Christ Room Hospitality is about Relationships and Family, Hosts Say

Cover art by Monica Welch, Dovetail Ink.

Out of work, out of money, and with two days before he lost his apartment, Peter was desperate for help. An immigrant from India, he had recently lost his job in Charlottesville, Virginia, and didn’t know where to turn.

A devout Catholic, he went to the Church of the Incarnation for the Saturday evening Mass. After Mass, he approached Laura Brown, co-founder of Casa Alma Catholic Worker, and explained his situation.

That’s when her longtime friends, Al and Tif Reynolds, walked up.

“There was this Indian fellow standing with (Laura),” Al recalled later. “And she said, ‘Now I’d like to introduce you to Peter. In two days, Peter’s not going to have any place to live.”

The Reynolds went home and talked about it briefly before deciding to take him into their home. Heavy snow was forecast for the next two days, so Al called Peter and arranged to move him that very evening.

“I said, ‘Wow,’” Peter recalled years later for a video Casa Alma made. “I praised God, I thanked God.”

Peter stayed with the Reynolds for nearly three years. He got a new job at Chick-fil-A and saved his money before leaving to work at a different Chick-fil-A in Richmond.

After Peter, the Reynolds continued to welcome guests into their home as part of Casa Alma’s experimental Christ Room Network: single women with children, a man sleeping in his car, a young woman who later went on to become a nun. Over the past ten years, they’ve taken in nearly twenty guests—and they keep in touch with many of them.

“They know our kids and our grandkids, and the kids know them,” Al Reynolds said. “When Peter comes in to visit, he’ll generally stop in and spend some time with us. They become members of the family.”

‘Every House Should Have a Christ’s Room’

Houses of hospitality are such a defining feature of the Catholic Worker Movement—often, its most public face—that it is easy to forget that Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin, the movements’ cofounders, envisioned something more: that every Catholic parish would have its own house of hospitality, and that every Christian home with space would have a “Christ room,” a room set aside to house those in need of shelter.

“People with homes should have a room of hospitality so as to give shelter to the needy members of the parish,” Peter wrote (“Parish Houses of Hospitality”), undoubtedly using the term “parish” according to the canonical definition that encompasses all the people within a parish’s boundaries, not just the Catholics. “The remaining needy members of the parish should be given shelter in a Parish Home.”

Dorothy often appealed to readers of The Catholic Worker to make their own Christ room: “When we succeed in persuading our readers to take the homeless into their homes, having a Christ room in the house as St. Jerome said, then we will be known as Christians because of the way we love one another,” she wrote in House of Hospitality. She made a more extended appeal in a May 1947 column:

One does not necessarily have to establish, run, or live in a House of Hospitality, as Peter named the hospices we have been running around the country, in order to practice the works of mercy. The early Fathers of the Church said that every house should have a Christ’s room. But it is generally only the poorest who are hospitable. …

Every house should have a Christ’s room. The coat which hangs in your closet belongs to the poor. If your brother comes to you hungry and you say, Go be thou filled, what kind of hospitality is that? It is no use turning people away to an agency, to the city or the state or the Catholic Charities. It is you yourself who must perform the works of mercy.

Despite this repeated call, though, the idea was never widely implemented.

At least one Catholic Worker community set out to change that. In the early 2010s, Casa Alma Catholic Worker (Charlottesville, Virginia) began investigating ways to promote Christ rooms within their extended community. After several years of research and reflection, Casa Alma launched its Christ Room Network in 2016, a support system for individuals and couples willing to open their homes to those in need. By 2019, four hosts had provided Christ Rooms to five guests, offering them a safe and stable environment to heal, save funds, and prepare for the next stage of their lives.

The initiative was shelved during COVID, but the community decided to collect the fruits of its experience, research, and reflection into a 28-page guide that other communities could use to launch their own Christ room networks. That guide is now available on CatholicWorker.org.

What would it be like if even a fraction of Christian households adopted the practice of opening up a room to someone in need? Generally, people object to the idea on practical grounds. And it’s true that there are risks and sacrifices involved, which is why Peter Maurin always used to emphasize that such doing the works of mercy must come at a personal sacrifice.

