Goodbye, Holy Family CW; Hello, Rechabite CW

Hours after their wedding on August 15, 2020, Sean and Monica Domencic moved into a house in the Cabbage Hill neighborhood of Lancaster with itinerant Catholic Worker Elliot Martin, officially launching the Holy Family Catholic Worker.

Now, a little more than a year after Holy Family CW agreed to dissolve, the Domencics are starting something new in one of the two houses that Holy Family once occupied. They’re not starting a new community with other people (at least not yet); instead, they are committing their family to living in the tradition of the Catholic Worker. In doing so, they join many other Catholic Workers centered on a single family.

“We are just a Catholic Worker family seeking to live out the rule of life God has called us to,” Sean Domencic told Roundtable. “We do certainly hope to be part of a bigger community based on that calling at some point. But we are not actively recruiting for some particular community vision, just open to visitors, friends, and collaborators, and leaving whatever comes next in God’s hands.”

Their Catholic Worker family is now listed in the community directory as the Rechabite Catholic Worker. The listing for Holy Family Catholic Worker has also been removed.

A variety of factors contributed to the decision to dissolve Holy Family CW in October 2022, including the community’s eviction from one of the two houses they had occupied, forcing guests and community members to squeeze into the remaining house.

Initially, the community planned to raise money to buy a new house but changing life circumstances for some of the members led to the decision to dissolve.

“It wasn’t a bad breakup,” Domencic said, holding his month-old second child as he spoke on the phone. “It was a blessing that everyone was able to have consensus around it.”

Since the community dissolved, all five members have continued to live in the same neighborhood and participate in some of the same activities as they had before: communal evening vespers; ministry to unhoused people and advocacy on their behalf at the city via the “Right to Rest” campaign, roundtable discussions, urban gardening, ecumenical dialogue with local Anabaptists, and “ecological Embertides.” They also continue to connect with other intentional communities in the neighborhood, such as Poplar Place, the Shalom Project, and the Catholic Worker House of Lancaster.

The Domencics have nurtured connections with the Bruderhoff through events sponsored by Plough Quarterly. They have also connected with other Catholic Workers at the annual conference of New Polity in Steubenville, Ohio; Sean regularly writes for the magazine.

The name of the Rechabite Catholic Worker has its roots in the year the Domencics spent prayerfully discerning after Holy Family CW closed. They felt especially moved by Jeremiah 35, in which God commands the prophet to invite the nomadic Rechabites into the temple for a little wine. The Rechabites refuse to drink, citing the command of their father that they shouldn’t drink wine, plant fields, or build houses. In a prophetic oracle, Jeremiah contrasts their obedience to their father with the Judeans’ disobedience of God’s commands.

“it was a passage that really spoke to us and gave us some guidance in terms of framing what we were trying to do,” Domencic said, pointing to the Rechabites as an example of lay monasticism in the Old Testament. “There are some Anabaptist writers who have taken (the Rechabites) as a contradiction to empire, living more simply and not being engaged with the land and complicit with the sins of the empire.”

You can read more about what the Domencics have been doing in a brief update Sean Domencic wrote for the Shalom Project.