The first volunteer
Egan, Eileen
forget themselves in dogged work. In hearing the elemental call of Islam, we might remember our God and ourselves. We might remember that God's cosmic wisdom, His Word which has created and...
...Peter felt that his call for Houses of Hospitality would find a response in each diocese and even in each parish...
...Second, there are no airplanes in or near New York that could be used to fly New York doctors anyplace else...
...Anyway that, s what the two of them have .accomplished as of this writing and I hate to think of what they will have run up as of this reading...
...Peggy Scherer led the procession carrying an immense Easter candle...
...They like their friends more than they like ill-paid people they don't know who may have to sacrifice their lives in the cause of humanitarianism for the rich...
...He attended Mass dally when that was possible and led the evening prayer of Compline dally when he was at Tivoli or Maryhouse...
...The Mass ended with the singing of "Salve Regina," loud and clear as Stanley liked it, "Mother of mercy, Our Queen, we greet you...
...The trust is that there are no doctors anywhere in the world except New York...
...He listened to Maurin's call for a renewal of Christian life and of society through gentle personalism and through a three-fold program of Houses of Hospitality, Farming Communities and Round-Table Discussions...
...He never married...
...He became what Dorothy Day called "our dear guest-master" to countless visitors and to the people who came to the PAX and Peacemaker Conferences held at Tivoli...
...Stanley has left a unique record of the Catholic Worker...
...We, especially Christians, are as yet too smallhearted, to, unimaginative, to body-forth into our domestic let alone foreign policies the greatness of the God of Jesus--and so, in history, that God appears rather as victim than as one in charge...
...The discussions started immediately, with Peter bringing Carlton Hayes, Parker Moon and other speakers to the Fifteenth Street apartment...
...Many settled in for stints of five or ten years...
...For Christians, too, the meaning of Incarnation is too great...
...In later years, his face was fuller and never seemed to lose a sunny expression...
...And after our life of exile, show us the blessed fruit of your womb, Jesus...
...He was giving the homily at the Mass of the Resurrection for Stanley Vishnewski of.the Catholic Worker at Nativity Church in New York's lower East Side...
...Stanley, with his gentle manner and quick humor, was a born reconciler...
...They were not havens of peace, since their residents were of wildly different types...
...Two great surgeons, specialists in incredibly expensive operations for incredibly rich ex-dictators, rush out the doors of their New York hospital en route to save the Shah in Mexico...
...He took to photography and set up a dark room where he developed the photographs that became a pictorial history of the Catholic Worker movement...
...This Stanley did for his entire adult life...
...Some participants in these feasts of pure reason doubtless make the journey by more exotic means, but your average, Sir Luke Fildes, plain American millionaire sawbones, gets there by air...
...Stanley loved music and found joy in it while recovering from a severe heart attack seven years before his death...
...Until we have swallowed the big aborning troth here, not simply in unconscious body and blood, but awakened conseiously, our brothers and sisters in this distressed world will not know the Messiah's Kingdom has come--a second time, to fill time...
...This happened not only at the New York houses, but in the forty or more houses that have sprung up at various times throughout the country...
...Aincha heard...
...It was only a small recognition of the devotion he had for his task that poems published in Commonweal were awarded first place in the Catholic Press Association competition for the last two years--in fact, winning two of the fkst three places each year...
...Stanley walked into our apartment on East Fifteenth Street...
...Fights were constant...
...Volunteers who joined the movement made no corn21 December 1979:709tnitment...
...Invited to share a tiny apartment with young men volunteering at the Worker, he recounted a night without sleep and shared not only with the volunteers but with squads of cockroaches...
...We haven's got a single cockroach," one of the young men living in the apartment told him...
...He came and went in our office with the same quiet grace that marked the poems he most liked to publish...
...At Tivoli he wrote a history of the Catholic Worker movement entitled Wings of the Dawn...
...When no houses of hospitality materialized and no farming communities sprang up, the Catholic Worker responded in its own way...
...Music up, titles roll...
...Stanley Vishnewski, R.oI.P...
...The dream sleeps...
...His gifts were often called upon in what he called" our Houses of Hostility...
...THE FIRST VOLUNTEER DEATH OF A CATHOLIC WORKER BAr i ~ ANY CAME and went, but Stanley stayed," said Pl the Rev...
...HUMANITARIANS AMOK KISSINGER, ROCKEFELLER, & THE SHAH no known treatment allegedly exists outside New York City...
...POETRY EDITORS For no less than sixteen years, John Fandel has served as poetry editor at Commonweal...
...Earlier this year, John proposed to pass the editorship on to others, and with this issue that change takes place...
...It was a piano concert by Douglas Finch and was not called off...
...After ihe closing of the funeral home, a stream of people walked back to Maryhouse to find the concert still in progress...
