Blessed Martin House

Blessed Martin House was started in answer to a need, the need of people for love and understanding and material assistance given in such a way that it does no violence to their dignity as children of God, called, as it were, to share the life of God, to be co-heirs with Christ, as St. Paul says. The house actually opened in 1951, but long before that it existed as an idea in my own mind, formed according to the pattern of St. Joseph's House of Hospitality of the Catholic Worker, in New York City, where I had worked as a volunteer. St. Joseph's House had been started by Dorothy Day, a convert to Catholicism from Communism, and Peter Maurin, a Frenchman, having as its general aim to "realize in the individual and in society the expressed and implied teachings of Christ, beginning with an analysis of our present society, to determine whether we already have an order that meets with the requirements of justice and charity of Christ."

I first came into contact with the Catholic Worker movement in 1947, through my friend Father Meenan, who had been my instructor when I became a convert to the Catholic faith. I was eighteen, and a nursing student at the Harlem Hospital School of Nursing. I was not then much impressed by what I saw at the Catholic Worker, mostly because of the poverty of it and its disorder. I did not like poverty in any sense. I had grown up in it, hating it and wanting to escape from it into renown and success. My father was a teacher in a little Southern college, and his salary had always been small; often my mother had had to work in order that we might have a barely comfortable living, or something just short of this. But here were a group of people, many little older than myself, who took the counsel "Blessed are the poor" seriously and were voluntarily living a life of poverty with the poorest in the slums of New York off the Bowery. They ate and worked and prayed and shared their house with people I always thought of as just "bums." And they seemed to be happy doing it, though all were obviously capable of doing something "better."

I did not like their ideas about poverty. But I did like what they said about race, about us all being one in Christ. Since I am a Negro myself it grieves me unutterably to see so many of my own people buried in the sordidness, the drabness and the ugliness of city slums and small-town ghettoes as the result of intolerance and hate— discrimination and segregation— and I long to have a share in the resurrection which must come, and find it easy to love and respect those others I meet, of whatever race or creed, who share the same desire.

So I worked as a volunteer at the Catholic Worker for about a year, and gradually, as I worked, I began to change my ideas on a lot of things— things like poverty and "bums." I began to see what Peter Maurin meant when he called the poor "ambassadors of God." A retreat with a small group and Father Meenan's brother completed the metamorphosis, and instead of being scandalized by the Worker, I now felt myself more and more drawn to become a part of it.

I could see that good was being done. The poor were being fed and clothed and sheltered through the personal sacrifices of the members of the staff. Race seemed to matter not at all, and ordinary people like myself were living and working together in order to grow in grace and in love of God in each other, and in love of the Church, her liturgy and sacraments.