Eileen Fagan's and Janice Thompson's thoughtful and provocative call for papers in the Mysticism and Politics section of the 2021 College Theology Society (CTS) Annual Meeting prompted me to think anew about the complex legacy of the Friendship House (FH) movement in the United States. Fagan and Thompson invited papers that would help CTS members reflect on how we might “approach our world with a ‘mysticism of open eyes’ and an ‘attitude of encounter’” and to “think of and act on behalf of a future that shows Christianity embracing human dignity and common good for all God's people.” A look to the past can help us work more effectively in the present for that kind of future. The history of Friendship House, a mid-twentieth-century Catholic interracial movement, combined spirituality and action for justice in ways that merit a closer look. More specifically, the archival and published material from the Friendship House movement in the 1940s illustrates the legacy of one Catholic action initiative centered on racial justice that combined spirituality and political action for the common good. This history can help contemporaries track ways that Catholics have been involved in such movements and might be engaged in similar efforts today.
Like any person or movement subject to the vicissitudes of history, the Friendship House legacy is characterized by successes and failures. The latter can appear glaring when viewed in hindsight and judged by contemporary standards and mores without reference to their historical context. The context in which they worked is disturbingly familiar with respect to race, poverty, and war, even accounting for all that has changed in the United States and the Catholic Church in the nearly eighty-five years since Friendship House was founded in Harlem, New York City, in 1938. Likewise, errors they committed then are still in practice in some quarters today. A literal appropriation of their understanding and application of resources in Catholic spirituality and Catholic social thought and practice from the preconciliar period is not appropriate for today; nevertheless, the way that they received, translated, and applied the tradition to their context can inform actors in the contemporary period who are already immersed in this work, as well as instruct those who seek to go and do likewise.
The reference to Johann Baptist Metz's “mysticism of open eyes” in the call for papers provides a helpful framework for retrieving a central aspect of the significance of the Friendship House movement. As he wrote in A Passion for God: The Mystical-Political Dimension of Christianity:
In the end Jesus did not teach an ascending mysticism of closed eyes, but rather a God-mysticism with an increased readiness for perceiving, a mysticism of open eyes, which sees more and not less. It is a mysticism that especially makes visible all invisible and inconvenient suffering, and—convenient or not—pays attention to it and takes responsibility for it, for the sake of a God who is a friend to human beings.Footnote 100
This seeing can happen in big ways, through an intense in-breaking of God that disrupts the normal round of life, and also in small ways, God revealing God's self in the quotidian, that sometimes requires careful discernment even to notice in retrospect.
Through spiritual discipline and direct political action, the White Catholics in the Friendship House community sought to expand their own vision and to expand the vision of their White counterparts in the United States, generally, and the Catholic community, specifically, so that they might recognize the reality of racism around them and the ways that they contributed to it. They sought to make visible the reality of racism in the United States and to take responsibility for it.
Rather than attempt to cover the entire scope of the movement in this short article, what follows is an attempt to highlight specific dimensions of Friendship House as an interracial lay Catholic movement committed to facilitating the moral conversion of White Catholics in the United States and the transformation of unjust social structures in collaboration with all people of goodwill. The focus here falls on select internal documents through which members of the Friendship House movement sought to clarify the meaning and purpose of their apostolate. This historical material highlights an important legacy of the last century that illustrates how Catholics have been involved in this work across time and affirms the ways that others are or might be involved in the work now.
Founding a Movement to Awaken White Roman Catholics to Their Obligations
Catherine de Hueck (1896–1985) founded Friendship House as a distinctively lay apostolate. She was inspired to do so through a series of self-described mystical experiences that led to her “Little Mandate.” The mandate read, in part:
Arise—go! Sell all you possess. Give it directly, personally to the poor. Take up My cross (their cross) and follow Me, going to the poor, being poor, being one with them, one with Me. Little—be always little! Be simple, poor, childlike. Preach the Gospel with your life—without compromise! Listen to the Spirit. He will lead you.Footnote 101
In response to this invitation, she opened the first Friendship House in Toronto and then expanded to other cities in Ontario. After encountering opposition in Canada, she moved to Harlem, New York City, and joined racial justice efforts already underway there.Footnote 102
De Hueck and Friendship House made an impact on many young people who visited or who stayed to contribute to the mission of the movement. Thomas Merton is one of the most famous Friendship House volunteers, though he distinguished himself after his time there. He was so impacted by his experience at Friendship House that he seriously considered whether it was his vocation. Even after he responded to the call to Gethsemane, Merton and de Hueck remained in contact with each other. In one exchange, de Hueck summarized her vision for the lay apostolate. It existed, she wrote, “primarily to awaken people—Roman Catholics at that—to their obligations, by assuming, in a spectacular manner, the corporal and spiritual works of mercy; and using all the means of propaganda [news] papers, lecture platforms, writing, and above all, living to bring forth these forgotten fundamental truths.”Footnote 103 Scripture, the sacramental life of the church, and the Catholic theological tradition contain the truths to which de Hueck referred. As she explained:
Again: first to LOVE GOD AND KNOW HIM. Out of this follows much prayer, thought, meditation and then action. Don't you see how that works? If you behold the fullness of GOD'S TRUTH thru the Blessed Sacrament, then all your work gets into the right proportion, and instead of being a simple intellectual with knowledge in width, you now become a Christian intellectual with knowledge in DEPTH. Out of this comes the right results in the line of politics, and so on.Footnote 104
She urged him, as she urged everyone, to strive to become a saint.
