Volunteers constitute the core of the Catholic Worker movement.

When we say we feed 100 hungry people  or clothe men who have little more than the shirts on their backs, what we really mean to say is that we enable teams of volunteer men and women who were looking for opportunities  to serve. On this page you can see some of the men and women who spend hours preparing the food, delivering it, and serving it directly to hungry people. The same goes for the clothing service. Perhaps the best part of being a Catholic Worker volunteer is that you meet hungry and homeless people face-to-face, and are privileged to recognize them as Christs in disguise.  Because we have the deepest respect for the unfortunate people we serve, we do not take their photographs and will never show them on our website or our newsletter.

The State of the San Diego Catholic Worker

As busy as ever, coping with the Pandenic

Everybody knows that the global pandemic has hit poor people harder than anybody else.

People at the lower end of the economic spectrum, for instance hospitality workers, were the first to lose their jobs when the economy tanked. As a result, many people already barely subsisting on minimum wages became homeless and unable to feed their families.

We, San Diego Catholic Workers, see that every day. It is an occasion for deep sadness, and we mourn with the newly homeless and parents, many of whom—for the first time —are unable to feed their children.

They provide an opportunity for all of us to rise to the occasion and become better than we are, more human, seeing our fellow human beings in dire need, and reaching out to help.

They provide an opportunity for the Christian communities to become more Christ-like, denying self and serving the poor.

The pandemic has another devastating knock-on effect: just as people are not able to visit their relatives when they are dying in a hospital, so we are obliged to observe safe distancing and avoid personal contact. That put an end to our great sit-down lunches on Fridays in Christ Lutheran Church in Pacific Beach. We have also had to stop distributing hot soup and sandwiches to people sleeping on the sidewalks of downtown San Diego, and we have stopped distributing clothing at the breakfast served by another Lutheran Community in downtown San Diego.

We’ve had to find new ways of feeding the hungry and distributing clothes. Here’s what we’re doing: 

Early every Wednesday morning, Michael and Mary Kay go shopping for the ingredients to make sandwiches for the 100-plus lunch bags that they prepare that afternoon in the Our Lady of Guadalupe church hall. They then deliver the bags to two parking lots where people living in automobiles can safely spend the night. In the kitchen, Alicia, Donna and Tom are making three giant pots of chicken-vegetable soup that are delivered with the lunch bags to the same locations.

That same afternoon, Jim, Olga, Leticia, Alexandra, Nancy and Roberta fill 28 boxes of food and household items for adults and children–some purchased, some donated by three different church groups—that are then distributed to families in need at Our Lady of Guadalupe and Our Lady of Refuge parishes.

In lieu of the three-course lunch that we have cooked every Friday for the past 20 years, sack lunches are prepared and distributed every Friday to our usual guests, under the watchful eye of Chico, at Christ Lutheran Church on Cass Street in Pacific Beach.

Unable to distribute clothes at our usual location, we have been sorting and packing 10 large bags of women’s clothing that are taken across the border to Tijuana.

We are kept busy, and because donations don’t come anywhere near our demands, we are spending a lot of money on food and supplies, roughly $2,000-a-month, but we are not complaining. The money that we have is given to us for the express purposes we are using it, and we are grateful to the Good Lord for providing so many people with the opportunity to express their generosity at this difficult time for all.

Denys Horgan
San Diego Catholic Worker