Zoning is addressed in the Catholic Worker's FAQ. If someone wanted start a Catholic Worker house, their general advice includes,
Check out the zoning, occupancy, and public health laws of your community. Whether or not you choose to comply with them is up to you but it's good to know them in case you run into difficulties.
On insurance, Robert Waldrop of the Oscar Romero Catholic Worker House in Oklahoma City explains.
Although Catholic Workers don't take "vows" in the sense that religious do, part of our charism is nevertheless to be poor and in solidarity with the poor. Since we don't have a "Rule", we try to figure out how this works, and often that means we deliberately embrace precarity, inconvenience and personal discomfort.
Most Catholic Worker houses are completely uninsured. ...
And if I sat here in a fully insured building, maybe I would feel a little less personally precarious, and thus somehow lose something indefinable in words about the way we live and minister as Catholic Workers. Less passion, less honesty maybe, or perhaps less authenticity.
While life is, in some ways, more precarious for the poor, it holds some precariousness for us all. That's why property insurance exists, to share the individual losses among the group exposed to the risk. Of course, the lower your income, the less you have to spend on insurance, just as the less you have to spend on housing. So why would the Catholic Workers put a roof over the heads of the poor but not put insurance coverage over that roof?
Then there's our heating system, or rather the lack thereof, hehehe.
They could substitute hot air about passion, honesty, and authenticity.
(via From the Anchor Hold)
Update: Milwaukee's Catholic Worker group are personalists rather than Heideggerans.
Each Catholic Worker house is independent. There are as many attitudes toward insurance as there are houses. Have you ever visited a Catholic Worker house? Do you know anything about any house besides what you found in 5 minutes of googling?
ReplyDelete>They could substitute hot air about
>passion, honesty, and authenticity.
You could substitute some concrete information, even anecdotes, for this vague attack. Have you met Catholic Workers who claimed to be passionate but weren't? Who claimed to be honest but weren't? Who weren't "authentic"? Let us know.
One: what does the zoning commission have to do with who I might have as a houseguest in my own home?
ReplyDeleteTwo: insurance is strange stuff. I wouldn't be alive still without it. Yet having it places me firmly among the wealthy and privileged where I am. Definitely a ponderable.
karen marie, whose anchor hold seems to have morphed into a house of hospitality [smile]
I will take Anonymous's word that if I visit a Catholic Worker house, the workers will tell me how passionate, honest, and authentic they are.
ReplyDeleteKaren Marie seems to have gotten the impression that some Catholic Worker houses attempt to evade zoning laws by equivocating on the meaning of "houseguest." Surely that can't be so, for then the workers would also be equivocating on the meanings of "honest" and "authentic."
No, not equivocating, just fact. Even our local Casa Maria, a full-fledged covenanted community now, started out simply as Mike and Nelly's home. The very first "Catholic Worker house" was nothing more, or less, than the apartment of venerable Dorothy and her daughter. There is room for Christ to come as a guest, and the guest comes. There's plenty of stew in the pot, and no reason not to share it.
ReplyDeleteIt was St. Basil and St. John Chrysostom who taught that the second pair of shoes in my closet by right belongs to the barefoot, the unused coat to the one who shivers. By extension, the spare bedroom or unused upstairs to the one who needs to sleep indoors. [Who is Christ].
Not complicated at all. Which is how my home filled up. And it has become a gift to me also --- I may have had the empty bedrooms, but I was also in need, since I can't shovel my own snow any more, or pressure-wrap my own legs, and my guests find Christ in me as well as I in them.
maybe the problem is that you see the Catholic Worker communities as some kind of institution that ought to have institutional behaviours, but it isn't usually, and doesn't.
So, what _does_ the zoning commission have to do with it again?
In your case, I expect it matters to a zoning commission if it does not distinguish between a rooming house which operates on barter and one the operates on cash. Similarly in the case of a Catholic Worker house.
ReplyDeleteOn institutions and institutional behavior, self-proclaimed "authenticity" looks like the Catholic Worker equivalent of "Genuine GM Parts."
If a house does not have property liability insurance, then it is at risk for being siezed by anyonre who visiys, trips,falls and needs medical attention. St. Francis house in Chicago is taking that risk. The property is worth at least a half million dollars to whoever constructs the right accident. The odds of that happening grow every day that property values rise
ReplyDelete