- Friendship House
Friendship House is a missionary movement founded in the early 1930s by Catholic
social justice activist Catherine de Hueck Doherty, one of the leading proponents of interracial justice in pre-Martin Luther King, Jr. America.History
Friendship House was founded in the early 1930s in
Toronto as a Catholic interracial apostolate, which grew from a charitable and anti-communism effort.The movement spread, with a second Friendship House opening in
Ottawa in 1936, and another shortly after inHamilton, Ontario , (which later became aCatholic Worker Movement House). Friendship House received formal ecclesiastical approval on September 14, 1934, but because Catherine's approach to interracial justice was so different from what was being done at the time, she encountered muchpersecution and resistance. The first Friendship House was forced to close in 1936.Soon, however, a
Catholic Interracial Council invited her to open Friendship House inHarlem (1938) — and this U.S.-based interracial ministry led to the foundation of Friendship Houses inChicago, Illinois (1942),Washington, D.C. (1948),Portland, Oregon (1951),Shreveport, Louisiana (1953), and farms inMarathon, Wisconsin ,Montgomery, New York , andBurnley, Virginia .The staff of Friendship House faced constant threat and physical assaults from anti-integration racists and bigots.
From the late 1940s through 1950s, Friendship House was a beneficiary of the notoriety of
Thomas Merton , who described his two weeks of volunteering at the Harlem Friendship House (during August 1941) in his autobiography, "The Seven Storey Mountain ". Many came to know Friendship House and volunteer through his writings.In the early days, the lay apostolate required staff members to attend daily Mass, morning and evening prayers, take regular retreats, and practice poverty, chastity and obedience. Thus the staff were shocked when their foundress suddenly married the famed American journalist
Eddie Doherty , and many personal and philosophical rifts began between the staff and Catherine. When these could not be resolved, Catherine moved back toCanada and founded a new apostolate named Madonna House in 1947.Despite the departure of the foundress, Friendship House continued to grow nationally until the late 1950s, when the last remaining house in Chicago changed from being a religious community to a volunteer organization staffed by persons hired and paid a small salary. Friendship House Chicago ran a day shelter for the homeless from 1980 to 2000 on West Division Street. This site closed on March 31, 2000, after neighborhood
gentrification , and the apostolate no longer maintains a facility.A Friendship House in the Northside neighborhood of Peoria IL continues "to serve the poor, homeless, unemployed, addicted, alcoholic, racially diversified, and all cultures." [http://faculty.icc.edu/stripp/showcase/friendshiphouse/assets/html/aboutus.htm]
Influence
Before the
Montgomery Bus Boycott , Friendship House, along with the Catholic Interracial Councils, provided some of the few sites where Catholics could publicly devote their full-time efforts to interracial justice, and where white Catholics, for the first time, could converse face to face with African Americans in a non-threatening setting.The main instrument of change employed by Friendship House was public education — personal contact, public speaking, and articles published in both the Catholic and secular press. Friendship House also itself published "Harlem Friendship House News", "The Catholic Interracialist", and "Community Magazine" from 1941 to 1983.
ee also
*
Catherine Doherty
*Madonna House Apostolate
*Catholic Worker Movement
*Ellen Tarry External links
* [http://web.archive.org/web/20031231220931/http://www.friendshiphouse.org/ Friendship House, Chicago IL] (Internet Archive link)
* [http://faculty.icc.edu/stripp/showcase/friendshiphouse/index.html Friendship House, Peoria IL]References
Schorsch, Albert, III. [http://www.uic.edu/~schorsch/php/Fhhist3.htm "Uncommon Women and Others: Memoirs and Lessons from Radical Catholics at Friendship House".] "U.S. Catholic Historian", Fall 1990 — 9(4):371-386.
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