Flophouse Father

Among U. S. Christians who care for the poor, none are more blessed with selfless zeal than those Roman Catholics who labor in the Catholic Worker movement. Their leaders are rugged, genial Peter Maurin and tall, dowdy Dorothy Day, who run a "House of Hospitality" in Manhattan, edit the Catholic Worker, a 1-c-monthly with 125,000 circulation.

Pacifists, perpetually broke, with a Franciscan disdain for material possessions, the Catholic Workers conduct four farms, maintain Houses of Hospitality for the poor in 23 U. S. cities. Last week in Pittsburgh a Catholic Worker, Father Charles Owen Rice, did something he had long wanted to do. With the blessing of his bishop, he gave up the modest but secure post of an assistant pastor--$33 a month, plus room & board--and became priest of a flophouse, his salary to be whatever he could scare up.

Handsome, bespectacled, studiously slangy Father Rice, 31, helped found the Catholic Radical Alliance in Pittsburgh on May Day 1937. This somewhat over-named organization threw its weight to C.I.O., got into many a picket line. It also opened St. Joseph's House of Hospitality, in a dirty, barnlike, abandoned orphanage in a slum. With a permanent staff of 40 indigent men who try to keep the place clean and run its kitchen, the House today serves 1,000 plain meals twice a day, shelters 600 men at night.

Last December a committee from Pittsburgh's Federation of Social Agencies threw up its hands when it learned that nearly all of the bums and hobos of the House slept on the floor, were required neither to take baths or medical examinations. Father Rice, who was then directing St. Joseph's as a side line to his parish work, hearing rumors that the city might close the place, exclaimed: "I'll go to jail first!" The uproar resulted in gifts of some 150 beds to St. Joseph's.

Last week Father Rice moved into St.Joseph's himself, began celebrating his daily Mass in its tiny chapel. His down-&-outers could attend, or not, as they pleased. Unlike some other charitarians, Father Rice asks neither hymn singing, work nor money from his guests, declaring that he aims to give them "the privacy which most social agencies disallow." His flophouse costs $500 a month, which Father Rice raises, keeps in an unlocked drawer. The drawer has never been robbed.

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