The RFT cover story about Carl's Friends - The Catholic Worker Community

Cool to be Kind
Voluntary poverty, sustainable agriculture, helping one's fellow man. A Catholic Worker community quietly grows in north St. Louis.
By MOLLY LANGMUIR

The sky over north St. Louis is overcast as Carolyn Griffeth straps Finn Mateo, her two-year-old son, into a car seat in her beat-up station wagon. They're headed to Walgreens, a store Griffeth would rather not support, but she needs a low-flow nipple for a baby bottle.
"You could make one," her friend Trish Grim had suggested.

"How?" Griffeth had asked.

Walgreens it is.

The house where Griffeth and her family live has a huge garden, a picnic table in the yard and "Instead of War" posters affixed to the fence. It is a few blocks north of downtown, near where Tucker Boulevard curves abruptly and becomes Florissant Avenue. Not long ago a young woman's body was left in a Dumpster down the street, but the event didn't attract much attention in the neighborhood, a place where houses are crumbling in on themselves, posters on rusty billboards are left to peel off and entire blocks are covered over with grass.

This wasn't the life that Griffeth, a small woman with auburn hair and freckles, imagined for herself. More than a decade ago, at age 21, she enrolled in the medical school at Washington University. She'd been raised in Pecatonica, Illinois in what she describes as a dysfunctional middle-class family. Her mother was a social worker, her stepfather a horse trader.

Three years later Griffeth embraced religious faith, anarchy and voluntary poverty. She dropped out of med school, leaving behind a $70,000 debt she intended never to pay. Instead of becoming a doctor, she became a Catholic Worker.

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