...While most of the Catholic Worker family went to the nearby funeral home, a few stayed behind to hear Chopin and Beethoven...
...It was Peter's idea," wrote Stanley in an introduction to Peter Maurin's Easy Essays, "that the voluntary poor should live with the involuntary poor to give them hope and love...
...Take us to Kennedy Airport...
...I myself am a volunteer...
...Rockefeller and Kissinger obviously practice selective humanitarianism...
...Early pictures of Stanley show him as a thin young man with a high-bridged nose and a stand-up mass of wavy hair...
...He contributed an introduction to Dorothy Day's On Pilgrimage: The Sixties, and edited selections from her work under the title Meditations...
...The wake for Stanley (now referred to as "the viewing of the body"), was held at Funeraria Buen Pastor on Second Street and Second Avenue...
...First slum apartments, and then whole houses, became havens for the homeless in New York's lower East Side...
...When, at a leftist meeting, a woman berated him for spreading religious propaganda, asserting loudly, "I don't believe in GOd," Stanley responded, "I don't believe in women...
...EILEEN EGAN (Eileen Egan, an associate editor of the Catholic Worker and UN representative of Pax Christi, is currently writing a history of Catholic Relief Services...
...After the pictorial history of the Catholic Worker was put on slides, Stanley was invited to universities and groups throughout the United States and Canada to deliver the slide lecture...
...There ain't no Kennedy airport no more...
...He would often join Dorothy Day at Maryhouse to listen to broadcasts of concerts and operas...
...After a reminder that St...
...Among the present editors were Frank Donovan, Rita Corbin, Peggy Scherer, Dan Mauk, Kathleen Clarkson, Robert Ellsberg and Katherine Temple and among past editors Robert Ludlow, Tom Sullivan, Gerry Griffin, Tom Cornell, Kieran Dugan, Patrick Jordan and former Chicago Catholic Worker editor James O'Gara...
...Ponsot forPoetry...
...After the Catholic Worker bought the farm in Tivoli, he moved there and spent the greater part of his time after 1964 in the country setting, There he wrote his articles and reviews for the paper, of which he was one of the editors...
...He expressed his gratitude to the author for a "spiritual guidebook for those of us who will never be able to make the physical trip to Assisi...
...The Catholic Worker movement came into being when, at the suggestion of George Shuster, then managing editor of Commonweal, Peter Maurin came to meet, Dorothy Day in December 1932...
...Geoffrey Gneuss, O.P...
...His hairline receded but his grizzly gray hair was still thick and wavy...
...The next morning, the simple gray coffin was carried in procession by Stanley's two families to Nativity Church...
...Odd, when you think of it, the disappearance of all those medi-planes between Shangri-La and JFK...
...For finally in this provisional in-between-time we dwell in, Eucharist is not so different from the Prophet's sense of God's "real presence" in the vein of the neck--that is, unconsciously in the blood, not yet in awakened word and deed...
...The second assumption contradicts the experience of every American medical DON'T SUPPOSE David Rockefeller and Henry Kissinger set out to get that Marine corporal killed in Pakistan or the embassy folk terrorized in Teheran...
...Teresa of Avila described life in these terms, Stanley gave details of his own experience when he "came in from Tivoli to find the house on Chrystie Street filled...
...He was from a Lithuanian family in Brooklyn...
...He stayed on until his death of heart failure at the age of 63...
...For those Who come after him...
...Over that extended period, volunteers had appeared, served, and gone on to other things, to be replaced in an ever-renewing stream of new blood...
...Marie Ponsot has also published a volume, True Minds, in the Pocket Poets series and broadcasts a monthly radio review of poetry...
...In all of these, he carried the message of the Gospel, of peacemaking, of voluntary poverty, of hospitality and service to the homeless who are "other Christs...
...We open above the credits...
...Deen has previously reviewed for Commonweal, Ms...
...The regular Friday evening meeting at Maryhouse that Friday, November 16, was planned as an unusual break in the series of lectures and discussions...
...It is an assignment he has always fulfilled with extraordinary care and attention...
...Stanley became a friend of Peter Maurin, a Frenchman versed in history, in particular the history of the Catholic church...
...They hail a cab...
...Close up and jump cuts from doc one to doc two: consternation, bafflement, frustration, pecuniary trembling...
...He was seventeen years old...
...So much our adventing Eucharistic rite tells us...
...In a flacked-up statement issued on his behalf, David Rockefeller reiterated the argument he presumably, or at least for the record, used with the secretary of state and the president of the United States, namely that he was motivated solely by "humanitarian" reasons in demanding that the Georgia Peach and the once and future.corporation lawyer admit David's and Henry's great and good friend, the well-known tyrant, torturer and bon vivant, Shah Mohammed Riza Pahlevi, late of the Peacock Throne and now allegedly suffering from some exotic form of alleged cancer for which convention ever held in Honolulu, Pago-Pago, Athens, Paris, London, Samarkand, and other famed centers of American medical knowledge...
