Detroit’s Day House CW Closes
Members of the Detroit Catholic Worker have announced the closure of Detroit’s Day House Catholic Worker as of December 2023 due to declining worker interest, community capacity, and financial resources,
Members of the Detroit Catholic Worker have announced the closure of Day House Catholic Worker as of December 2023 due to declining worker interest, community capacity, and financial resources, according to a letter by Day House community members. While the details are still up in the air, the house itself will likely be transferred to another “socially minded Detroit-based housing cooperative,” the community said, and plans are being made to celebrate the community and its history.
The community was founded in Detroit’s Corktown neighborhood in 1976 by Fr. Thomas Lumpkin and four other individuals. The diocese formally assigned Lumpkin to the Catholic Worker in 1978, making him perhaps the only priest in the world whose pastoral assignment was a Catholic Worker house rather than a parish. The assignment was meant to be temporary, but he ended up living in the house for 40 years.
“It’s a vocation you need to submit yourself to, but it’s been a grace in helping me realize how much I was given,” Lumpkin told the Roundtable newsletter’s Zak Sather. “I would like to pay back a little bit by extending love and concern to people who are homeless, but I’ll never give back the extent to what I was given.”
Under his stewardship, the 10-bedroom house at 2640 Trumbull Ave. served as a transitional home for those experiencing housing instability, especially women and children. Day House provided “general services like showers, laundry, mail, meeting space for activist organizations, and a weekly community mass and dinner,” according to the community’s listing on CatholicWorker.org. The community also founded the Manna Meal soup kitchen in a church just a few blocks away; that ministry will continue, Day House members said.
Day House also has a history of peace activism; Lumpkin says he has been arrested perhaps a dozen times for various acts of civil disobedience. He was already familiar with the county jail, having been assigned by the diocese to say Mass there every week.
A new generation of workers offered to take over leadership of the house in 2019. By that time, Lumpkin was in his early 80s.
“I thought, well, this is the Lord telling me I should get out, and so I did,” he said. Lumpkin didn’t stray far, moving only a few blocks away as he continued to be involved with Day House and the Manna Meal soup kitchen.
Unfortunately, in recent years Day House has struggled to find resident community members.
“We’re not seeing that coming and going like we did before, and there’s no one person that wants to make it their lifelong vocation,” Lumpkin told Roundtable. He attributes part of the problem to student debt: “So many young people now graduate with big debt and they need to pay off, they can’t do volunteer work. It wasn’t like that in the past.”
The number of live-in community members has dwindled to almost zero, he added.
Largely because of this dearth, 2460 Trumbull Ave. will close its doors as a Catholic Worker House. Yet Lumpkin says he doesn’t harbor any sadness. Instead, he focuses on the present, and the grace he found in his work.
Living at the house helped him to appreciate “that the incarnation goes deep into the core of reality,” Lumpkin said. “For a long time, I thought if you wanted to find God in other people, the only place you would look was in people who were loving, because God is love. I never dreamed I would find him in mentally and emotionally ill people that no one wanted to live with.
“Living in that fact…broadened my spirituality. I really found grace in that.”
Even as the house itself winds down, Detroit’s Catholic Worker community will continue to provide the care and comfort to the poor that they have for more than 40 years.
What follows is the letter the Day House community sent to the wider Catholic Worker community:
Dear Catholic Worker community,
We are writing to share the bittersweet news that, as of December 2023, Detroit’s Day House Catholic Worker has officially closed.
Since 1976, Day House has offered hospitality in the Catholic Worker tradition. In recent years, though, worker interest, community capacity, and financial resources have dwindled such that we have struggled to keep the house running, let alone running well. Over the last few months, the community has discerned that it is time to close our house of hospitality. We have decided to give the house itself to another socially minded Detroit-based housing cooperative. We are working with them to make that transition in the time it takes to do so well and will invite them to write their own introduction in the future.
As the house transitions in the coming months, we will be continuing to find ways to celebrate and commemorate the incredible work and community that have grown through and around Day House. For the time being, our Sunday evening mass will continue to be held in the living room of 2640 Trumbull at 5:15pm every Sunday, led by Father Tom. We are also grateful that Detroit’s Catholic Worker presence will continue on with Manna Meal Soup Kitchen, which serves meals 5 days/week from the basement of St. Peter’s Episcopal Church.
If you would like to be on our email list for updates on future events and celebrations, please email us at dayhousedetroit@gmail.com. We are so grateful for the ways that each one of your lives has intersected with this house and this tradition.
With peace,
Kateri, Cat, Coffey, and many more
You can read a 2023 feature about the Day House community in the Detroit Catholic newspaper: Inspired to serve others in a radical way, young adults reinvigorate Detroit’s ‘Day House’.
And for Fr. Lumpkin’s 2021 interview with Religion News Service, see Catholic Worker has served Detroit’s homeless from Corktown Episcopal church for 45 years.
Zak Sather contributed original reporting to this story.
