Thus it is that in some places, St. Paul, especially in writing to the Ephesians, speaks of the fact that God has raised us up with His Son and placed us in heavenly places with Him. This is a reality in which there’s a stability and a point of perfection which already exists. Our Divine Lord sits at the right side of the Father. By grace, we are incorporated into that same reality.

There are some Scriptural quotations to keep in mind. The first one I wish to cite is Ephesians 2:6: “And that God has raised us up together and has made us to sit together in heavenly places through Christ Jesus.” Notice the notion of fulfillment. This is one of the places where the Baptists get the idea of “once saved, always saved.” You make your adherence to the Lord Jesus and that’s it–you have salvation in the bag. That’s where this distorted notion comes from.

There is also a quotation from later in the same chapter : “We are now therefore no more strangers or foreigners, but are fellow citizens with the saints and are domestics of the household of God.”1 “Now”–we are called citizens now. There is in this reality a part of our lives which is in some way not here. St. Paul also says in another place that our conversation is in heaven,2 not among the things here below. If we are risen, then we must contemplate the things that are above and not seek the things that are below.3

We now wait for the moment in which this reality of grace will be fully manifested, and simultaneously we live in time; which is why he writes to the Philippians (2:12), “With fear and trembling work out your salvation.” When he writes for the Romans we are told that “all of creation longs and awaits for the day of manifestation of the sons of God” (8:19). Grace is given to us which is in a sense hidden. St. Paul says that it is a treasure in an earthen vessel (II Cor. 4:7). We carry this great gift of the life of Christ within us in a terra-cotta pot, and these break easily. We live on one hand in the world, and at the same time we are transformed in Christ in heavenly places. This tension will always remain in each of our lives.

What do we do? Too often the point of this statement is missed. Too often what we do is to subordinate the things of God to the concerns of the world because death and judgment are at least, we assume, a ways off, but the mortgage payment is due next Monday. Our tendency is to judge things by time and not to judge the things of time by eternity. Thus, there is a continual conflict we live on a daily basis. We live continually each day in judgment because we are always making choices. We choose this path or that one, because we are always free. What we cannot choose is a hundred yards down this path or a hundred yards down that other path, which is why judgment has to be exercised very well.

What we see in individuals, we see also in the history of the Church–this conflict between the things of God and the things of this world.

The Mystery of God’s Ways

There was a man who died in 1949 who was buried from out at the Church of the Transfiguration down in what used to be Little Italy in New York City. He was known well enough by the Vatican that his death was announced by L’Osservatore Romano. He died on May 15 and was buried on May 18, 1949. Most people who had seen him thought that he spent a lot of time in the Bowery. He looked like a beggar, he looked like he slept in his clothes–and he did. When he was laid out after his death, the suit that they got to put on the body was from a box of clothes that had been donated because he possessed nothing. Absolutely nothing.

For two days the body lay in state in lower Manhattan. Hundreds of people came. There were priests, seminarians, and religious from the different orders who came from around the country. These people came to pray, and in many cases to touch rosaries to the hands of this “beggar.” His body was buried in St. John’s Cemetery, Queens. As a last testament to this poverty, he was not even buried in his own grave, but in the grave which has the family name on it of “Conway.” This is because a Dominican priest, Fr. Pierre Conway, donated his part of the family plot to this man who possessed absolutely nothing.

This poor man died on the feast day of St. John Baptist de la Salle. In his early life this man had been a Christian Brother for seven years as a teacher. He also died on the anniversary of the promulgation of the papal encyclicals Rerum Novarum of 1891 (on the working classes and the industrial question) of Leo XIII, and the encyclical Quadragesimo Anno of 1931 by Pius XI. The latter also dealt with the social questions of the organization of a Christian society and a Christian social order. These popes had been very clear on these issues, and their teaching had caused a tremendous stir at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Peter Maurin, a Man of Tradition

The man of whom I wished to speak today was born as Aristide Pierre Maurin in 1877 in southern France in the city of Oultet. The language the people spoke was a direct descendant of Latin, but was not French. He was born into a family that was profoundly rooted in tradition, and for this reason I take this man as an example.

