Set the Table Before the Argument: Hospitality as a Moral Act in Catholic Christian Care

Imagine two people seated across from each other who hold incompatible views on something that matters to them both. Before a single point is made, one passes the bread. The other pours the water. Someone laughs at something small. By the time the first real disagreement surfaces, something has already shifted, not the arguments, but the persons making them. The room has become a place where the other is, however provisionally, a guest rather than an opponent.

A July 2026 commentary in the National Catholic Register, drawing on what its author calls "the Napa Way," makes exactly this case: before Catholics debate, they should have dinner together. Tim Busch, founder of the Napa Institute, describes hosting "salon dinners," Mass, then the Rosary, then a shared meal, for Catholics spanning the theological spectrum, on the premise that friendship creates trust, trust creates dialogue, and dialogue creates understanding.[^1]

Charity as the animating structure of welcome

Hospitality is not a social grace grafted onto Christian life. Aquinas states that charity is the form of the virtues: it is charity that orders and animates every other act of the moral life, including acts of welcome.[^2] The host who makes room at the table enacts something morally ordered, a prior affirmation of the other's dignity that precedes any exchange of ideas. Because charity is the form of the virtues, it shapes the texture of every other moral act, including the act of argument.

This is why Pope Francis's "sourpusses," Christians whose faces communicate judgment before welcome, are not simply unpleasant company. Leading with grievance, correction, or doctrinal position before offering any welcome is a moral failure, not merely a social one; it closes the very relational space the faith claims to keep open. Truth is received, not simply delivered, and reception requires a person who feels, at some level, that they are already among friends. The dinner table operates on a different logic. It says: you belong here first, and we will sort out our differences from within that belonging.

The passions are not the problem

There is a common misreading of the Catholic tradition that treats warmth, affective generosity, and pleasure in another person's company as spiritually suspect, soft goods to be transcended on the way to serious moral and intellectual life. Aquinas's treatment of the passions in the Summa Theologiae runs the opposite direction. In his account, the passions are ordered or disordered depending on whether reason and will govern them toward their proper end.[^3] Delight in a guest's presence, genuine laughter at the table, the ease that comes when two people feel safe with each other: these are rightly ordered goods when they are governed by charity toward the other's genuine flourishing. Warmth is a moral achievement, not a concession to sentiment.

This matters for anyone who holds professional responsibility for another person's interior life. The counselor who reads Aquinas on the passions correctly understands that affective receptivity toward the person seated across the room is the ordered form of a natural capacity, brought under the direction of reason and will, aimed at the other's good. Clinical distance is a different disposition, appropriate to certain moments and counterproductive in others. It is not a moral upgrade on warmth.

The person is interpersonally relational by definition

The Catholic Christian Meta-Model of the Person, developed by Paul C. Vitz, William J. Nordling, and Craig Steven Titus, defines the human person as an individual substance of a rational, volitional, relational, sensory-perceptual-cognitive, emotional, and unified body-soul nature, called to flourishing through vocation, virtue, work, service, and meaningful leisure.[^4] The category "interpersonally relational" is not an addendum to this definition; it belongs to the structure of what a person is. Human beings are not first individuals who then choose to enter relationships. Relationality is constitutive.

The shared meal is, on this account, an anthropologically serious act: a site where the body's needs, the soul's social bonds, and the moral dimension of welcome converge in a single practice. To eat with another person is to affirm, in a pre-verbal register, that they belong in your proximity. When the National Catholic Register commentary proposes dinner as the precondition for productive disagreement, it is touching something the CCMMP makes explicit: the person who feels relationally recognized is a person capable of genuine dialogue. Strip out the relational recognition and you are left with two isolated individuals exchanging propositions, which is not dialogue but parallel monologue.

The counselor's chair as a kind of table

The pastoral and therapeutic encounter is the dinner table by another name. What a person needs before any exchange of content is the experience of being genuinely received, welcomed into the room as a whole person, not as a presenting problem. A counselor or spiritual director who enters the session with a posture of genuine hospitality, attentive, unhurried, visibly present to the specific person rather than to the type of case, creates the relational safety in which real change becomes possible. The argument about technique follows; the welcome comes first.

This posture has a structural parallel in contemporary psychotherapy. Steven Hayes, the originator of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, identifies psychological flexibility and genuine values-based contact with the present moment as foundational to therapeutic change.[^5] The good therapist, in Hayes's framework, remains open and present, fully in contact with what is actually happening in the room, rather than retreating into interpretation or protocol. That disposition is formally close to what hospitality asks of a host: full attention, non-defensive presence, and a prior orientation toward the other's good. The theological vocabulary and the clinical vocabulary converge on the same posture.

ACT's model of openness, presence, and values-directed action does not require a Catholic frame to function. But within the Catholic Christian anthropological tradition, this posture has a name and a moral ground: charity governing the affective capacities toward the concrete person seated in front of you. The warmth a skilled therapist or spiritual director brings to a session is the same warmth the good host brings to the dinner table, and, according to both Aquinas and Hayes by different routes, it is a precondition for anything more substantive to occur.

The table is the argument's precondition

The National Catholic Register commentary ends not with a policy proposal but with an invitation. Its logic is exactly right: the argument does not disappear when you share a meal. The disagreement is still there when the plates are cleared. But the people who held it are different. They have been, however briefly, in each other's full presence. They have passed something across the table. They have laughed.

For practitioners who work with persons in light of a Catholic Christian understanding of what persons are, this is a professional point as much as a pastoral one. The welcome is the work, not a courtesy variable that can be set aside in favor of technique. Set an extra place. Pour a glass. Let the argument be made among persons and friends, not adversaries.

References

[^1]: Busch, T. (2026, July 20). The Napa way: Before we debate, let's have dinner together. National Catholic Register. https://www.ncregister.com/commentaries/busch-friendship-meal-overcome-polarization

[^2]: Aquinas, T. (1920). Summa theologiae (Fathers of the English Dominican Province, Trans.). Benziger Brothers. II-II, q. 23, a. 8 (charity as the form of the virtues).

[^3]: Aquinas, T. (1920). Summa theologiae (Fathers of the English Dominican Province, Trans.). Benziger Brothers. I-II, qq. 22–48 (Treatise on the Passions).

[^4]: Vitz, P. C., Nordling, W. J., & Titus, C. S. (Eds.). (2020). A Catholic Christian meta-model of the person: Integration of psychology and mental health practice. Divine Mercy University Press. pp. 20–44.

[^5]: Hayes, S. C. (2019). A liberated mind: How to pivot toward what matters. Avery/Penguin Random House.