NEW HAVEN — Twenty-five years ago, the curtains in the residences on Rosette Street were drawn closed when the founders of the Amistad Catholic Worker House moved in.

Seeking a change from life as a nuclear family in the Bronx to a more community-based lifestyle, Mark Colville and Luz Catarineau-Colville moved in 1994 to the neighborhood and founded the Amistad Catholic Worker House, which offers meal service Monday through Friday for breakfast and lunch. Neither a food bank nor an agency, the Catholic Worker House stands as a monument in the Hill to mutual aid and neighbors acting neighborly.

“People should realize it’s OK to open up your doors,” Catarineau-Colville said. “Mark and I are not social workers by trade. We just live here.”

For their sustained, compassionate approach to building and supporting their community and for their lived opposition to war and violence, the Colvilles are the New Haven Register’s Persons of the Year.

It’s an honor the couple find somewhat embarrassing, as they don’t view themselves as saintly — or even especially heroic.

“Not only are we not particularly virtuous, we can be hard to live with,” Colville said.

Being pleasant isn’t the couple’s goal; creating a social structure that eliminates the need for militarized and violent government forces is.

“Anarchy isn’t about throwing Molotov cocktails,” Colville said. “It’s for people who don’t need a cop to tell them to behave. We’re trying to create a society where it’s easier for people to be good. People can always come to this table and seek refuge from their problems.”

To do that, the Colvilles and the volunteers who assist during meals spend time listening to their guests as they share their stories, without judgment.

“Our trust in our neighbor has fallen apart as a society,” Colville said. “On Rosette Street, people take care of their own. In many ways, we’re a model for what a neighborhood should be.”

The Rev. Joseph Blotz of The First Church of Christ in Mansfield has volunteered for meals at the Amistad Catholic Worker House for eight years.

“One of the things that strikes me is they are not about helping the community, they are in relationship with their friends and neighbors and doing whatever it is to support them. It’s not about helping the vulnerable or charity work, it’s about how they can best be neighbors and friends to people in their community,” he said. “It’s like going to someone’s house and having a meal; it’s a very intentional choice on Mark and Luz’s part.”

Catarineau-Colville said the Amistad Catholic Worker House is intended as a location where people experiencing homelessness can gather without being harassed by authorities.

Colville said that following what he saw as the violence perpetrated in Iraq by American forces during the Gulf War, the couple was looking for ways to raise their small children in “a militarized society” that is anti-poor. Colville said he was familiar with the Catholic Worker movement from his youth, but it wasn’t until the couple was approached by a clergyman as they were preparing for an overseas mission in Brazil about beginning a Catholic Worker house in New Haven that things clicked into place.

“He said that it would prepare us for our overseas mission work, and I guess we’re still preparing,” Colville said.

Whatever community there is on the Amistad Catholic Worker House’s block, Colville missed out on much of it this year. He spent much of it in a Georgia jail after participating in a Plowshares action on a Kings Bay Naval Base, a base for nuclear submarines, with six other activists last year. He initially refused to post bail so as to not cooperate with a system of imprisonment, but ultimately agreed to do so so he could receive adequate treatment for skin cancer and attend his daughter’s wedding in Costa Rica. He and his fellow protesters were found guilty in October and Colville expects to be sentenced sometime in February.

“It’s important to me that people try to understand the connection between this table here and what’s going on at the nuclear submarine base in Georgia,” he said.

Colville has previously been arrested while trying to protect an encampment for the homeless, rallying for immigrants in Hartford, and for protesting American use of drone strikes.

His neighborhood is “devastated” by the same militarization that led to the development of nuclear weapons, he said. Universal health care and free college are discussed as a pipe dream, he said, but “there’s no question about another few billions for war.”

With the couple living in voluntary poverty and Colville detained on the opposite end of the coast, Catarineau-Colville said she saw the community step up to rally around her and the house to keep everything operating.

“I think people flocked over here to help; many of them have experienced a loved one in jail,” she said. “I had to cut back on some things, and others stepped up to fill that void.”

In a forum the Register published last year, the Rev. Allie Perry of New Haven wrote: “For almost 25 years, Mark and his wife, Luz, have lived in New Haven’s Hill neighborhood, in the Amistad Catholic Worker House that they started. There Mark and Luz have raised their four children. There, following the tradition of the Catholic Worker movement founded by Dorothy Day, Mark and Luz, and others who have joined the community over the years, practice radical hospitality.

“They host meals, they have share-outs of donated household furnishings and goods, they hold a weekly (Mass). They live in community and in communion with those who are, in Mark’s words, ‘the victims of our nation’s obsession with war without end,’” Perry wrote.

The couple described Stephen Kobasa, a local Catholic journalist and activist, as the first person to visit them when they moved to the neighborhood and opened the Catholic Worker House.

“New Haven in so many ways was crying out for the acts of passion and solidarity that Luz and Mark and the Catholic Worker have been engaged in from the very start,” Kobasa said. “Their energy and passion was palpable, and their desire to become a part of the community — they were not imposing themselves upon the neighborhood, but becoming a part of the neighborhood that had existed before. To listen carefully to the community around them was always very moving to me.”

The Colvilles say their first neighbor in the Hill was a crotchety man who would frequently quarrel with neighbors essentially for being in his line of sight. By the end of his life, they said he was “the mayor of Rosette Street” for his acts of generosity. Today, they believe Rosette Street is the safest place for one to park their car in the Hill and now neighbors willingly leave their curtains open.

brian.zahn@hearstmediact.com