Meet Dr. Arthur Falls
In New York, in 1933, Dorothy Day co-founded with Peter Maurin the first Catholic Worker house of hospitality. Three years later Dr. Arthur Falls, an African-American, founded a Catholic Worker “school” in Chicago. “The comparisons to be made are stark: Dorothy Day, the great mother of Catholic alt-left thought, was a celebrity in life and is now on the path to canonization. Falls was obscure even before his body reached the coffin,” writes Nate Timmons in Black Catholic Messenger.
Falls died in 2000 at age 98. The physician’s remarkable life is captured in the book Healing the Racial Divide (Pickwick Publications, 2014) written by Lincoln Rice, a moral theologian who earned his PhD at Marquette University. Rice’s book is largely based on Falls’ unpublished memoir.
Dr. Falls, a graduate of the medical school of Northwestern University, was a surgeon and an activist for desegregation but what brought him into contact with Dorothy Day, according to Timmons, was the masthead of the Catholic Worker newspaper. “He first corresponded with Day following the advent of the newspaper in 1933, suggesting that they change the two White figures on the masthead to reflect an interracial vision. Day agreed, acted, and quickly earned Falls’ respect. He was likely the first major African-American figure in the Catholic Worker Movement, and by 1936 he had started its first house in Chicago.”
Later he wrote letters to New York’s The Catholic Worker that became a regular feature, under the caption “Letter from Chicago.”
Falls was committed to the first of the three pillars of the Catholic Worker Movement: “Round Table Discussions for the Clarification of Thought,”1 which was the focus of his Chicago “school.” At his own expense he established two CW storefront locations in the city to feed the poor.
According to the promotional material for Rice’s book, Dr. Falls “integrated theology, the social sciences, and personal experience to compose a salve that was capable of not only integrating neighborhoods but also eradicating the segregation that existed in Chicago hospitals. Falls was able to reframe the basic truths of the Christian faith in a way that unleashed their prophetic power. He referred to those Catholics who promoted segregation in Chicago as believers in the ‘mythical body of Christ’ as opposed to the mystical body of Christ.”
Rice recently gave a talk in Chicago, saying “I still have hope that Arthur Falls will gain wider traction. From everything I've read about him and his life, all the people that knew him, and the interviews he gave—to me, everything points to him being a saint and I see nothing to detract from that viewpoint.”2
The other two pillars: Houses of Hospitality for Learning to Do the Acts of Love; and Farming Communes to Promote Worker Ownership of the Means of Production.
As reported in Black Catholic Messenger