Category: Houses of Hospitality

Today: Homeless camp, South Bend CW zoning update, Pit Stop Ploughshares, Dwight Smith talks, Massachusetts parish comes out against Iraq war, Darfur, artists abroad.

• Photos of homeless camp in Worcester woods. We’ve previously written about the camp in Beaver Brook Park.
• According to a South Bend Tribune article, members of two local parishes, St. Adalbert and St. Casimir, have been asked to contact elected officials in support of the South Bend (Indiana) Catholic Worker’s zoning battles with the city:
  Continue reading “Items”

• There will not be much Worcester news on this blog for the next couple weeks; I’m heading for the Catholic Peace Fellowship gathering in Indiana. Retreat leaders will include Paul Keim, Kathy Kelly, Bishop John Michael Botean, and Father Daniel Berrigan, SJ.
• Worcester Magazine reports on a “west side crimewave” that neighbors are blaming on the hobo jungle in Beaver Brook Park.

  Word on the street is that the guys are vacating the lot now anyway as the weather turns cold. I think as many as a dozen people were sleeping there over the summer, although the cops would periodically raid the area and arrest some of the guys. When they were released from jail, they’d head right back to Beaver Brook.

  Also in WoMag, Phil Reid presents his vision for a compassionate city.

• Catholic schoolteacher Stephen Kobasa lost his job because a new policy clashed with his longstanding distaste for saying the Pledge of Allegiance and for posting a flag in his classroom. The full story is worth reading.
• The latest Pit Stop Ploughshares trial is coming up in Ireland. The last one ended in an early mistrial.
• The South Bend Catholic Worker, which the city is trying to shut down through zoning violations, is playing the zoning game itself, thus far with no luck.
  

  Members of the Area Plan Commission of St. Joseph County voted to recommend that the South Bend Common Council turn down a request that zoning of the house at 1126 W. Washington St. be changed from single family to multifamily.

  (Full story in South Bend Tribune)

Some new weekly items:

• The clash between the South Bend Catholic Worker group and some neighbors over zoning continues to get some press there, although there’s no news to speak of. Here’s an op-ed with some history of the house, and a South Bend Tribune article via Loaded Mouth.
• Film fans: here’s Victor Morton’s “Catholic Version” of the Aristocrats joke.
• Spotlight on Darfur 1 is a continuation of a project to highlight the diversity of blog posts on the Darfur crisis, a crisis that Eric Reeves calls “the first great episode of genocidal destruction of the 21st century.” Things continue to go badly there.
• You can read about national attitudes toward the war many places, but what about local opinion?

  In Worcester in recent weeks, we’ve seen a surge of anti-war feeling. For example, in today’s daily paper, the Telegram & Gazette, there are three anti-war letters to the editor, and none supporting the war.
  Continue reading “Items”

Weekly items:

• South Bend Tribune: Day shelter a good idea to fill a void:
  

  OUR OPINION

  We were glad to see the South Bend Common Council give its OK to a proposed day shelter for homeless men.

  The request came from Catholic Worker of Michiana, which plans to open a facility in a vacant building at 744 S. Main St.

  Continue reading “Items”

Weekly items, old and new:

• As the South Bend Catholic Worker expands, it’s getting some static from the city for housing too many unrelated people in the same house, a zoning violation:
  

  But Catholic Worker does not seem interested in moving. Instead, it is hinting at a threat of its own: a lawsuit in federal court.

  [A similar case], still pending, involves the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act of 2000, which bars a government from implementing a land use regulation in a manner that imposes a “substantial burden” on one’s “religious exercise” — unless the government can prove a compelling governmental interest in doing so.

  “I’ve come to think that this configuration of events is interfering with our ability to practice our religion,” Pfeil said. “If I as a private resident want to practice works of mercy by sharing my home with people who are homeless, I ought to be able to do that.”

  (South Bend Tribune)
  Tribune update

• After a New York state jury refused to convict four activists on charges stemming from civil disobedience at a military recruiting station, the federal government has indicted them on federal charges stemming from the same protest. (National Catholic Reporter)
• A Christian Peacemaker team is visiting a stretch of Arizona border to head off any violence instigated by the anti-illegal-immigrant vigilantes The Minutemen. (CPT newsletter)
• In the LA Catholic Worker’s recent issue of The Catholic Agitator is an interview with Catherine Morris and Jeff Dietrich. Jeff’s take on the works of mercy:
  

  . . . as they spoke it just occurred to me that this is what Christianity is about. They were feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, sheltering the homeless, and burning draft files.