AN AMSTERDAM STORY!

Lo and behold, there comes a rainy day and you are indoors sitting cosily in one of the cafés lining Amsterdam's narrow grey streets talking to enlightened people – read, international journalists. You naively reveal you are a religious person and you think your religious values have a place in the Habermasean public sphere of rational democratic dialogue. For sure, before long, you end up wishing you hadn't believed in the citizen's right to freedom of expression. The reaction to your argument is similar to canned peas, one exactly the same as the other. First, there is some embarrassment, some slight shaking of the head from side to side which leaves you in doubt as to whether it is in agreement to what you said or not. Then you receive unspoken messages, and some not-so-unspoken ones. Chill, baby. Take it easy. We do want no fanatics here.


I chilled till my lips froze at the mention of religion. Of course, as a journalsim student I know that the media world over has harped onto associating religion with conflict and terrorism. But, I mused secretly to myself one day, what about the other end of the stick? If all religion in politics could be easily labeled as fanaticism, how could you explain Martin Luther King? Or Gandhi? Or Dorothy Day? The last one must have caught you off guard. Well, I added her because I 'mused' in front of a portrait hung up on the walls of the Catholic Worker House in Dantestraat, in the south of Amsterdam where I roam around, officially as a student, but unofficially as a curious tourist. It is a portrait of Gandhi, King and Day looking out piously from behind a plain glass framing.






An Israeli volunteer at the CW house. Portrait Behind: Gandhi and Dorothy Day



The Catholic Worker is a house of hospitality founded in the United States by the American journalist Dorothy Day who converted from communism to the Catholic religious faith just before the World War. The movement which, after Day's death, has no official headquarters or visible leader has spread to many countries in Europe. Each house is as unique as the other, for they all follow different ideals and activities, but most are centered around the idea of hospitality – its doors open to all irrespective of age, gender and religion. In Amsterdam the house welcomes new immigrants to Netherlands who have nowhere else to go and is located in two adjacent apartments in a not-so-rich suburbs of the city. Seventeen people live in this house, including a political Chrisitan anarchist and a not-so-political democrat. Cats roam around the library, occasionally leaping in between book shelves adorned with books on non-violence, anarchism, the Catholic faith and yes, Mahatma Gandhi.


Of course, an Indian is curious to know how Gandhi got in there. “Oh, that is quite easy. Im sure both Gandhi and Dorothy would say that we 'should live simply so that others can simply live'. Yeah, that's the ideal of this house,” said Gerard Moorman, who started the house in 1988. Well, I pointed out, there is this curious mixture of political activism and spiritual values as well in the Catholic Worker that Gandhi tried to live out in his life at the Sabarmati ashram.


The Catholic Worker house in Amsterdam is called Jeannette Noel Huis and now has three permanent adult members including Wibo Mes, Frits ter Kuile and his wife Aiyun. Like Gandhi, Frits integrates both his personal religious beliefs and political opinions. “When I was young I wanted to be a hero,” says Frits laughing heartily at himself. In the eighties, he gave up his studies in genetical engineering to live in the woods next to a NATO base near Woensdrecht, a village in the south of Netherlands to protest against NATO's decision to employ more nuclear weapons in Europe.




Frits (second from left) and gang at the Catholic Worker House, Amsterdam



“Being a Christian anrachist and pacifist who likes Tolstoy and Gandhi a lot, I felt very attracted to the Catholic Worker movement and joined the community in Amsterdam in 1996,” says Frits who now lives in the house with wife Aiyun and childern Jia Jia and Onno.


Political activities range from offering hospitatlity to illegal immigrants to non-violent protests at the deportation center in Schiphol airport where scores of immigrants “are incarcerated not because they did a criminal act, but because they lack papers. For many years, till they stopped allowing visitors, we also visited the prisoners, many of them from India,” says Frits.




Amsterdam Schiphol Airport Entrance







Behind the Barbed wires: Protests at the Schiphol airport deportation center



The protests at the deportation center has highly political and relgious roots. Anarchism is a deeply held political value in many Catholic Worker houses. For Christian anarchists like Frits, Gandhi's ideal of non-violent non-cooperation with the state is of ultimate importance. For, the core of this political ideology is the primacy of human freedom, where no coercive force by institutional hierarchy such as the government or monopoly capitalism has any place.


I visted the house several times to get to know the people. Once as I was talking to an Iranian political refugee staying at the house, he revealed that the government had not granted him a residence permit even after waiting for seven years. To my surprise Frits interrupted and remarked firmly, “He has a residence permit from God.”


This anarchism is supplemented by personalism or personal responsibility to care for the neighbour, “At the core of our works is Mathew 25 where Christ tells us that what we do to the least of our brothers and sisters, we do to Him,” points out Frits.


Inspired by philosophers such as Emmanuel Mounier and Jacques Maritain, the Catholic Worker protests nonviolently against the anti-immigration policies of the government and espouses the idea that the foreigner in the country is to be welcomed as Christ, and not treated as unwanted, imprisoned and deported as per the government's will. Dorothy Day remarked candidly in The Catholic Worker newspaper which she started in New York in the 1930s and which still sells at a penny a copy, “The problem of authority and freedom is one of the greatest problems of the day.” Gandhi's idea seemed to echo in Dorothy's life as she tried to live out her life according to these high ideals till the very end. “The oppressor can be overcome by spiritual values,” said Day.


I attended a few protests at the deportation center with Frits and gang, including nineteen year-old German Sophie Hinger who is a volunteer at the house for a year. “Wow”, I thought,”These people actually live out their Gandhian mixture of politics and spiritual values every single day of their lives.” The movement is amazing, adds Sophie who does not consider herself religious or an anarchist but admires the willingness of the Catholic Workers to take in immigrants into their own homes. This, especially so in a land where immigration laws have become tougher over the last few years.


For more on Dorothy Day, visit http://www.catholicworker.org/dorothyday/photos.cfm