Friendship House: A conversation for Our Times

Friendship House: A Conversation for Our Times

My Thoughts

You know, as a historian, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about why we even bother studying history. I mean, we’ve got enough going on right now, right? But here’s the thing—history is really about patterns. It’s about learning from the good, the bad, and yeah, the downright ugly of human experience. When we look at how Jesus lived and how his early followers showed up in the world, we start to see something that might just shake us awake. Those “aha moments” we’re looking for? They come when history suddenly feels urgent, current, real. And that’s what I want to talk about today.

Who Was Catherine de Hueck Doherty?

So let me tell you about someone you’ve probably never heard of, but honestly, should have. Catherine de Hueck Doherty—most people called her “the Baroness”—founded something called Friendship House back in the day. Here’s what strikes me about her: she actually did something. In the 1930s and 1940s, when racial segregation was the law of the land and poverty was everywhere, she didn’t just pray about it or write angry letters. She opened houses in places like Harlem and Toronto, where she and her community literally lived alongside the people society had written off.

Think about that for a second. She chose to live in poverty, to break bread with the poor, to show up. That took guts.

The Network of Saints

Now, here’s where it gets really interesting. Doherty didn’t work alone, and she wasn’t operating in some bubble. She was connected to some pretty remarkable people who were all wrestling with the same question: How do we actually live out our faith in a broken world?

Thomas Merton—The Monk Who Got His Hands Dirty

You might know Thomas Merton as this contemplative monk who wrote beautiful books about spirituality. And he was all that. But before he became a monk, he was a young guy at Columbia University studying philosophy. Doherty invited him to volunteer at Friendship House in Harlem, and something clicked for him. He saw the poor not as a problem to be solved from a distance, but as Christ himself. He spent time there, worked there, and it changed his entire spiritual journey. Later, even as a monk, Merton never lost that connection to social justice. He got it because he’d lived it.

Louis Putz—The Priest Who Brought a Movement

Then there was Louis Putz, a Holy Cross priest from Notre Dame. He was working on something called Catholic Action—this movement centered on “See-Judge-Act.” In other words: look at what’s actually happening in the world around you, judge it against Gospel values, and then act. Don’t just feel bad about injustice—do something about it. Putz was spreading this way of thinking throughout American parishes, especially in the 1940s and 1950s. While he and Doherty weren’t always directly working together, they were definitely on the same page. They both believed in the power of everyday Catholics—not just priests and nuns—to change the world.

Msgr. Reynold Hillenbrand—The Spiritual Director in the Shadows

There was also Msgr. Reynold Hillenbrand, a Chicago priest who kind of worked behind the scenes but was hugely influential. Hillenbrand actually served as a spiritual director for Doherty and the Friendship House community. He was all about combining prayer, justice, and charity. He understood that real faith isn’t just something you practice on Sunday morning—it’s how you treat people, how you fight for what’s right, how you show up.

Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Connection

But I think the most important connection for us to understand is between Friendship House and the Catholic Worker movement, led by Dorothy Day. These two communities were basically doing the same thing in different cities, and they knew it. They cheered each other on.

Dorothy Day actually encouraged Catherine Doherty to start Friendship House. Can you imagine that kind of support? Day was out there running the Catholic Worker movement—feeding the hungry, housing the homeless, protesting war—all while publishing a newspaper. She saw in Doherty a kindred spirit. Both of them believed that faith without action was dead. Both of them believed that showing up for the poor wasn’t charity—it was justice. It was Gospel.

What’s beautiful is that they didn’t see each other as competition. When Friendship House opened in Toronto in 1934, Day and one of her artists actually visited. They shared newsletters. They sent people back and forth to learn from each other. When Friendship House faced some tough times and people wondered if it would survive, Day wrote publicly about it, calling the potential loss a “disaster” for the Catholic church. She got it. She knew that what Doherty was building mattered.

The Heart of What They Were Doing

Here’s what really gets me about these communities. They didn’t just talk about hospitality—they practiced it. They opened their doors. They fed people. They listened. They lived among the poor instead of serving them from a distance. They brought prayer and action together. They didn’t see a wall between the spiritual life and social justice. Those were the same thing.

And they did this in the face of real pushback. The church institution wasn’t always comfortable with what they were doing. Neither was society. But they found strength in each other. They reminded each other that they weren’t crazy. That this was what Jesus actually taught.

So Here We Are

Which brings me to the question we need to wrestle with today: Is our moment in history calling us to something similar? Do we need a modern-day Friendship House? Do we need to rebuild that kind of Christian social justice movement?

Look around. We’ve got massive inequality. We’ve got people experiencing homelessness on our streets. We’ve got families struggling to afford rent and food. We’ve got divisions that run deeper than ever. We’ve got a world that feels like it’s coming apart.

And we’ve got a Gospel that says something completely different about how we should be living.

Using See-Judge-Act to Find Our Way Forward

So let’s use the same tool that Louis Putz, Joseph Cardijn, and the Catholic Action movement gave us. It’s simple. Three steps. See. Judge. Act.

First: See. Really look. Not with headlines and statistics, though those matter. But with your eyes and your heart. What’s actually happening in your neighborhood? Who do you see? Who don’t you see? What’s the reality that people are living in? Are there elderly people in our parish who are isolated? Families struggling with addiction? Kids growing up without enough? Immigrants who feel unwelcome? The first step is getting honest about what’s real.

Second: Judge. Hold what you see up against the Gospel. Jesus said, “Whatever you did for the least of these, you did for me.” He spent his time with the poor, the sick, the outcast, the people nobody else wanted to deal with. So here’s the question: Are we living that? Is our community living that? Is our society living that? When we look at inequality and suffering, do they align with Gospel values? No. It doesn’t. So we name that. We judge it as wrong. Not with anger and judgment toward people, but with clarity about what’s just and what isn’t.

Third: Act. And here’s where it gets real. What are we actually going to do about it? We can’t just think our way into change. We have to move. Maybe it’s starting a meal program or working in one. Perhaps it’s visiting lonely people. Maybe it’s advocating for better housing policies. Maybe it’s welcoming people who feel excluded. Maybe it’s sitting with someone in crisis. Maybe it’s small; maybe it’s big. But we actually have to do something.

Drawing Our Conclusion

So what conclusion do I draw? Here’s mine: Yes. We absolutely need something like Friendship House. Not necessarily with that exact name or model, but that spirit? That commitment? That’s urgent.

But here’s the thing—we’re not starting from scratch. We have the example of people like Doherty, Day, Merton, Putz, and Hillenbrand. We know it’s possible. We know what it looks like. And we know it works.

The question isn’t whether we need it. The question is: Are we willing to do it? Are we willing to see clearly, judge honestly, and act faithfully? Are we willing to show up, the way they did, in the places where Christ is suffering?

Because that’s what this is really about. It’s not about nostalgia. It’s not about being nice. It’s not an academic exercise. It’s about recognizing that the God we claim to worship is asking us to love in concrete ways. Right now. In our time. In our parishes. In our neighborhoods.

So that’s where we land. The real history lesson isn’t just about what they did back then. It’s about what we’re being called to do right now.

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