in bickering, ‘you use  too much toilet paper, et cetera. Well, that’s (actually) a problem when we had a lot of guests, too. But one thing is, I learned to see things in perspective. Like Lucky was saying, how she got to live with people from all over the world, I’m also thinking about people that lived with us from the Center for Survivors of Torture in Uptown. So I heard firsthand stories of people’s experiences in Guatemala and Uganda and other places—speaking of perspective.”

Dumpster Diving and Bike Hauling

The community often got food by dumpster diving behind upscale grocery stores on the North Shore, later receiving donations from Whole Foods. One time, when their borrowed truck broke down, Woodring attempted to transport donations using a garden cart attached to her bicycle. It didn’t go so well. But then, Tim Hurley from Uptown Bikes provided them with a proper bike trailer capable of carrying 300 pounds, which proved much more effective. Ruthie credits Tim and Uptown Bikes for helping the community become “bike literate” by teaching them bicycle maintenance.

A Low Moment: ‘I Had Never Seen Violence at the House Until That Night’

One of her “lowest moments” at the house happened when she called the police to help with a guest. The house was facing gentrification pressures, with neighbors complaining about people using their porch, sometimes for drinking or drug use. These neighbors would frequently call the police or health inspectors.

“We had a policy against calling the police,” she explained. “I came home at midnight and there was a guy sleeping on the porch, and I was concerned about neighbor relations, and everyone else was asleep.” She tried to wake him up, but when she wasn’t successful, she called the police.

“Denise said she had never seen violence at the house, and I hadn’t either, until that night,” she said. “I thought the police would just tell the guy to leave, but they came, they dragged him off the porch, they punched him, kicked him, threw him against the neighbors’ fence and stuffed him in the police car and drove away with him.”

The next day, she attended a meeting with police at the precinct and another in their kitchen. “That was a learning moment that I am not proud of.”

Making “Herstory” with a Top-Free Bike Ride

On a lighter note, she shared a funny story in response to an audience question about the panel’s favorite action at the house.

Ruthie said that her favorite action was a five-week walk to the Project ELF site in northern Wisconsin. But she also recalled another memorable action that was sparked by a guy going by the house, shirtless, on a hot summer day.

“One hot August day, around 2000, Lucky and I were sitting in the kitchen, and some guy without a shirt on walked by, and Lucky was like, ‘We should be able to do that,’ and I’m like, ‘Well, why can’t we?’ So we decided to organize a top-free bike ride and about 11 of us—half men, half women—started in downtown Chicago. We took off our shirts—some of the guys put on bras in solidarity—and we rode to Chicago.

“I remember coming through…a construction zone and one of the construction workers had his back to (Jack), and he was minding his own business, and he looks up, and a big smile crosses his face, and he’s like, ‘I like that!’

“And then we got to the front of the Museum of Modern Art, and we see the blue lights flashing…. The police officer that pulled us over was like, ‘Some woman that may be here complained that there were women riding around without shirts on—“there’s kids down there!” We don’t care. In fact, we didn’t even notice the women; it was the guys with the bras on that caught our eye.’

“So, three of us had agreed that we were going to get arrested, if it came to that, but we also had flyers that we were handing out that said, “Chicago Ordinance 8-80a says the areola and below must be covered, according to Chicago city ordinance.” So we were handing out those flyers, and I remember we gave one to the cop, and he was like, ‘Great, now I don’t have to look in my code book to see what number it is.’

“So they literally put us in a paddy wagon, and as we were driving away in the paddy wagon to the Cabrini Green district, Lucky was riding along on her bike saying to passersby, ‘They’ve got women in there who were arrested for riding around top free! They’re making herstory!’

“And then we got to Cabrini Green and they processed us, and all the Cabrini Green district was like, ‘Hey, what are they here for?’ and one of the officers said, ‘You know, it’s just really nice to have a case that doesn’t involve homicides.’

“Then they fined us, and that was one fine that I actually paid, because I thought that was worth it!”