De Hueck was preaching what she practiced. In undertaking the Friendship House apostolate, she was motivated by her own experience of war having been nearly starved to death by Bolshevik revolutionaries in Russia. “The sight [of blood] is ever before my eyes, and driving me like one possessed, to keep the eyes of others clear from tears, to keep the arms of other mothers cradled about their babies, to keep other human beings in the midst of plenty in the City of New York away from starvation.”Footnote 105 She exhorted Merton, as she would countless others, to see and to act for justice:
Look at the Negro and Harlem. That is the field that is being laboriously tilled by us and made fertile for the revolution to come. And when it will come, we will sit academically and discuss the horrors of it, our allegiance with this and that branch of it, utterly unaware of the simple fact that WE were the instigators of it as much by the things we DID NOT DO as by those we did badly.Footnote 106
In other words, she recognized her own and White Americans’ complicity in creating and supporting the conditions that led to extreme suffering. They were, she was saying, tilling the field of suffering through sins of omission that were just as serious as sins of commission.
She saw Christ in the people suffering around her in Harlem. She recognized in that suffering the suffering of God. The mystical Body of Christ was being “crucified everywhere,” she declared, while “‘America First’” proponents and their opponents argued over this and that. Catholics fell into the same trap, she conceded, arguing among themselves rather than acting.Footnote 107 De Hueck and her collaborators chose to do something, and Friendship House was the means through which they acted, though they conceded that they were not perfect and failed at times.
Living a Christian Experiment in “Democratic Race Relations”
Catherine de Hueck opened Friendship House in Harlem in 1938. There, she was joined by Ellen Tarry (1906–2008), an African American Catholic, and Ann Harrigan (1910–1984), an Irish American Catholic. Together, these three women later opened Friendship House in Chicago upon the invitation of Bishop Bernard J. Sheil (1888–1969).Footnote 108 Tarry and Harrigan made tremendous sacrifice in undertaking this venture with de Hueck. Tarry, a journalist and author of children's books, gave up her writer's life, a position at the Amsterdam News, and the vibrant social and intellectual life of the Harlem Renaissance in which she participated. Harrigan resigned from a full-time position at Grover Cleveland High School in Queens and left behind her close-knit family in Brooklyn.
At both the Harlem and Chicago Friendship House branches, staff workers lived in and among the community where they worked, regardless of race. The Harlem and Chicago houses were in Black communities. They lived simply. They ate their meals together. They shared what they had with one another in community. They made promises but not vows to participate in the Friendship House community and were free to go at any time. Although they collaborated with priests and vowed religious, membership in Friendship House was restricted to laypeople who were not bound by vows within a religious community.Footnote 109
They recognized that they were at the forefront of a movement that was so old it looked new again. In 1946, Catherine de Hueck described their pathbreaking status in the following way:
By trial and error we function, because we are pioneers. In order to find out how lay groups function we must go back to the way of life in the early centuries of the Church, and the medieval life, and the third orders. All that is lost now, and so we are pioneers. You know where you are going, but you don't always know how. In founding an order there is lots of help, but in the lay apostolate there is nothing. Our way of life is new and strange, but it is growing.Footnote 110
They understood the movement as a distinctive vocation within the Catholic Church.
