Mutual aid: material and spiritual
This spring, CTA members and friends are reading Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next) by Dean Spade. This is part of our 2021 National Campaign; the Mutual Aid study group is one of two tracks that we are offering in the first half of the year. (Learn more about how to get involved here.)
Spade begins the book by defining mutual aid as “collective coordination to meet each other’s needs, usually from an awareness that the systems we have in place are not going to meet them”; in fact, the systems in place often cause the crises or make them worse. Every social movement practices mutual aid. Examples include the ride-sharing system of the Montgomery bus boycott or putting drinking water in the desert for migrants crossing the border. Mutual aid means something more specific than just “helping each other out.” It conscientizes people (makes them aware of social conditions) and mobilizes them for transformative mass action like protests, strikes, or boycotts. Furthermore, it is not sponsored by the state or by philanthropists.
St. Joseph House, New York
Zach, Claire, myself, and other CTA members have roots in the Catholic Worker movement, which practices mutual aid. Drawing on those roots, Zach and I believe that it’s an important framework for CTA — not because CTA members don’t practice mutual aid (quite the contrary!), but because we don’t always think of our work through that lens. By identifying our work as mutual aid, we emphasize our agency and authority in contrast to the Catholic hierarchy. Understanding ourselves as a community capable of providing for ourselves underlines our belief that we are the church; we the laity have the ability and authority to worship together and provide for each other. Finally, by identifying our work as mutual aid, we can imagine further ways of resisting the church-as-empire, an empire that entwines with other empires: the hierarchical Roman Catholic Church provides spiritual and material aid to “secular” empires like the U.S. government and white supremacy. We can imagine and realize ways to meet all our needs, both spiritual and material.
Our mutual aid practices may involve things that Spade identifies in his book, like sharing food or writing to prisoners. This type of mutual aid enacts the Corporal Works of Mercy: Catholic ethics center our obligation to feed the hungry, shelter the homeless, visit the imprisoned, and so forth. Expanding beyond Spade’s explanation of material or corporal mutual aid, though, we believe that mutual aid can also be spiritual. Catholics also engage in mutual aid practices that enact the Spiritual Works of Mercy: we must comfort the afflicted, instruct the doubtful, admonish sinners, and so forth. Both the Corporal and Spiritual Works are invaluable to our movement — and, really, to any movement.
Though CTA is a nonprofit organization, mutual aid is still an appropriate term for the ways that many of our members (and other dissident Catholics) provide for each other’s spiritual needs in practice. Since Vatican II, the Catholic left has practiced spiritual mutual aid. At the grassroots of the church, people gather in egalitarian house churches and prayer groups. They consecrate the Eucharist communally or at the hands of a person who would be denied ordination by the Catholic hierarchy. The framework from Dean Spade’s first chapter can demonstrate how these practices meet his definition of mutual aid:
“Mutual aid projects work to meet survival needs and build shared understanding about why people do not have what they need.” For many, religious community is a survival need. We need to be in spaces where we can worship God and share fellowship with each other. As we all know, though, Catholic churches often fail to meet our spiritual survival needs. Women and LGBTQ+ people often cannot attend Mass without encountering language and theologies that dehumanize them. Church institutions are often racist, segregated, and agents of gentrification. They are often inaccessible to disabled people. For many reasons, churches fail to give people what they need. Spiritual mutual aid projects therefore bring people together to meet their needs and identify why “official” Catholic spaces fail them. By gendering God as a woman in feminist liturgies or celebrating the Eucharist at the hands of a queer person, for instance, we recognize the harm that divinizing hetero-masculinity has done to us. We may then understand that the church at large needs to change liturgical language and ordain women and LGBTQ+ people. Mutual aid projects spark common understanding of what needs to change.
“Mutual aid projects mobilize people, expand solidarity, and build movements.” In the context of movement ecology, mutual aid projects are typically alternatives to existing systems. Movement ecology articulates how strategies for social change weave together like strands in the fabric of a movement; one cannot be separated from the others. This part of Spade’s definition points to the ways that alternative structures or mutual aid can activate people to engage in another strategy like direct action. Alternative spiritual communities may mobilize people to change the systems that have exiled them from canonical Catholic churches. The people may decide to march together after Mass, tithe to community groups, or come up with creative protest strategies during group discussions. The spiritual community may become a hub for people to recharge, support each other, and connect to the divine; it may also help people connect to activist collectives. Coffee hour becomes a natural setting for networking and organizing. Furthermore, people seek out alternative communities for different reasons, so by worshipping together, people learn about each other’s concerns and develop solidarity. We connect across the diversity of struggles and oppressions that people experience in the Catholic Church. Communal intercessions or prayers of the faithful may become the grounds for solidarity: we hear about the struggles in each other’s lives and together pray for justice, healing, and hope. Movements can grow out from a makeshift chapel in someone’s living room.
“Mutual aid projects are participatory, solving problems through collective actions rather than waiting for saviors.” Alternative spiritual communities recognize that we need spiritual sustenance now. We cannot wait for systemic change to feed ourselves, so we co-create solutions. This is both practical and prefigurative, showing the way to the church we want. The pope is not our savior. At the same time, nonprofits (even progressive nonprofits) are not our saviors. CTA chapters, which often worship together, are grassroots and autonomous. Inside and outside of CTA spaces, Catholics practice spiritual mutual aid that does ask for diocesan sanction or nonprofit status. In the Rio Grande Valley, many CTA folks banded together after a hostile conservative takeover of their church in 2003. They still worship together in intentional community.
Members of my former intentional community gather around our kitchen table to celebrate a religious holiday together in 2019.
Most CTA folks have worshipped in a community that practices spiritual mutual aid at some point in their lives. Understanding this as mutual aid can help us further articulate its radical potential. It can also inspire us to practice other forms of mutual aid. In the Pacific Northwest, some CTA folks are doing this, providing material mutual aid to unsheltered communities.
CTA hasn’t often centered material needs like food and shelter. This may be because our membership has been predominantly middle-class, but it’s also because we have focused on challenging theologies and church structures. I’m not suggesting that we abandon those goals: deepening our commitment to all forms of mutual aid could help us change the church. The material and the spiritual are deeply connected; theology should be entwined with practice. For instance, CTA members are deeply committed to justice for LGBTQ+ folks; we could shelter LGBTQ+ Catholic youth who have been kicked out of their homes. We are committed to racial justice; we could organize shelter with low-income black and brown communities that are displaced when a diocese sells church buildings to luxury developers. We are committed to women’s rights; we could drive women in our communities to faraway hospitals or clinics when they are unable to access necessary health services at a local Catholic hospital.
We don’t need to call social services to do these things. Doing so distances ourselves from the suffering members of our community and professionalizes care that we can all provide for each other. The other day, a woman at a Catholic Worker soup kitchen told me that she’d seen dozens of government-run food charities collapse due to inefficiency, bureaucracy, and “savior” frameworks, but the Catholic Worker kitchen had survived for more than thirty years because the people provided for each other. We should both keep Christ rooms in our own homes and worship collectively. We should allow both our spiritual and material needs to nudge us toward action. This is both our Christian obligation and a strategic framework that can strengthen the movement for church reform.
We are reading about mutual aid this spring because this framework can make us a stronger movement. We are already meeting survival needs, building shared understanding, mobilizing each other, expanding solidarity, and collectively solving problems. By identifying this work as mutual aid, we might become more empowered individuals and communities. We might better practice being church.