And yet, some people have taken the leap and found the experience to be deeply enriching and rewarding, if not always without its stresses and problems. Their stories provide a glimpse of what it might look like to realize Peter and Dorothy’s original vision in which hospitality was a habit of every Christian community.

‘We’re All in This Together’

Charles Carney and his wife, Donna Constantino, opened a Christ room in their new home after spending an intense 10 months in 2004 providing daily meal hospitality to dozens of people at Holy Family Catholic Worker in Kansas City, Missouri (now closed), with Brother Louis Rodeman.

“It was tough duty,” Carney recalled, even though it was transformative for him. A professional social worker, he had come to Holy Family Catholic Worker with lots of stereotypes about the people he would be serving. At some point, he realized that, other than his access to greater social capital, he was no different than the people he was serving.

“All my stereotypes went out the window,” he said. “It was a pretty life changing, I might even say holy, kind of experience.”

Still, after 10 months, the couple were burnt out. They decided to buy their own home, but they wanted to continue doing hospitality, if on a much smaller scale.

Every day that winter, several unhoused men were sleeping on the porch at Holy Family House; the couple passed them whenever they entered or left the house.

“We would see them sleeping on the cardboard, trying to stay warm,” Carney recalled. “It was wintertime, and it bothered our consciences.”

Constantino insisted that they purchase a home with room to do hospitality. After closing on their home, they invited two of the men on the porch, Bob and Ricky, to move in with them. The two men moved into the house the same day as Carney and Constantino did.

That was the beginning of 18 years of Christ room hospitality in their home, which they called the St. Lawrence Catholic Worker.

“We had two bedrooms, and one bedroom was for Donna and (me), and the other was a good space for another person,” Carney explained. “But we also had an unfinished basement and a utility room that wasn’t even insulated. One of our guests, Bob, he loved that place because it was a step up from the front porch. It was warmer, and he could take his extension cords and plug them into the power and have TV, and he could plug in heaters.”

There was a soup kitchen two blocks down the street, as well as other resources for low-income people in the neighborhood.

“Sometimes we ate together, but we never said, ‘We’re gonna provide food for you’ or anything because these guys were pretty resourceful,” Carney said. “They were getting food when they were on the streets. They knew what to do and how to do it.

“We wanted to help them continue to have as much autonomy as possible but have some sense of community around that.”

Each new guest remade that ad-hoc community, he said, a community in which everyone had something to contribute to the others. In fact, one guest was a skilled handyman who fixed the house’s plumbing, saving the couple perhaps $10,000 in repairs.

“It was this great joint venture: like, we’re all in this together, using our talents to cope with life and get by and be the best people we can be,” Carney said.

The Reynolds started doing Christ room hospitality to strangers through their association with Casa Alma Catholic Worker in Charlottesville. But long before that, they were already Informally hosting friends and relatives who needed a place to stay for a while: Al’s brother, then both of their mothers (at different times), then the son of a cousin, then Tiff’s boss, a Franciscan nun who was having back surgery and stayed with them for the three months of her recovery.

Later, the pastor at the Church of the Incarnation connected them with a young adult who was volunteering her time with the church’s youth; she stayed for more than a year.

In the meantime, Al had gotten to know the founders of Casa Alma, Laura and Steve Brown, through his post-retirement work as an assistant to the parish’s director of religious education. Laura had joined the parish staff as the minister of justice and peace, and Steve later joined as a maintenance worker.

When the Browns decided to start Casa Alma, the Reynolds pitched in to help.

“I guess I worked down there (at Casa Alma) for 11 or 12 years,” Al said. “You know, construction, painting, that kind of stuff. That kind of cemented our relationship, and when Laura decided she was going to do this Christ room thing, Tiff and I talked it over and decided we were interested.”

Reviving the Spiritual Practice of Hospitality

Casa Alma was in the midst of a leadership transition at the time of this writing, so no one from the community was available to be interviewed directly. However, a representative the community did provide A copy of the booklet that they developed, Christ Rooms: A Model for Hospitality as a Communal, Spiritual Practice. (The booklet is available for download from the CatholicWorker.org Christ Room page.)

The Casa Alma community members began developing the Christ Room Network program shortly after it opened its first houses of hospitality in 2010, according to the community’s Christ Rooms booklet.