Not only did they see their work as pathbreaking within the Catholic Church, but they also saw the interracial dimension of their apostolate as an expression of an important dimension of the American experiment in democracy that was rarely enacted. Ann Harrigan wrote:
In order to carry this out we have planned our life in the service of others as a vocation, not as a profession … such as living right in the place where you work and adopting a very modest way of living, in that there are few if any luxuries … we pioneered the work of interracial relations on a more complete scale than has ever been done before. Our staff is interracial, our volunteers likewise, and all our adult activities were thrown open to the general public with the object of starting a tradition of harmonious relations between the races.Footnote 111
Expressed another way, although it may not have been a singular example, they believed that their work was groundbreaking, an “experiment in truly democratic race relations.”Footnote 112
To that end, Friendship House was a place where Black people and White people could “meet, talk, discuss, study, and carry on the business of living and working in harmony, to be a sort of laboratory of race relations.”Footnote 113 Education was an important dimension of their mission. They built a lending library and coordinated lectures and discussions focused on Black history, literature, and culture. They hosted a labor school. They facilitated dialogue across difference through open forums on relevant topics of the day that were open to the public. They also ran a children's center with a Mother's Club to support women in the community. Related to the same initiative, they hosted summer programs for the children in the community.
Pursuing the Intellectual and Moral Conversion of White Christians
Their movement was distinctively spiritual. Although they acknowledged that their work resembled social work, they rejected a singular focus on the material dimension of their ministry:
And always we are inspired by charity, not in its narrow sense of almsgiving, but also in the breadth and depth of all the richness of the fulness of Christ, our Model in charity as in all things. We believe in the primacy of the spiritual and that since man has a soul as well as a body, and that the soul will last forever, any social work that is intelligent must work on the two levels simultaneously, spiritual and temporal.Footnote 114
They structured their lives around liturgy and prayer in order to be receptive to God's presence in their everyday lives and to sustain their work. The spiritual life was the first on the list of “Rules of the House.” Here it read, “The spiritual dominates and underlies all other activity. Emphasize BEING first and DOING second, and not vice versa.” As laypeople, their appearance would conform to contemporary standards of “ordinary people” while their interior life would be conformed to Christ. “Outwardly we are the same but Inwardly we must be different cultivating a strong, inner life with Christ.”Footnote 115 They would strive to conform their interior lives to Christ through daily attendance at Mass, reading Scripture, daily meditation before the Blessed Sacrament, regular spiritual direction, and group compline. They also adapted “the standard of living of about the poorest in the Community” as a way to conform their lives to Christ.Footnote 116 Taken together, they ordered their entire lives around this program with the intention of entering into solidarity with the community and thereby with Jesus and vice versa.
They understood that this focus on the spiritual and living in solidarity with the communities with which they collaborated in the pursuit of justice would conform them to Christ. White Friendship House members recognized the fundamental necessity of this program for personal transformation in order to facilitate the transformation of society. A main plank of the Friendship House movement was to convert White Catholics from the “bourgeois” mentality and its attendant racism to an apostolic way of life. Chicago Friendship House cofounder Ann Harrigan explained, “A lot of our work is not obvious. Everything we do can serve as indoctrination, as for example having an open house in the home of a volunteer in a white neighborhood. Then too, so much of our work is with white people. Because it is chiefly a white problem, a lot of preliminary work has to be done with white people.”Footnote 117 Later, in another context, Friendship House leader Mary Galloway put it this way, “Our primary emphasis is the education of whites like ourselves, who either cause or permit the circumstances of deprivation which enshroud the life of a Negro in America.”Footnote 118
In addition to defying segregation by creating integrated living and working situations during the Jim Crow era, they also supported and learned from the advocacy efforts of the African American community, especially around housing and employment. They affiliated with organizations across lines of race and religion, including the Urban League and the NAACP in order to learn best practices and to support structural change. In their own words, they did so, in part, “so that [they] would “enrich [their] own decidedly different program” by learning from “experts in their particular fields.”Footnote 119 They worked tirelessly to end restrictive covenants and they would intervene in particular cases of injustice with and, when necessary, on behalf of men from their community and the neighborhood who were unjustly accused of crimes or mistreated in the judicial system. To take one local example, the Chicago Friendship House intervened at the Juvenile Delinquency Bureau at the area police station in order to establish preventative criminal justice practices and thereby offset the heavy caseload there with its emphasis on punitive criminal justice measures. They also supplied direct material support to those who needed it.
Taking Responsibility by Building Bridges across the Color Line
They strove to build bridges between Black and White communities in large part to lead White Catholics to see the suffering they caused through sins of commission and omission and to take responsibility for them. Initially, their permanent foundations were in Black communities, and they made only forays into White communities. De Hueck's original vision included two-way bridges to facilitate interaction between Black and White communities. They established their first interracial Friendship House in a White community in rural Wisconsin. This decision was not uncontroversial within the movement itself.
