Friendship House

Friendship House is a missionary movement founded in the early 1930s by Catholic social justice activist Catherine de Hueck Doherty, one of the leading proponents of interracial justice in pre-Martin Luther King, Jr. America.

Friendship House was founded in the early 1930s in Toronto as a Catholic interracial apostolate, which grew from a charitable and anti-communism effort. The movement spread, with a second Friendship House opening in Ottawa in 1936, and another shortly after in Hamilton, Ontario, (which later became a Catholic Worker Movement House). Friendship House received formal ecclesiastical approval on September 14, 1934. However, Doherty provoked stiff opposition among some clergy and laity when she led picketing against an employer for paying what she considered inadequate wages. When Archbishop McGuigan took Doherty to task for this demonstration against an archdiocesan benefactor, Catherine quoted him Quadragesimo Anno. This did not affect their friendship, however, de Heuck's approach made many of her contemporaries uncomfortable. She was accused of mismanagement and of being a communist. At the end of 1936, she closed Friendship House and went to New York to visit Dorothy Day.

In 1938, a Catholic Interracial Council invited her to open Friendship House in Harlem, partly in order to have a Catholic Center as a counter to efforts being made by the Communist Party in the neighborhood. Friendship House ran an employment center, credit union, and co-op. There was also space for the Martin de Porres Library, and rooms to hold cub scout and CYO meetings. Through her speaking engagements de Hueck raised money to keep the center open; she also arranged college scholarships for local students.

In 1942 Bishop Bernard Sheil invited de Hueck to open a Friendship House in Chicago. As de Hueck planned to stay in Harlem, she asked Ann Harrigan and Ellen Tarry to run the Chicago House. It housed a children's center, a Catholic library, and an office. In January 1949 a Friendship House opened in Washington D.C. with the support of then Archbishop Patrick O'Boyle.

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