Simone Weil Catholic Worker Seeks Intentional Community Member
The Simone Weil Catholic Worker (Portland, OR) is looking for a full-time live-in intentional community member/Catholic Worker
The Simone Weil Catholic Worker (Portland, OR) is looking for a live-in intentional community member/Catholic Worker (full time, but part-time outside work is fine)
If you’re interested, email us why and tell us about yourself! (simoneweilhouse@gmail.com).
But first, read on and take a look at our website to get a sense for who we are.
Simone Weil Catholic Worker seeks to live the microcosm of “a society where it is easier to be good” in Portland, Oregon.
We organize ourselves as an urban agronomic university, integrating work, prayer, study, and hospitality. In everything, we seek to live and support “conversion of life” to the Gospel.
Nuts and Bolts: We are two houses across the street from each other that form a community. Simone Weil House is where the work and public hosting happen, where we have backyard tiny homes, and where we (Bert and Emma, the newly married couple who started the place) live upstairs. Dorothy Day House (described at top) is a four bedroom house across the street that is still quite peaceful, despite increasing farm elements in the yard!
Hospitality: We offer supportive, residential community in our 3 backyard tiny houses for folks who were living outside; we facilitate a heavily-used free fridge/pantry/clothing closet in our front yard; and we host regular open dinners, work parties, liturgical prayer, and basically a “2nd world” in our front yard for neighbors, those in need, and any who want to share a particular, perhaps even fun, Christian life.
Prayer & Work: We are associated with the Benedictine Abbey of Mount Angel as oblates, and borrow from their rhythm of prayer and work (Ora et Labora). We pray from the Eastern liturgy of the hours that is mostly shared by Byzantine Catholics and Greek Orthodox. Our weekdays are structured by 6:30am Matins, Midday Prayer, and Vespers or Compline Prayer (varies); and we are evolving into a structure of manual work periods shared by intentional community and resident guests that includes work on food prep, gardening and chickens and soon-to-be goats, our cottage industries (paper, candles), and making resources available through our front yard Free Fridge and clothing closet.
Shared Study: In 2025, our shared study alternates between reading Peter Maurin’s favorite books, and running “experiments” in Christian life, which we share with a virtual community that meets weekly. We also host monthly in-person “clarification of thought” gatherings that usually include reading aloud and discussing.
Home Economy: We live and invite others into a complex home economy that centers on making, growing/raising, and bulk-buying food for ourselves, and the free pantry and refrigerator we host in our front yard. We’ve also experimented with food sharing with our extended community through our CSA-inspired Community Supported Pantry, which we hope to revive in some form.
Communion Economy: Our community is a center for economic practices and learning that express what we believe about the Body of Christ. We facilitate “communion economy” practices, starting with a mutual-aid credit union community that can offer 0% interest loans guaranteed within the community in order to prevent and redeem interest-bearing debt. In addition to adopting this practice ourselves, we support other communities, especially parishes, to do the same. So far, other topics we’ve explored through the lens of communion economy are food growing and buying, medical debt/insurance, technology, and reconciliation/mediation.
Right now our intentional community is Bert (since 2019), Emma (since 2020), Madeleine (2024, but departing for grad school in mid-May), and Helia (2025).
Newspaper: We currently publish a periodic newsletter that we plan to transition to a full newspaper!
In living these practices, we seek to live the the beginnings of a small but encompassing way of life, “rooted and grounded in love,” adequate to explore “the breadth, and height, and length, and depth” of life in Christ (Eph 3:17-18)
Characteristics that might point to a fit:
- Desire to share life in community, including with folks previously living on the streets
- Interest in continuing Catholic and Eastern Christian formation (ie active interest in our shared practices and framework, but not necessarily shared belief), including liturgy of the hours and Scripture
- Interest in talking with others about faith, texts from the liberal arts, how to respond to the big problems at the scale of real communities
- Interest in “radical” Christianity in Peter Maurin’s sense – the challenge of the Gospel, his radical economic program, especially as it relates to manual work, tech, and community-scale mutual economy
- A sense of humor, ability to take in stride things that can seem absurd
- Availability to move in soonish
Links of interest to get to know us (from our website):
- Our 2024 Year in Review
- Local newspaper article and op-ed and interview in CST publication
- This short piece by our namesake, Simone Weil
- Liturgy and Communion Economy course one pager
If you’re interested in joining us, email us a little about yourself at simoneweilhouse@gmail.com.