In her initial 1938 introduction to Friendship House, de Hueck announced that a farming commune would be part of their apostolate. At that time, however, she and her collaborators were still establishing the foundation in Harlem. The farm would have to come later, she acknowledged, because they faced more urgent problems that precluded taking up the rural initiative. She also noted that the context made it difficult to move quickly. She explained that Friendship House in the United States “is tremendously handicapped in promoting the idea due to discrimination and prejudice rampant even in rural America.” She promised that “as soon as the more urgent aspect of its Apostolate is organized, it will concentrate on the back-to-the-land movement, even though all it will be able to achieve will perhaps be no more than plant tiny seeds.”Footnote 120
Five years later, with the material support of Bishop Sheil and largely satisfied with the organization of the New York and Chicago houses, de Hueck realized this dimension of her vision. She announced the opening of St. Joseph's Farm, Marathon City, Wisconsin, in 1945.Footnote 121 She chose the Marathon City site after an extensive survey of other properties. In 1944, she reported on her review of properties in the Green Bay area, including, for example, a site called Rockwood Lodge. This site appealed to her because of its proximity to the Norbertines’ St. Norbert Abbey in De Pere, Wisconsin, but she ultimately dismissed it because she found it “sumptuous … too expensive … and utterly un FH style.”Footnote 122 Two years later, Curly Lambeau purchased the property and renovated it into a training facility for the Green Bay Packers.
St. Joseph's Farm was within walking distance of Marathon City downtown and a Franciscan retreat center while still rural enough that residents could enjoy outdoor activities such as swimming in the Big Rib River and hiking through wooded areas. The buildings on the property were in need of significant repair before they could be used. Although close to Marathon City, some members of the Friendship House community saw the location as a significant drawback. It was too distant from larger urban centers. Wausau was closest, about fifteen miles due west. Green Bay and Madison were more than 100 miles away. Milwaukee and Minneapolis were about 200 miles distant. In other words, it was time consuming and expensive to get to this isolated location, and residents and guests who stayed there would be “roughing it,” as one staff worker later described the conditions.
According to Friendship House self-reporting in the mid-1940s, Marathon City was a town of 823 people descendant of German, Polish, and Norwegian immigrants. The Catholic parish was the largest Christian community in the town. The Lutherans were the only Protestant community with a church building. There were very few entertainment options in town, which consisted of little more than a library, a bowling alley, drinking establishments, and an occasional late-run movie projected in a civic hall. A small, insular community, the people of Marathon City were highly suspicious of the people who moved from the big city to their remote village.Footnote 123 After all, the Friendship House staff did not seem to have jobs; they lived by begging and came to the area to promote interracialism in a homogeneous White community.
At their third annual convention of Friendship House, held at the end of January 1946, de Hueck again described the Friendship House movement as a bridge with two spans. Both were conceived in 1938 but born at different times. The bridge was constructed to create an opportunity for Blacks and Whites to meet, “not under the dry auspices of some discussion, but in a human, natural fashion, both for discussions and for social activity, including the breaking of bread together.”Footnote 124 The Harlem and Chicago establishments were the first span. The farm was the second span. Margaret Nicholson and Monica Durkin, Black and White cofounders, respectively, opened the farm on August 25, 1945. “This was the first time that through the auspices of F.H. Negroes went and met the white people on the same basis as above, but in a white community.” In doing so, “a two way traffic was established.”Footnote 125
De Hueck acknowledged that the farm, with such a small interracial community, was as yet a nominal effort; she compared it thereby to the mustard seed of the gospel parable. She envisioned the Friendship House interracial apostolate spreading across the country through the summer school to be held at the farm:
In the eight years of its life and work in the Harlems of America, F.H., its white and Negro membership, its friends, as well as the priests and people all over the U.S.A. who took interest in it and worked with it, have acquired an enormous amount of very specialized knowledge. Catholic knowledge, American knowledge, knowledge that can go far to really make that bridge and that two-way traffic teem with people coming and going. And the dream of interracial justice will indeed become a reality. For this specialized knowledge must be given at least to Catholic America at large, and to any other part of America that desires to get it.Footnote 126
The instruction would include lectures, seminar style interaction between faculty and students, and round table discussions. Anticipating the summer school that would be held in 1946, Betty Schneider explained that courses would deal with “the Mystical Body of Christ as the foundation for interracial justice, take the student over the liturgy, especially the Mass, in all its social significance, and come down to such specific techniques as can be called Catholic and that will help to solve the racial tensions of America and promote interracial justice.” The instructors would be knowledgeable about the aims, goals, and techniques of Friendship House, as well as, added de Hueck, “a full understanding and knowledge of the broad supernatural foundations of its way of life.”Footnote 127
During the discussion session, attendees expressed concern about the location of this second span of the bridge. They were blunt in expressing their concern over the dilapidated condition of the property, the remote location, and the effectiveness of the endeavor overall. Some were concerned that the location missed the mark because, they argued, the second span of the bridge should be located in a White community nearer to a city center, such as Chicago or New York, where the other houses were. For example, after listening to de Hueck's introduction of the farm, one of the delegates responded, “I can't agree with you.” He said, “Those are questions that people on the outside ask us. Remember, I told you that the question of introducing Negroes into all white communities came from people on the outside. Why do you think F.H. should try to put Negroes into all white communities by taking them away from Chicago and sending them to rural districts in the process of integration? The immediate problem is in Chicago, and it is thought that that is where we should be. This should be started in your own neighborhood.”Footnote 128 This interlocutor may have been referring to de Hueck's residence near Holy Name Cathedral in Chicago, a predominantly White community distant from the Friendship House site in the Bronzeville section of the city.