“We began to think about how to expand our efforts and welcome more people in need without losing our character as a small community of volunteers living as Catholic Workers,” the community wrote. “We knew people within our own faith community (and others) who had spare bedrooms in their homes and an inclination to share them. We were friends with empty-nesters whose guest rooms were occupied by family on occasional visits. We knew couples and singles who had a garage apartment or in-law suite. But we didn’t know how those with available rooms could have sufficient support to safely welcome a stranger in need into their extra space.”

The community spent several years researching and discussing how best to provide a way to support Individuals who wanted to do Christ room hospitality.

Besides interviewing other Catholic worker communities, Casa Alma members also relied heavily on the classic book, Making Room: Recovering Hospitality as a Christian Tradition by Christine Pohl. The book provided a valuable historical, theological, and spiritual framework for doing Christ room hospitality.

For Christians, Pohl writes, hospitality can be a form of spiritual practice: “The practice of hospitality forces abstract commitments to loving the neighbor, stranger, and enemy into practical and personal expressions of respect and care for actual neighbors, strangers, and enemies…. Claims of loving all humankind, of welcoming ‘the other’ have to be accompanied by the hard work of actually welcoming a human being into a real place.”

This spiritual grounding helped to shape some of the practical aspects of The Christ Room Network. For example, the community encouraged potential hosts to examine their own motivations for providing hospitality. They developed a list of qualities that might characterize the ideal Christ room host:

• Time in their lives and space in their homes to welcome someone in need.
• An active spiritual life and prayer practices to sustain and nourish them.
• The ability to identify their motivations for hosting.
• The ability to identify areas of hosting which might be challenging to them.
• A willingness to enter into relationships of support and accountability.
• The ability to resist fixing, changing, or giving unwanted advice to guests.

The community decided not to screen most hosts and guests with criminal background checks, relying instead on pre-existing relationships with hosts and “robust referrals” from social workers, case workers, and pastoral workers for guests.

Another key decision was to not host guests who were struggling with active and untreated addictions or mental health issues out of concern that most hosts “would not have the capacity or expertise to provide stable housing and support in these cases.”

The program also sought to provide lots of structured support: support households provided practical hosting help to host households, and guests were encouraged to select a third-party advocate to ensure their needs were being met. Hosts and guests were encouraged to develop a covenant outlining expectations.

But above all, the community presented Christ room hospitality as a spiritual practice. Sarah Malpass, at the time a Casa Alma board member who also did Christ room hospitality, emphasized that point in a 10-minute video the community created for potential Christ room hosts.

“For folks who are considering opening up their home…I think it’s really important to consider your posture and where you’re coming from,” she said. Christ room hospitality “is not about charity, it’s about intentional community, and so I think it’s important to remember that you’re not just opening up a room, but you’re opening up space in your life.”

The DIY Christ Room

Most people who do Christ room hospitality don’t have anything like the robust support system Casa Alma developed. Some just jump right in.

One veteran Catholic Worker started doing Christ room hospitality from her two-bedroom apartment in the wake of 2005’s Hurricane Katrina. She related her experience in an email to the Roundtable newsletter:

For the past twenty years, I have lived in a two-bedroom apartment in the suburb of a major city. On several occasions, I have used my second bedroom as a Christ room, but I am supposed to get permission from the board of directors of my building before doing so. 

My first experience was after Hurricane Katrina. The archdiocese requested rooms and I put my name on the list. Almost immediately I got a call, so I dutifully asked my board of directors. Surprisingly, they said “No.”  I found another place for that couple to stay, and after that, I started sneaking people in.

I took in a Spanish-speaking woman who was going to college and used her financial aid to pay a rental on a storage unit for her furniture and other belongings. Then I housed a wonderful woman from Colombia and her growing son. She had huge physical problems, and I became sort of a surrogate mother to her, often taking her to doctors or hospitals. She finally was able to get her own apartment and we still keep in touch.  I would also briefly house friends who were visiting or working nearby. 

But then I got “caught” by the board somehow, and now they really check up on me a lot so other than housing my daughter for a few months, I seem unable to use my Christ room.

(The author asked to remain anonymous to avoid further antagonizing her building’s board of directors.)

