Young adults and intentional community
Call To Action’s intentional community program at the Rye House in Minneapolis is a new direction for our movement, but it’s an obvious next step. Intentional communities have been a major part of progressive Catholic life in the 20th and 21st centuries. Indeed, they’ve been central to Catholic life through the millennia. Monasteries, communes, and co-housing can all be intentional communities; communal living evolves with the times, meeting new needs. As a young adult, I see how my peers are creating new ways of living together. Today’s young adults are doing what every generation has done in its own way: finding countercultural meaning in communal life.
Robert (left) and his Alliance for Catholic Education community
Many year-of-service programs for young adults center on intentional community. Participants live together while working at organizations in the area. A shared home allows volunteers to bond, process intense experiences, share labor, and live simply. Programs like the Jesuit Volunteer Corps are common next steps for CTA young adults who’ve just finished college. Robert McCarthy (2021 Re/Generator) participated in the Alliance for Catholic Education program through the University of Notre Dame. The program recruits and forms a new generation of teachers to serve under-resourced Catholic schools. Robert taught in the Diocese of Stockton in California, where he lived in community with other Catholic school teachers. It was a supportive place to grow as a person, teacher, and Catholic, he says. The community baked together and practiced hospitality for their extended community. These experiences are short-term, but many alums of such programs maintain close ties with their former community-mates.
Dominic’s co-op community at the University of Michigan
Other CTA young adults seek intentional community as they enter the workforce. Dominic Surya (2019 Re/Generator) lives at the Covenantal Community of University Church, a co-op affiliated with his UCC/Disciples of Christ church on the South Side of Chicago. In 1979, church members founded the co-op to be “inter-generational, inter-racial, and inter-economic class.” Dominic also spent one summer in a student co-op at the University of Michigan, which has one of the largest student co-op networks in the country. Communal living provides “easy access to people,” he says: you can socialize spontaneously and build routines that prevent isolation. It’s also affordable, which matters to him as a young adult who works in the non-profit sector. Finally, living at the Covenantal Community gives him an opportunity to increase access to affordable housing for other people in the neighborhood: as a voting member of the co-op, he has a say in which applicants are accepted for membership.
Intentional community often sustains countercultural activism. Politicized intentional communities typically resist hyper-individualism and consumerism, unite like-minded people, and provide mutual aid to members who take arrestable risks during protests. The Catholic Worker movement is one framework that appeals to many young adults in CTA. Our Executive Director Zach Johnson co-founded a Minneapolis Catholic Worker community over ten years ago. Re/Generation Coordinator Claire Hitchins lives at Casa Alma, a Catholic Worker community in Charlottesville, Virginia. And I’ve lived at two Catholic Worker houses: Maryhouse in New York City and Su Casa Catholic Worker in Chicago. Some Catholic Worker houses of hospitality do not call themselves “intentional communities,” but they have many hallmarks of intentional community life; workers live simply, practice the Works of Mercy, and communally resist oppressive forces like capitalism and imperialism. Young adults join the Catholic Worker movement because it’s a cohesive philosophy that demands both individual and collective transformation. You don’t make vows, either, which appeals to young adults who want to follow the Gospel without pledging obedience to the Catholic hierarchy.
CTA members and friends gather in the garden at Su Casa
CTA young adults have lived in convents, both discerning religious life and co-habitating with sisters as part of inter-generational initiatives like Nuns & Nones. They have found homes in secular, ecumenical, or multi-faith communities. Some prioritize living with people who share their LGBTQ identity. Others have spent time on rural communes.
Personally, I’m drawn to intentional community because I don’t want to live by myself. I want to be among people who understand me deeply. I never found those people in my small hometown, so I’ve sought them elsewhere; like many college-educated young adults, I’ve lived in a handful of big cities, moving every few years for work or school, trying to find my place. I long to feel rooted in place and among people. Intentional community is my attempt to ground myself.
Ultimately, Call To Action wants to be part of a world in which people share and redistribute resources. Our members have always lived their values in community, from chapters to house churches to communal life. By building intentional community, we are making new homes for the young adults in our movement.
