Happy Feast Day of St Joseph the Worker and 89th birthday of the Catholic Worker Movement! Although we have briefly postponed today’s planned open house celebration we do have great cause to celebrate!!
We are extremely excited to inform you that we will begin moving into St. Bakhita House the last week of May. The timing allows our generous benefactors, the Capuchin Franciscans of St. Joseph, to fully vacate and take residence in their new home at St Francis Parish and Monastery. We are SO happy for them and are deeply grateful for their generosity.
Over the next few weeks we will be contacting those who expressed an interest in helping us ready our new home. We want to create a beautiful space to offer hospitality to the women who will be transitioning from the Franciscan Peacemakers current Clare Community residence to their new expanded housing at St. Bakhita House. All help is most welcome and appreciated. This includes donations of time, talent and treasure!
We also would like to invite women to contact us who are interested in exploring communal life on the third floor of our residence. We currently have four rooms available. So, if you are interested in living in an intentional Catholic Worker community dedicated to prayer, work and hospitaliy we would love to meet with you!
Thank you so much for all your patience and support over the last few months. Your prayers and donations have been an awe-inspiring gift to us. We will announce our “for sure” St Bakhita Catholic Worker Open House date in our next communication.
In the meantime, today we pause to pray for all who labor. Especially those who suffer from exploitation in its many manifestations. Work is a sacred act and we pray that our world will value it is such. St. Joseph the Worker, pray for us.
Blessings and peace,
Anne
What we would like to do is change the world-make it a little simpler for people to feed, clothe, and shelter themselves as God intended for them to do. And, by fighting for better conditions, by crying out unceasingly for the rights of the workers, of the poor, of the destitute…we can, to a certain extent, change the world; we can work for the oasis, the little cell of joy and peace in a harried world. We can throw our pebble in the pond and be confident that its ever widening circle will reach around the world. We repeat, there is nothing that we can do but love, and, dear God, please enlarge our hearts to love each other, to love our neighbor, to love our enemy as well as our friend.
-Dorothy Day, Servant of God
