Michael Scaperlanda: This Will Warm Your Heart!

[From John Allen's report, in today's NCR:]

In a recent NCR cover story I described a phenomenon in Texas I called "Evangelical transfer," meaning ways in which the state's strong Evangelical Protestant ethos shapes the Catholic experience.  This week, I want to describe another "evangelical" face of Texas Catholicism, this time in the sense of lives lived in radical witness to the values of the Gospel.

Meet Mark and Louise Zwick, founders of the Casa Juan Diego on Houston's West side, a remarkable center of welcome and advocacy on behalf of the city's mushrooming immigrant population.

In Catholic circles around the world, Mark and Louise Zwick are probably best known for the Houston Catholic Worker, a newspaper and labor of love in which they blend deep Catholic piety with keen social analysis. The paper is legendary for tweaking American Catholic neoconservatives, and anyone sucked into their orbit; in 2004, for example, the Zwicks lampooned the work of a certain Rome correspondent for the National Catholic Reporter, who, they felt, had been overly influenced by lunches in the Eternal City with prominent Catholic neo-cons. (In charity, they wrote at the time, they would refrain from saying that I was "out to lunch.")

On the streets of Houston, however, the Zwicks are famed not for literary production, but for love in action. One Wednesday morning in mid-February, Mark was showing me around the property when a mini-mob scene developed. A group of Hispanic men had clustered outside awaiting "Marco," and one by one they came forward to ask him, in polite Spanish, for various kinds of help. I watched as Mark found a jacket for one of the men to wear against the cold, a pair of shoes for another, and explained to a third how to get eyeglasses from Casa Juan Diego's free medical clinic.

Louise told me that this experience of living alongside the poorest of the poor, struggling daily to help meet their material and spiritual needs, fuels Casa Juan Diego's social advocacy.

[Read the rest of this remarkable, inspiring story, here.]