Although Tiff and Al Reynolds worked with the Christ Room Network for a short while, they continued doing Christ room hospitality even after the program was shuttered during COVID. (The community hasn’t revived the program in part because it recently purchased a 10-unit apartment building as part of its hospitality program.)

They welcomed one woman who was referred to them by Casa Alma, and that woman stayed with them for more than a year. Shortly after welcoming that woman, they took in a mother with two young children, too. The other guests they have welcomed in the past few years were all referred to them by others.

“You get a reputation” in the wider community, Al Reynolds said, which leads to more referrals.

That was the case with Irene Amphonsa and her son, Kwame, who came to the United States from Cape Coast, Ghana, to seek specialized treatment for his cerebral palsy.

“We met her through our neighbor who was Kwame’s physical therapist,” Al Reynolds said. “She was living in a room in a house rented by another Ghanaian family and was not being treated very well.”

Amphonsa and her son lived with the Reynolds for four months during the year they were in Charlottesville.

Amphonsa, who is a lecturer at the University of Cape Coast, had a good sense of humor, Al said. “She’s funny—we’ll tease each other. And of course, we had our share of African food. I went over and bought some goat with her at the local African store. She made a goat stew.”

Later, the couple visited Amphonsa in Ghana, and she has returned to visit them, too. “For the most part, everybody we’ve gotten has just become another member of our family,” Al said.

The man currently living in their house connected with them through one of their relatives who had gotten to know him through his work in a soup kitchen. The man had been working and living in an apartment, but then he fell and messed up his shoulder, Tiff said.

“So, he couldn’t work, so he lost his job, and then there you go, he lost his apartment,” Tiff explained. He stayed at the Salvation Army for a while, but his time was running out when he approached Tiff’s relative at the soup kitchen. “He couldn’t even sleep in his car because he doesn’t drive, and he doesn’t have a car.  So anyway, he was going to be out on the streets.”

The couple don’t create a covenant with their guests, as Casa Alma suggests, although their understanding is that the hospitality—even if it lasts more than a year or two—is temporary. After one of their first guests, Peter, had been living with them for more than two years and had accumulated a sizable savings, they encouraged him to strike out on his own.

Other than that, they don’t really have a lot of rules.

“We basically tell people when they move in, you’re now a member of our family,” Al said. Guests have the run of the house; they are given a house key, an account on the family computer, and if they have a driver’s license, they can borrow a car. They are also invited to help out with maintenance and chores, and many take the Reynolds up on that offer.

Peter really became integrated into the family. After he expressed a desire to improve his English, their granddaughter opened a school for him.

“She was nine years old when I first met her,” Peter said for the Casa Alma Christ room video. “She took me so serious, she almost opened a classroom in the basement for me, with a board, with books, and she would give me homework. If I do something wrong or if I do not do my homework, she’ll make me sign the paper with my mom, which is Tiff.”

Carney and Constantino often received guests through referrals from the other Catholic Worker communities in Kansas City, although sometimes they also just invited people off the street.

“I can remember going out underneath bridges and locating somebody and saying, ‘Come on, let’s go get out from under that bridge,” Carney recalled. “Take up your mat and walk, so to speak.”

Carney met another guest, a talkative man who had schizophrenia, at his AA meeting. (Carney is himself recovering.) After running into him again at the public library, Carney struck up a conversation.

“And I just said to him, ‘What do you do all night? It’s wintertime.’ He said, ‘Oh, I just walk, I just walk and stay warm.’ And I said, well, we have some space. You wanna come home?’”

‘You Can Only Do So Much’

It wasn’t all smooth sailing, though. The couple ­­­­­housed many people with mental illness, Constantino said. Carney’s background as a social worker and Constatino’s background as a trauma-focused clinical therapist helped greatly, she said.

Still, “it really was a challenge, because you had to not only deal with their homelessness and their personality, but also their mental illness.”

One of the toughest times, Constantino said, was when they hosted two women, Rachel and her mother, Ginger. Rachel had multiple illnesses, including PTSD, a traumatic brain injury, and fibromyalgia. Rachel’s mother also had mental health issues and needed surgery for a rectal condition. The two had been living on Rachel’s disability, but after she was hospitalized while under the influence of drugs, she lost her benefits.

