Portland community provides mutual aid — beyond the church hierarchy
Photos from Dignity & Peace on Instagram.
When I met with seven organizers of Dignity & Peace — a new Call To Action-connected group in Portland, Oregon — I was struck by how their stories overlap with stories I’ve heard from CTA members across the country. Like many progressive Catholics, they have struggled to reconcile their faith with the restrictions imposed by the Catholic hierarchy. The Dignity & Peace organizers are an intergenerational (and interreligious!) bunch, and their common commitment to radical welcome and direct service is palpable. Undeterred by a conservative crackdown on their work, they’ve found creative, radical ways to collaborate with houseless communities in Portland, Oregon, fill the gaps left by traditional social services, and offer spiritual sustenance to each other in the process.
Most Dignity & Peace organizers are former members of St. Francis, a Roman Catholic parish in Portland. Many of them had been active at the parish since the 1970s. They “go way back,” I learned, and over the decades they’ve “been on a Vatican II journey together.” Most members of Portland’s CTA chapter were members of St. Francis.
Starting in the 70s, a priest named Fr. Don Durand helped shape St. Francis into a hub of progressive Catholicism. His leadership attracted creative, artistic, and socially-conscious people who grew together as a family. Their loyalty was to the St. Francis parish and the Franciscan example, not to the Roman Catholic hierarchy.
Out of the parish grew the Dining Hall, a radically welcoming community that started at the church in 1979. Influenced by the Catholic Worker movement, the Dining Hall saw itself as a hospitable place where houseless people could find resources and camaraderie without having to prove their “worthiness.” Comparable spaces in Portland required that people in need listen to a sermon, take a number, or jump through hoops. Because it didn’t impose such requirements, many of the Dining Hall guests were people who experienced compounding issues, those who might not have been welcome at or eligible for other social services.
The Dining Hall served as many as 250 people at a time, but organizers describe it as a family. It went through many iterations, some with paid staff, some without, but always sustained by a dedicated volunteer base. Fueled by an endless flow of coffee, parishioners showed up to provide services that other shelters couldn’t or wouldn’t. During severe weather, it opened its doors 24 hours a day. While many shelters require that guests leave early in the morning, no one was ever forced out of the Dining Hall. Oatmeal and coffee were available starting at 7 am, and while everyone had to be “out of bed” by 10, they could stay as long as they liked.
Brunch after mass blended into Dining Hall hours, so parishioners mixed and mingled with the guests. The Dining Hall became part of the congregation’s liturgical life, too: on Holy Thursday, parishioners would wash the feet of their houseless neighbors. After the foot-washing, everyone received new socks and shoes.
After the progressive Fr. Durand left, St. Francis went decades without a priest in residence. Instead, a laywoman named Valerie Chapman managed the parish affairs and the Dining Hall day-to-day. After Chapman retired, though, things changed. A new priest was assigned to the parish, and he didn’t know how to handle the Dining Hall or the neighborhood’s needs. Without structures that guaranteed the Dining Hall’s survival, the archdiocese swooped in and handed it over to Catholic Charities. The Dining Hall could no longer remain open all night, and it became more like a traditional social service organization: impersonal, centrally-controlled, and less accessible. While the Dining Hall had formerly called its visitors “guests,” Catholic Charities used the word “clients.” One organizer commented that Catholic Charities “isn’t in the business of embracing the leper.”
Changes at the Dining Hall came with conservative changes in the church’s liturgy and governance. The new priest wouldn’t allow the laity to wash each other’s feet on Holy Thursday, and insisted in particular that women could not have their feet washed. Mass attendance shrunk from 125 to 25. The priest had the support of a new conservative archbishop who seemed intent on bringing back a “pre-Vatican II or even medieval church.” With his support and approval, the new priest asserted dominance over the laity. He eventually announced that he had decided to disband the pastoral council. Some parishioners had wanted to prevent the Catholic Charities takeover, but the priest further quashed dissent by dissolving all of the church’s committees.
