The Church Steps of St. Paul the Apostle

Shirina Braun

11/14/17

Blog: The Church Steps of St. Paul the Apostle

Passing the stairs of the Church of St. Paul the Apostle on my way to Fordham every day, the daylight brings attention to the warn in, filthy exterior of the concrete material which shapes them. As I pass these same church steps in the evening and observe homeless individuals using them as beds, it is difficult not to recognize the irony of the situation. These stairs are situated, unguarded by gates or fences, at the buzzing corner of Columbus Avenue and West 60th Street, allowing and facilitating these stairs to serve as both an access and receiving point for the public. Though the steps’ flat, well worn, and grimy surface offers an elevated space for homeless people to lie at night without fear of eviction, the irony of an impoverished and vulnerable group of people sleeping on the cold, filthy steps of a church that supposedly “strives for a faithful response to the call from Jesus Christ in the contemporary world,” is not lost on me (www.stpaultheapostle.org). This paper will shed light on the steps’ vertically structured, concrete material, and haggard and filthy exterior (positioned as it is with open access to the public) as formally relating to the steps’ dual functions as both an access point for churchgoers and a receiving point for the homeless, and how these formal and functional observations reflect Catholic social activist Dorothy Day’s critique of the Catholic church as accommodating itself to the individualism of modern America.

There is a juxtaposition between what the steps are supposed to be, both physically and spiritually elevating people towards God, and what they actually act as most evenings: makeshift beds for the homeless. Though the vertical structure of the steps physically raises the homeless from the streets at night, they also elevate and separate churchgoers from realities of the suffering of those “below” them as they climb these steps Sunday mornings, passing individuals in need, usually without pause, on their way to worship. According to Day, Catholics often use the Christian idea that poverty and suffering will always be around us to avoid fighting for social justice and to focus on individual salvation. Yet, Day argues that Christ did not mean by this inevitable suffering that we should remain silent in the face of injustice, but that we must try to account for injustices of our less fortunate “brothers” from a place of our Godly love (Day 205). Day sees that our natural selfishness can only be transformed by a love “that demands renunciation” of physical, spiritual, and emotional comforts. In response to the dual functionality of the steps given its flat surface and elevated structure, Day would argue that it is not enough to merely tolerate others as the church does by allowing the homeless to sleep there, choosing not to block off the steps at night; the church should insist on its members actively making significant sacrifices, eliminating both physical and spiritual distance between themselves and others, bringing this world closer to its transformation into the kingdom of God (Day 256).

The reality of how homeless people use these church steps each night is a grim reminder of the church’s responsibility and ineffectiveness in serving those in need. The steps’ solid, concrete material represents Day’s notion of radical love as a sturdy foundation to the Catholicism she believes in. However, the steps’ worn down, dirty physique and open street access show how the message of the church became “filthy” over time, warping to suit the individualistic mentalities of a selfish modern American public. As Day explains, “I felt that the Church was the Church of the poor... but at the same time, I felt that it did not set its face against a social order which made so much charity in the present sense of the word necessary” (Day 210). Day sees the church’s eagerness to accommodate itself to American ways of being as harmful to the church’s mission to truly help those in need, as this “modernized” church fails to make the sacrifices necessary to address the broken social system which facilitates so much poverty and homelessness to begin with. Though Day sees the Catholic message of selfless love and human equality as being as fundamentally strong as the concrete steps, the church’s passive tolerance to the homeless problem, which quite literally sits right in front of them, reflects the individualistic mentality that the church embraces. It is the feet of the masses of those the church accommodates itself to which stain these steps, and Day would see the modernized focus of the church, which draws in such masses of New Yorkers, as utterly in opposition to her radically loving Catholicism.

The observations and analyses made are not meant to condemn the Catholic church, but rather to present an opportunity to explore how the form and function of these church steps reflect Dorothy Day’s critique of the church as accommodating itself to American individualism, and as not living up to their own principles as the radically loving and community-centered institution that she understands the Catholic Church to be. The reality is that the social teachings of the church have not “transformed” our world in Day’s sense; these homeless people sleeping on the cold, dirty steps are reminders of how far we need to go, and how necessary the social teachings are, but that our unwillingness to make radical sacrifices hold us back from truly transforming this world into the kingdom of God. Day recognizes the importance of sharing the suffering of the impoverished, promoting community, and fighting for social justice as her duty as a good Christian, and the steps of the Church of St. Paul the Apostle both formally and functionally suggest, as Day does, that a certain Catholic anti-Americanism is necessary for upholding these Catholic ideals.

Work Cited

Day, Dorothy. The Long Loneliness: The Autobiography of the Legendary Catholic Social Activist. HarperCollins Publishers, 1952.

The Church of Saint Paul the Apostle, Christian Brothers Services, www.stpaultheapostle.org/#.