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Judy Pena, a guest at the San Bruno Catholic Worker Hospitality House dining room, laughs during breakfast March 20. Pena said she enjoys chatting with friends over breakfast. “Everyone comes here with their memories,” she said. The Hospitality House will celebrate the dining room’s 23rd anniversary in April. (Photo by Nicholas Wolfram Smith/Catholic San Francisco)
March 25, 2019
Nicholas Wolfram Smith
A few dozen people were gathered in the dining room of the Catholic Worker Hospitality House in San Bruno for breakfast on a drizzly Wednesday morning. Tables were filled with guests chatting and enjoying company or taking quiet time to eat breakfast alone, while volunteers served breakfast and stopped to talk with guests. Pausing his work for a moment in the dining room, Peter Stiehler, the house’s director, told Catholic San Francisco, “You can see what we do here is serious, but it’s lighthearted too. It reflects the joy here.”
On April 1, the Catholic Worker Hospitality House in San Bruno will celebrate its 23rd anniversary. Five days a week, the Catholic Worker dining room serves breakfast to between 70 and 80 people.
Over the years, the house has added more services: A few years after the breakfast program began, Stiehler was able to start an overnight emergency shelter housing up to nine. Since then, the house has been able to offer permanent supportive housing to needy residents in two homes. “All of our work, one thing has grown out of another,” Stiehler said.
The house also acts as a hub for other services. Showers are available every day, medical professionals stop by every Thursday, and haircuts are offered once a month. The house also hands out toiletries, hats and gloves. As people left the dining room during a recent visit by Catholic San Francisco, Christine Baker, the assistant director, handed out rain ponchos.
While rest and repose are important gifts, Stiehler said the sense of community is the most important offering. “It gives people a place to be with others,” he said. “That’s my most important job, after opening in the morning and making sure we have enough food.”
Stiehler and his wife Kate Chatfield founded the Hospitality House when they moved to the Bay Area, inspired by their experience living in a Catholic Worker home in Los Angeles. The Catholic Worker movement, founded as a loose collection of communities in 1933 by Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin, embraces radical hospitality and non-violence and aims to “live in accordance with the justice and charity of Jesus Christ,” according to its website. There are over 200 Catholic Worker communities in the U.S., four in the Archdiocese of San Francisco.
One San Bruno guest, who gave his first name as Harold, was homeless when he first visited the Hospitality House 20 years ago. Now stably housed, he continues to visit regularly and tell people about the dining room.
“I know a lot of people wouldn’t have a place to go otherwise,” he said. “People who don’t have anywhere else to go, this is where they talk and mingle. They can’t afford to go to restaurants, they’re getting kicked out of Starbuck’s all the time,” he said.
All have found a warm welcome at the Hospitality House, regardless of their situation in life. “People are saints here,” he said.
Gathered at a table at the tail end of breakfast, a few guests and volunteers chatted over coffee, including Leoba Moulton, one of the saints Harold mentioned. She cooks breakfast three times a week. Guests praised her cooking and mentioned their favorite dishes she’s made.
Moulton brings more than hot meals to the dining room by giving her attention to the guests who come through. “There’s so many people who come here alone, and I’m a widow, so I know what it means to be alone,” she said.
Judy Pena, a former volunteer and staff member who first visited the house 19 years ago, said, “And they appreciate that, it helps them feel less alone. And of course she doesn’t let them get away with hell.”
“Common courtesy still applies,” Moulton agreed, laughing.
The dining room runs on donations of not only food and goods but the time volunteers spend there. About three to four volunteers help every day. On Wednesday, volunteer Lorraine Murphy was washing dishes during breakfast.
At 94 years old, “she’s one of our most faithful volunteers,” said Christine Baker. “Rain or shine, she shows up.”
Many former guests become volunteers or have been hired to operate the overnight shelter. Jonathan, who volunteers as a cleaner after breakfast ends, said he first came as a guest around 10 years ago and found himself helping more and more often. Now, he said, he tries to come every day.
“They really believe in the spirit of helping people,” he said. “It provided a place for me to rest and get my head together. It’s just great for a springboard, a foundation.”
For more information about the San Bruno Catholic Worker Hospitality House, visit http://catholicworkerhospitalityhouse.org or call (650) 827-0706
From left, Dean Varchetto, Lorraine Murphy and Barbara Cox work in the San Bruno Catholic Worker Hospitality House dining room March 20. The Hospitality House will celebrate the dining room’s 23rd anniversary in April. (Photo by Nicholas Wolfram Smith/Catholic San Francisco)