...This mass vanishing could well provide the plot for "Airport '80...
...Some stayed for a summer, some for a year...
...Community prayer meant much to him and his enthusiastic singing of the "Salve Regina" at the conclusion of Compline is a strong memory for anyone who participated in it...
...In the same issue is a reprint of a 1967 article "A Night at an Uncomfortable Inn...
...Even those whose dependence on Providence is as utter as that Of Mother Teresa have expressed wonderment at the continued existence of a movement grounded on so frail and uncertain a basis as the appearance of new volunteers as old ones left...
...Aging was kind to him...
...Stanley's last lecture and slide show was at Maryhouse on Friday, November 2nd, less than two wee[s before he died...
...It's too big a truth, stumbling block and scandal, in the face of all those manifest dualisms that battling wits empirically experience between each other, in themselves, and with the Lord of worlds...
...He was our first volunteer," Dorothy Day recalled...
...Referring to the work of the volunteers, he joked...
...in articles, in photographs and slides, and in the extended history still to be published...
...The last issue of the paper to appear in his lifetime contained Stanley's review of Raphael Brown's True Joy from Assisi...
...To return to the real world, you can believe the humanitarian argument if you want to, but deep in my heart what I believe is that the deciding arguments 21 December 1979:711...
...Paul says, all nature groans...
...The new editors will be Rosemary Deen and Marie Ponsot, who both teach at Queens College of the City University of New York and have completed a book together on the practice and teaching of writing...
...Stanley enjoyed selling the Catholic Worker (official price a penny a copy) on the streets of New York...
...It was not long before the Catholic Worker had found farms near New York and Stanley dividedhis time between the city and the various farming communities...
...The appearance of the Catholic Worker newspaper, and its distribution in Union Square on May Day 1933 is considered to be the birthday of the movement...
...I Of several minds: Frank Getlein They slipped into the auditorium and sat quietly until the playing stopped...
...How about Grand Central...
...A member of Shem's race, a son of Abraham, Jesse's shoot, Jesus spoke in parables of the Kingdom, a word of boundless love, a word somewhere stuck in our throats, as yet unspoken and inactive in this world...
...Stanley Vishnewski, who died at Maryhouse, on East Third Street on November 14, 1979, joined Dorothy Day shortly after the founding of the Catholic Worker movement...
...The ones you see are all married with large families...
...Like Ammon Hennacy, he was always ready with the unexpected retort...
...In a period of depression and massive unemployment, he felt sure thatFarming Communities (which would serve as agronomic universities) would be initiated, since, he pointed out, "There is no unemployment on the land...
...not a few aspiring poets profited from his acute advice and gentle encouragement...
...Largely unwitring, we also swallow, under elements of bread and wine, God's wish to hallow earth and body more than we can fathom...
...R was just one of those things...
...Of this secret hidden since the foundation of the universe, both Judaism and Islam speak in fragmentary and varied ways, but finally they cannot swallow it as Christians will...
...I haven't made up my mind whether I'll stay or not...
...We might remember that God's cosmic wisdom, His Word which has created and hallowed the material world, chose to sow earthly soil by taking flesh...
...Stanley's rock-like faith as a follower of Jesus never faltered...
...He worked without pay and for a long time he had to walk over the bridge from Williamsburg and up to Fifteenth Street...
...The magazine's readers profited from the scrupulous judgment he used in sifting through the many poems submitted here...
...Humanitarianism for the immensely rich and recently powerful, anti-humanitarianism for clerks, typists, diplomats, and Marine corporals...
...He had discovered some early photographs of Dorothy Day, one showing her as an infant with three generations of her family...
...It was held on a Friday evening, and the simple funeral home was filled with Stanley's family, Commonweal: 710two brothers and a sister and nieces and nephews, as well as his Catholic Worker family...
...Tamar Hennessy, Dorothy Day's daughter, always close to Stanley, came with two of her daughters...
...No planes, no airport...
...He began coming in every day to do what needed doing, selling the paper and going on errands...
...O gracious, O loving, O sweet Virgin Mary...
...Don't need it...
...Well, it's one way to look at the world and I guess we all do so one way or another and to some extent...
...He came during the f'u'st month after we had distributed the Catholic Worker on Union Square...
...For this, coming birth, as St...
...The humanitarian argument is based on two interesting assumptions...
...The driver, a Central Casting New York hackle, removes his cigar, rolls up his shaggy dog eyes, and growls, "Whatsamatter, doc...
...But he has left another record, the record of a unique life...
Vol. 106 • December 1979 • No. 23