She Left the House, but Took Its Spirit with Her

By 2002, she was burnt out—a phrase that a number of Catholic Workers brought up throughout the weekend of the gathering. But she took her experience, including her bike repair skills, with her when she moved to Massachusetts. She and a friend started a bicycle trash-hauling cooperative.

“That was in 2002. Now it’s 23 years later. We’re a 30-member working cooperative picking up trash, recycling, composting, et cetera. And also the household where I live, there’s about 10 of us, and it just last year became an official housing cooperative on the land trust and all that, too.”

Sam Guardino

They Took Personal Responsibility

Sam Guardino first came to St. Francis House in 1981 and was a member of the live-in community from 1990 to 1993. “And I wasn’t burnt out when I left; I was just in love before I had burnout. Those things happen.”

Guardino emphasized the importance of “blurriness” in the Catholic Worker community: while boundaries existed, they weren’t as rigid as in conventional society. The roles of workers, guests, and visitors were fluid, with guests sometimes becoming workers and visitors becoming guests. However, there was always a core group of people willing to take responsibility when needed, which helped the house reach its 50th anniversary.

“I want to focus on one reason St. Francis House is having a 50th birthday: because people were willing to take responsibility over the years in times when things needed to be done,” Guardino said. “Sometimes that meant doing an emergency dumpster dive for food.”

Fighting Housing Inspectors and Gentrification

Another important example of an individual taking personal responsibility for doing something hard that needed to be done came when the community was facing pressure from the neighborhood, which was undergoing gentrification in the 1980s. The house was frequently visited by city housing inspectors who would cite it for violating the city building code. Fortunately, the community had a lawyer living in the house, Mark Miller, who took responsibility for going to the hearings.

“By the way…we never set a number about how many people lived in the house. It was kind of that variable, ‘N.’ Right? And then, of course, we had Donald James Delano at the front door letting anybody in. He would’ve let a SWAT team in—in a very remarkably loving way.”

One key to the house’s survival was that the founders had purchased the property outright, giving them stability in a volatile real estate market—especially once developers began eyeing the double-wide lot.

Sticking to the Mission

“St. Francis House stuck to mission,” he said. “Part of it was hospitality, where people would live with us, single adults who were unhoused. Some lived with us for a long time and became part of the fabric: Lovey, Delado, Miss Minnie, and others. Some kind of lived with us and it was just kind of that time to kind of gather their lives…that kind of rest, that respite in their life. Some lived with us and they had such serious, serious struggles in their life: often poverty, often maybe substance abuse, serious mental illness, and so on and so forth. But we kept to that mission whether we were able at the time to have two people or N people living in the house.”

Another part of the mission involved working on justice issues. The community has been involved in anti-nuclear activism, and for a while, it focused on the situation in Burma—at a time when that issue wasn’t very high profile.

“And then, finally, the mission of living simply…living off what other people leave behind. Stein and his carving and Hurley and his bike repairing, Gail Catanella carding wool while singing arias for our talent show—all those little things that people got into played a little part. And I think that, throughout all these years, that has been maintained, it’s been constant.”

Keeping Healthy Boundaries, Nonviolently

Responding to Ruthie’s story about the difficulty she had getting a guest to leave the porch at midnight, Guardino emphasized the importance of having boundaries to maintain the well-being of the community, while at the same time practicing nonviolence.

“I think it’s important that those boundaries were always there,” he said. “Sometimes it takes a lot of time to talk to someone and a lot of pain and confusion to get them out non-violently. I think that we were generally very successful at that; there were some unsuccessful moments, but you just have to understand that this is your house, this is how you’re going to act, you’re just going to talk somebody down and respectfully have them leave….

“At St. Francis House, we knew what our challenge level was, and it was hard to live with a household and people if somebody was constantly disrupting the community because of their substance abuse issues and things like that.”

Jesus Took the…Grapefruit?

