"Unity Kitchen celebrates 40 years" Catholic Sun - Aug 31, 2010
Frank Cordaro
Tuesday, 31 August 2010
Unity Kitchen celebrates 40 years
http://www.thecatholicsun.com/sun-september-2-2010/unity-kitchen-celebrates-40-years
By Connie Berry
Sun editor
Bishop Robert Cunningham followed in the footsteps of his predecessors
when he celebrated Mass at Unity Kitchen in downtown Syracuse Aug. 22.
This time though, the Mass was in celebration of a milestone. Unity
Kitchen Community of the Catholic Worker is 40 years old. With a
simple altar covered with a white cloth, the bishop welcomed all the
guests and volunteers who filled what is usually the dining room at
385 W. Onondaga St.
The bishop described God as a “teacher” in his homily. He said the
world is very different and yet in some ways the same as it was for
the people of the first century.
“We feel ourselves veering from the narrow path so God sends us
reminders,” Bishop Cunningham said. “He reminds us of our need to not
be concerned with things happening outside, but with our relationship
with Him and each other. And yet God, like every good teacher, tries
to help us grow.”
The history of Unity Kitchen includes its own growing pains. It opened
in September of 1970 with Bob Russell, a conscientious objector to the
Vietnam War, at the helm. He was living at St. Lucy’s rectory and
providing community service. Father Ted Sizing, then at St. Lucy’s
Church, asked Russell to open a soup kitchen. Father Sizing and then
Father Dick Keough were early supporters. A storefront was found at
564 S. Salina St. and Unity Kitchen opened. Ann O’Connor began her
work at Unity Kitchen in the early days, shortly after the kitchen
opened. Peter King joined the community in September of 1972. They
married in 1980 and still serve as the primary leaders of Unity
Kitchen.
The anniversary Mass also provided a way for the couple to thank all
the volunteers and guests who have helped keep the kitchen going over
the years. “We thank God for our 40 years of grace and gifts and being
taken care of,” O’Connor said after the Mass. “We’re really a small
endeavor in the whole of things.”
The principles that founded the kitchen were those of the Catholic
Worker — hospitality and serving each guest as if he or she was the
face of Jesus. The small endeavor was not always so small. The first
year many of the people who came to the kitchen were homeless or
alcoholics or both. It was a time of urban renewal and the storefront
was leased for $1 and slated for demolition at the end of the year.
After a year of soup lines, a new location was found in an abandoned
factory building. This location was large enough to also offer
overnight shelter, O’Connor said. The soup lines continued and Unity
Kitchen was often chaotic and crowded. A policy of never saying “no”
to those who came to the door meant the conditions inside were
sometimes tumultuous, O’Connor explained.
A study was performed by a group at Syracuse University in 1977
examining the kitchen’s ability to function on a human service level.
The results, O’Connor said, were dismal, although the study did praise
the Catholic Worker principles of non-violence, voluntary poverty and
personalism practiced at the kitchen. The group that worked at the
site was burned out and overextended and O’Connor said they began to
look at what they were doing. Because of the numbers of people being
served, she said, there was no time for relationship building or true
Christian hospitality. The folks stood in line, ate their soup and
sandwich hurriedly and left so that more could be fed.
It was at this time, the late 1970s and early 1980s, when a core group
at the kitchen decided to discern their intentions and through
Scripture study and prayer, come to a communal consensus about the
future of Unity Kitchen. This time the group came to agreement on how
to serve the poor in a personal and dignified way. They went from
serving 120 people in soup lines in an institutional fashion to
serving 24 guests at dining tables with flowers, china and silver
tableware. Five guests and one server eat at the tables family-style.
O’Connor said, “We went from soup kitchen to soup tureens.”
“We all agreed we couldn’t serve large numbers of wounded people in a
dignified way,” O’Connor explained. “We began the very interesting
process Peter_Maurinof studying the history of Christian hospitality
in the church.
The base community decided on 12 or multiples of 12 as a definite
number to serve. They agreed on 24 and began serving an evening meal —
“a gracious dinner,” O’Connor said. A guest registry was developed and
a place for a stranger who might be welcomed to the kitchen is always
open. There are still guests from the early days who come to dinner,
O’Connor said. But this time they take the time to hang up their coats
and hats and sit down to be served by a volunteer. Dinner conversation
includes everything from politics to recipes. Unity Kitchen now
practices what O’Connor called “limited but lavish” hospitality.
Currently, the kitchen serves two dinners a week and is open each
Sunday for noon Mass with refreshments afterward.
The change from soup lines to dining tables did not come without a
price. The hospitaliers lost much support when they changed their
vision, O’Connor said. “But we gained support too,” she said. “A lot
of people just couldn’t accept the limited numbers.”
Controversy from the radical change in hospitality has followed the
Unity Kitchen community over the years. O’Connor and King are
outspoken in their views of Catholic Worker hospitality. They
recognize the movement’s founders, Peter Maurin and Dorothy Day, but
O’Connor said over the years, the Catholic faith has dissolved from
some Catholic Worker endeavors. “There have been ups and downs about
the way hospitality is done,” O’Connor said. “Now there are many
Catholic Workers in existence who have lost their Catholic faith. Many
are even pro-abortion. Anybody can buy a building and put a ‘Catholic
Worker’ sign on it.”
It was Maurin who was the theorist or thinker behind the Catholic
Worker movement. It developed during the depression when there were
long soup lines and unemployment was rampant. Day was a journalist and
a Catholic convert who couldn’t reconcile some of her newspaper work
with her new-found Catholicism, O’Connor said. She and Maurin began
the Catholic Worker newspaper, which is still published today. Maurin
died in 1949 and Day continued the work until her death in 1980.
Today, most Catholic Workers focus on two dimensions of Dorothy Day,
O’Connor said. “One is her Catholicism, and it was very strong,” she
said. “The other is her resistance ideas — resistance to war, the
government, Wall Street and some include a resistance to the church as
a part of it.”
O’Connor said when Catholic Worker communities put aside the
Catholicism Day practiced and the church she loved, they open
themselves to chaos and confusion. “We take a strong stand for the
church. She has a lot of problems, yes, but so do we,” O’Connor said.
O’Connor wrote an essay a number of years ago titled “Catholic
Workers: Are They Catholic?” The article was greeted with little
enthusiasm. O’Connor said it may be the Irish in her but she has no
intention of backing down on something she considers so important —
her faith. “Modernism poisons everything,” she said.
And although Dorothy Day visited the Syracuse area before she died,
O’Connor said she wishes Dorothy Day was around today so they might
discuss the hospitality at Unity Kitchen.
“We called her once and had a big discussion and she said ‘stay small’
but then she’d praise a larger kitchen,” O’Connor said. “She wasn’t
always clear on hospitality besides the idea of feeding whoever comes.
She didn’t have all the answers and she could be contradictory. I
wouldn’t say that I know what Dorothy Day would say about Unity
Kitchen but I bet if she was around we’d have some great discussions.”
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Peter King and Ann O'Connor
Unity Kitchen Catholic Worker Community
P O Box 650, Syracuse NY 13201
315 478 5552