Everyone I spoke to has left St. Francis because of these changes. I was told that 1/3 left the Catholic Church, 1/3 moved to other parishes, and 1/3 started an intentional eucharistic community together. The loss of St. Francis of Assisi has to be devastating to these people who spent decades living and working there together. But despite the crumbling of the parish, the community — the church — hasn’t faltered.
In the summer of 2020, former St. Francis parishioners saw how the houseless community that they knew through the Dining Hall was hard-hit by the pandemic. They decided to get together, fill their cars with supplies, and make deliveries to their neighbors. Thus began Dignity & Peace, the latest incarnation of the Dining Hall’s radical hospitality.
Dignity & Peace makes direct reference to the original mission of the Dining Hall, “to serve a meal in dignity and peace.” Dinae Horne is the muscle behind the project: once Dignity & Peace acquired an old van to deliver its supplies, she became the main driver. She’d worked at the Dining Hall for several years, so she had familiarity with houseless communities of Portland. Dinae’s most dedicated co-volunteers are houseless themselves. In the frigid cold of February 2021, she coordinated them to distribute sleeping bags, tarps, coffee, and hot chocolate to their own communities.
The local CTA chapter formally helped Dignity & Peace get off the ground, giving it support to develop bylaws, articles of incorporation, and 501(c)3 status. Though Dignity & Peace has incorporated, it remains small and volunteer-run. Marietta Schlumpf commented on the strengths of a small group that relies on direct giving. When people realize that their contributions go directly to the people, she said, they give generously.
With almost a year under its belt, Dignity & Peace is active and energized. Vice President Julie Cusumano joked that the community is full of broken people meeting people — showing up in a broken van! That sometimes-broken van delivers coats, shoes, pillows and bedding, holiday gift bags, notes from kids, and special requests. Every Thursday and Friday, volunteers take it to a bridge on Morrison. The community behind this project is intergenerational, too: Julie’s 18 year-old daughter Lena serves on the board. She recently conducted a sock drive that continues to supply the community with all the socks it could ever need.
Dignity & Peace has many characteristics of mutual aid, a form of solidarity-based support. Community members provide for each other without reliance on a powerful super-structure, and houseless folks do much of the labor to provide for themselves and their community. Furthermore, Dignity & Peace brings political analysis to its work: social services have failed the most vulnerable communities in the city. It is also an interreligious community of people, many of whom recently experienced a rupture in their religious lives. It addresses systemic injustice in both church and society.
The group is catholic with a lowercase “c” — it is universal in its aims and means. Dinae, the main driver, is Buddhist. Other core volunteers are non-religious. Many of the organizers are Catholic — the membership of Dignity & Peace significantly overlaps with the local CTA chapter — but they are building their catholic community outside of the hierarchical Church. Like the Dining Hall in its earliest days, Dignity & Peace does not ask for permission. Dianna Shaffer, the president of Dignity & Peace and a member of St. Francis since 1974, said: “I am no longer beholden to the Catholic Church to keep a community together. This empowered me to keep walking ahead. We don’t need them. We will do this in the best way that we can. And we have.”
The story of Dignity & Peace is a story of joy and loss. One organizer told me that Dignity & Peace helped her through her grief at losing St. Francis and the relationships she’d forged at the Dining Hall. The grief is both spiritual and personal: Albert Alter, a photographer, showed me a picture of a man who’d regularly attended the Dining Hall and died in November 2020. Authorities said the man had died of natural causes. “That’s what they say when you freeze to death,” Alter said. The members of Dignity & Peace know all too well that the network of social services in Portland is entirely inadequate. Church and secular social services do not meet the needs of the most vulnerable people.
Alter also commented that Dignity & Peace had strengthened his faith — just not his “faith in a building.” Julie Cusumano said that their community is “exactly the same as it’s always been” — minus the abusive power of the hierarchical Church.