Earlier, Lucky had mentioned that she probably would not have wound up at the Catholic Worker if it hadn’t been listed as a secular community in a directory she was looking at. Guardino elaborated on the tensions between the religious and the secular at the house with a story about a French priest.

At the time he was living in the community, they had Mass on Thursdays, inviting different priests who were supportive of the community to come celebrate. While the community believed in receiving communion under both species, they insisted on using grape juice rather than wine out of respect for those members of the community struggling with an addiction to alcohol.

Once, the community invited a French worker-priest named Benoit Charlemagne to say Mass. Even though he had lived in Uptown since the 1970s, his English was poor.

“Trying to explain to Benoit Charlemagne, who had very little English…and who was a Frenchman, a true-to-the-heart Frenchman, that we were going to have grape juice and not wine—it took a long time to explain it to him.

“And then during the liturgy…Benoit goes in, ‘Jesus took the bread and the grapefruit, and shared it with his friends…’ It kind of maybe sums up this secular creativity that was going on at the house.”

Denise Plunkett

The Luckiest Offer of a Lifetime

Denise Plunkett was at the house from 1978 to 1982. “I looked into the Worker when Chris Perry left. She asked me if I would be interested, when she left, moving in, and about a year later, she left. So, I felt like it was the luckiest offer in my life. It was an amazing experience.”

A number of other Workers arrived shortly after she did: Lynn Rothmiller, along with Henry Nicolella and Mike Sullivan, both of whom had previous Catholic Worker experience in New York. A significant addition to the community was Joan McKinley, a nun from St. Louis, who, although living in her own apartment nearby, volunteered at the house daily from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., providing a consistent presence while others were at work. Roy Bourgeois, a Maryknoll priest, also moved into the house.

Music and Community: A House Filled with Joy

“We had very easygoing staff living there. I don’t ever remember a fight in the house or anything. I don’t remember an unpleasant moment, really. And we had visitors constantly, because it was fun.”

Fr. Bill O’Brien, a young Jesuit who had lived at the Catholic Worker, was organizing the Jesuit Volunteer Corps and housed Jesuit volunteers in two six-flat buildings a block away.

“So some of them would come over every night. Kristen and Sarah would come and play guitar and get everybody singing, so the people in the house knew all these young folks in the neighborhood. Everybody loved everybody and counted on everybody.”

Seven: A Long-Term Guest Finds a Home

One of the long-term guests who arrived during her time at the house was Seven.

“I was going out to work at 7 a.m., and here is a woman curled up on the open front porch, covered with snow. And I was like, ‘Oh my gosh. Nobody knocked on the door or anything.’ So I went over and shook her and said, ‘Come on in, you can have breakfast, you can lie down on the couch, you can take a nap, whatever, but come on out of the cold.’ She wouldn’t come in. So I had to go to work.

“The next day, the same thing happened. And another person from the Worker was leaving when I was. There was this person again. To make a long story short, she came in, and she was there for decades.”

Just a few days after Seven arrived, during a discussion about dinner preparations, Seven volunteered to cook.

“So Seven started cooking, and cooked every night, as long as I was there. She probably cooked until she left, and she never complained. And here was somebody that would have been so rejected by society….

“So she went from being homeless to being absolutely appreciated every day. All the people eating at the Worker would tell her how grateful we were, how good everything was….

“So she was a really important person, and she realized that. And I’m sure it’s what kept her going all those years, cooking for all those people.”

‘Everyone Was Helping Out’

According to Plunkett, the house typically accommodated around 20 residents, swelling to about 25 during winter months. The layout included two adjoining living rooms with approximately three couches between them, which were constantly occupied by sleeping residents during cold weather. The house had four bedrooms upstairs, and while the attic was somewhat cold, it was also used for sleeping space.

Once, she traveled to Iowa to visit her mother; when she came back, her bed had been given to someone who needed it. “That’s kind of how it worked. And I think that’s what made such a good feeling in the house. There was no cut-and-dry distinction between who’s kind of managing the house and who needed a bed, because everybody was helping out.”