Since we last spoke I've kept messaging along lines of keeping families in Somerville, Affordable Housing. I discussed basic needs with Sonia Conde of Padres Latinos and Rev. Jordan Harris of Connexion and attended the Anti-Displacement Task Force  Reportback . At the sole budget hearing open to public comment, I said continuing the particulate pilot funding is crucial for environmental justice and that I was opposed to cutting the Racial and Social Justice Department to increase funding of the police. Lately, I've door knocked on 18 streets in East Somerville. Over $3000 raised. Your dollars are going to Human Rights, not a popularity contest. A Somerville City Councilor who served ten years said this was inefficient because the poor don't vote. Around the corner from the East Somerville T-station, a resident who bought a house there thirty years ago said no Councilor had ever knocked on his door. It's true, I might have attended the Thursday Films at the Park Series b...

  Fight the plight   Come to the catechism of the poor persons.   The age of conviction may as well be now. We were former persons. Veterans, we work, were former union members. We got degrees in college. You call us homeless, forget we are persons, a misnomer that goes about solving nothing. Who we are matters because you are dealing with a person. A broken down reality, who all the time must wipe your tears, who must wait on you. Patience, come quick, one paycheck away, one health care crisis away and another joins us on the front lines. “Every major ill in this country is embedded in the person that is homeless,” as Willie Baptist says. The antibodies are right here—we are survivors who just couldn’t afford a place to stay.   Should you be in doubt, rest not. Should you want to shed a tear, go not to your sister or your brother. For we are persons. a family denying the cry of the poor. Like wolves “shedding blood and destroying lives to get unjust gain” says the p...

Draft resisters Fr. Tony Mullaney, Jim Forest and John Bach endured federal sentences savoring the victory of permanently effacing the War Department’s draft record, sparing lives. Forest would call his year in prison a sabbatical. When he received a NASA photograph of Earth through the prison mail, Forest contemplated it for hours. Bach, recalled his "draft bit" an ideal compared to the floating space station Metropolitan Correctional Center. The maximum security prison was “a Bicentennial metaphor,” he wrote to supporters, for how out of touch the country was, the best it could see to make off the poor while it waged fronts increasing the gap of the rich and poor, sustaining “a permanent war economy, a permanent national security, a permanent emergency.” Eleven stories up from “Park Row” in New York City, he felt so isolated the street might as well have been in Paris or Rome. By then  Forest was on a caper in Paris with a friend climbing the roof of the Chartres cathedral....

  We're expecting to house refugees, people fleeing from Afghanistan. The roots of our effort is nourished in prayer as a community with these principle passages from Scripture:  “You shall treat the alien who resides among you no differently than the natives born among you; have the same love for him as for yourself, for you too were aliens in the land of Egypt.” (Lev. 19:5) “What you have done to the least of these, you have done to me.” (Matthew 25) “Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.” (Hebrews 13:2) In light of the Paulist Center Immigration Advocacy Group, and considering Pope Francis's invocation of a synod on the theme of synodality in the life of the Church, I've endeavored to compile sources of Catholic Social Teaching. It could be a working t heory of change, as I've written on this blog, in a time of listening . Overview: Sources of Catholic Social Teaching include but are not limited to Biblica...