De Hueck responded to this objection by reminding the attendees that the restrictive covenants in the White communities around Chicago made such activity difficult and that, in any event, she understood the farm to be an experiment where Black and White people could learn to live together in community and witness to the possibility in that area and beyond through other channels, including the summer school, their speaking engagements, and their publications.Footnote 129 Likewise Ann Harrigan acknowledged her misgivings about the project, but supported the decision to move forward with it. Perhaps she was guided by an admonition she noted in a report on the setup of Friendship House from years before: “Mistakes will be made since there are no Blue Prints. Prepare for them, take them in your stride, learn by them.”Footnote 130 They undertook their work in humility, as learners who took seriously the knowledge and wisdom advanced by other experts in the field as well as the lessons learned from their own mistakes.
The debate notwithstanding, the first summer school sessions were held during June and July 1946. Classes were conducted in a large, circular red barn on the approximately seventy-acre property. Enrollment was limited to two priests (or seminarians), six laymen, and eight laywomen who arrived on the property from across the country. Attendees prayed and recreated together. They explored the surrounding natural environment by swimming, hiking, and fishing between learning sessions. They were primed to return to their point of origin to radiate the spirit of Friendship House with the knowledge and technique around interracialism that they absorbed during their course of study, prayer, and recreation that summer.
In light of the conversation around two-way traffic, the construction of a second span emerged in New York, as well. Harlem Friendship House leader Mabel Knight described their venture in New York, opening an integrated house in Greenwich Village, an area of the city that was predominantly populated by White people.
The Chicago Friendship House community sought to adapt its work in Chicago in order to “share, as much as possible, the realities of people around us.”Footnote 131 They planned to take on factory work. As Mary Galloway explained, “It has been a progressive conviction among us, that try as we might to work in Christ's marketplace, we are not yet penetrating past our own self-styled ivory tower. It seemed to dawn on us almost simultaneously, that our form of poverty might be an isolating factor.”Footnote 132 Starting November 1, 1948, two of the Chicago Friendship House members set out to “live a life of poverty on the lowest wage level.” As their usual practice, Black and White Friendship House workers proceeded together, Elizabeth “Teevy” Teevan and Mary Galloway, respectively. Taken together with the farm in Marathon City and the outpost in Greenwich Village, this move to the factories represented the ways in which the Friendship House community kept their eyes open to what was happening around them and took responsibility according to their ability within the limits of their time.
The Christian Requirement to See and to Act
Taken together, the history of the Friendship House movement in the United States during its formative years provides an informative insight into the ways that Black and White Catholics collaborated to try to initiate a moral and intellectual conversion among their White co-religionists with respect to interracial justice. They sought to be the world they hoped to see by conforming their lives to Christ's life through disciplines of spirituality, patterns of solidarity, and direct action. They took seriously their distinctive identity as lay Catholics to balance action and contemplation in their lives. Theirs was a mysticism of open eyes, one “that especially makes visible all invisible and inconvenient suffering, and—convenient or not—pays attention to it and takes responsibility for it, for the sake of a God who is a friend to human beings.”Footnote 133 Indeed, the White Catholics in Friendship House recognized the urgent demand for their own ongoing intellectual and moral conversion and the necessity to call their counterparts to the same for they understood that “unless Interracial Justice is done, all forms of social justice will be seriously hampered, if not defeated.”Footnote 134 Tragically, their witness and message remains as relevant today as it was eighty-five years ago.