By the time Constatino and Carney met the pair, they were living on the street.

“And so, we had them live with us until we helped them find an apartment,” Constantino said. “But they were very demanding emotionally, mentally. And so, it was really exhausting to have them live with us, but there was no other option at that point.”

Fifteen years later, Rachel and her mother are dealing with many of the same problems and are once again homeless.

“You know, you can only do so much. And, you know, you’ve run out of emotion and empathy to be that present,” she said.

Another guest—Bob, one of the first two people the couple welcomed—turned out to have escaped from prison, a fact that Carney and Constantino learned during his stay with them.

“Now, granted, it was a very minimum-security prison,” Carney clarified. “We had to decide, ‘What do we do?’ And we decided: nothing. He eventually went back to Iowa and turned himself in on his own.

“And after he got out, he showed up at our door again. And we said, okay, come on in…. It was kind of an honor to think that he felt that this was home to him.”

Another guest struggled with alcoholism. One of the few rules Carney and Constatino set for their guests was that they couldn’t use alcohol or drugs in the house. The guest went on “some major benders” and fouled his room with excrement.

“And that night I said to him, ‘Frank, you can still stay here, but we need to get with your AA sponsor, right now. And we need to figure out a plan on how you’re gonna get sober. Otherwise, I’ll take you anywhere you want to go,’” Carney recalled. “It was summertime. And he said, ‘Take me to the railroad tracks behind Royal Liquors. There’s a homeless camp over there.’ And at that point, his addiction was stronger than whatever else was going on in his life.”

So, that’s what Carney did. Earlier, though, they had helped the man apply for public housing.

“And on December 22nd, three days before Christmas, I learned that he was able to get his own place and off the streets,” Carney said. “I mean, what a Christmas present.”

How did Constantino and Carney get through the toughest, most exhausting times?

“It was really our prayer life, our spiritual life that held us for all those years,” Constantino said. “Because if we didn’t have a spirituality, you know, praying and meditation, we wouldn’t have been able to do it. Our spirituality was primary in not burning out.”

“And being in community with other Catholic Workers,” Carney added, citing the support they received from other Catholic Worker communities in the area.

Keeping things small helped, too, he said. As much as he appreciates the work of larger Catholic Worker communities such as Holy Family Catholic Worker, he prefers the one-on-one relationships that characterize Christ room hospitality. That “gentle personalism” opened space for friendship and camaraderie, and a deeper, richer relationship with guests.

“It was much less stressful” than the setting of Holy Family House, he said, “not that it wasn’t stressful at times. It was probably more fun. And it was kind of in line with the original idea of what Dorothy wanted to see.”

A Gift—in Both Directions

Christ room hospitality isn’t for everyone, the Reynolds said. On the other hand, they feel that more people could open their homes to welcome the stranger in need.

“People say, ‘Oh, you let strangers in your house—don’t you worry they’re going to steal something or injure you?” Al said. “If they’re going to steal, they’re going to steal. But it’s just stuff. And I wasn’t particularly worried about them injuring one or the other of us.

“Most people will look at you like, ‘Well, I could never do that. And you know, I don’t know what to say to them.”

Not surprisingly, Carney agrees.

“I think I figured out that, like, if one out of every three hundred households would just take in one person going through homelessness, our problem would be solved,” he said. “Dorothy Day wanted people to get more individual attention from family to family. And she wanted tens of thousands of these Christ rooms around the country. And that’s where I always get excited: this is a very doable thing, and it’s not as daunting as people might think.”

You definitely want to “take it to the Lord” before making the decision to do a Christ room, Tiff Reynolds said—and keep praying once you’re doing it.

“But if there’s no reason for you not to, then I would say your home is a gift, and if you’re able to share it, you will be gifted in turn. You’ll meet some people you wouldn’t otherwise have run into. You’ll get to know them in more than just a superficial way.

“The Bible says, you give something, you get something back. The more you give, the more you get back. And I think both of us can attest to that, with this idea of sharing our house. Our family just keeps getting bigger and bigger.”

Read more about Christ rooms:
Christ Rooms
The Christ Room Network
‘Do You Want to Come Home?’ 18 Years Running a Kansas City Christ Room