Peter Maurin is considered by some as being something of a revolutionary, and yet at the same time to look at his life it can be seen that he is someone who is profoundly rooted in tradition. He was born into a peasant family. His mother had five children, two of whom had died. She herself died giving birth to the last one. She left three living children. Peter’s father did not remarry right away, but waited a number of years before doing so.

When Mr. Maurin was about 30, he married a young woman who was about 19, and she went on to give him 19 children. Peter Maurin thus came from a family of 22 children. There were so many children that they used to recite the family prayers in choir back and forth. Peter was born on May 9. The month of his birth and of his death was the same. His family had been farming in that same area for 1,500 years; so almost about the time that St. Augustine was bishop in North Africa, Peter Maurin’s family had a farm in the same area of what is now southern France.

This continuity with the same terrain gives a profound sense of tradition. What little we have in America we smash down every twenty years and try to build it again bigger and better. The Maurins lived in the mountains, on a hillside in fact, which was very rugged and difficult to tend. They lived in a typical peasant house with animals on the ground floor like a barn, and the family living on the second floor above; all 25 of them, because at one point their grandfather was living with them.

Peter’s grandfather was also a profoundly religious man and he worked on the farm, in those fields and on that hillside, until he was 90 years old. The only reason he stopped working was because he couldn’t see anymore and the hillside was too steep for him. He stayed home and wove baskets and made things that were needed on the farm while saying the rosary all day long.

This old man taught his children and grandchildren a profound sense of the Catholic Faith. The family prayed the daily rosary, they always had their night prayers together, they studied the Bible together, and the grandfather also insisted that they learn Church history. He also required them to memorize the Sunday Gospels. All the children knew the Gospels for the whole year by heart. This was clearly an age different from ours. The family had to travel two miles to get to church in the village.

A Teaching Christian Brother

Maurin went to study with, and later join, the Christian Brothers in Paris. He left his home when he was about 14 years old and he went north to Paris. At the age of 16, he was given permission to enter the novitiate of the Christian Brothers and took the name of Brother Adorator Charles (a very 19th-century name). He taught elementary school as a Christian Brother. He made his vows and he started teaching in the late 1890’s.

While he was teaching in Paris he came across the working-class families. He knew peasantry, he had always been a peasant, and he was also proud of it because it had provided him with a great sense of tradition. He came into contact with these working class families near Paris (around Montmartre). He came to know well the difficulties that these families had. Their problems were related to industrialization and the de-rooting of any kind of sense of people living in community. Forced to work in the factories, one becomes disengaged.

Later Br. Adorator Charles was obliged to do military service. The second time that he had to do military service, he kept thinking, “Here I am, a religious, and I’m supposed to be consecrated to the things of God and I’m being made to serve this military machinery.” Thus as a young religious Brother he began to think more on the Church’s social doctrine.

When he returned from military service he began studying thoroughly the papal encyclical Rerum Novarum, and along with this, he began reading other writings on the topic from the end of the 19th century. He was studying these questions so much that the other Brothers were surprised. This was not really necessary for elementary school teachers. He remained a Christian Brother for seven years. This period ended with the dissolution of the religious orders in France at the beginning of the 20th century when the anti-Catholic attacks began in earnest. Br. Adorator Charles did not renew his vows, and so re-entered the world.

His Life at the Beginning of the 20th Century

When Christ Is King When the Sermon on the Mount is the standard of values then Christ is the Leader. When Christ is the Leader the priest is the mediator. When Christ is the Leader the educator trains the minds of the pupils so that they may understand the message of the priest. When Christ is the Leader the politician assures law and order according to the priest’s teachings. When Christ is the Leader the technician devises ways and means for the economical production and distribution of goods. When Christ is the Leader the administrator administrates according to the directions from the technicians. When Christ is the Leader we have a functional, not an acquisitive society.

By the time of the condemnation, Peter Maurin had already left France, and in 1909 he was in Canada as a homesteader in Alberta. He stayed there for a couple very difficult years. The man with whom he homesteaded died in one of the first winters in Canada. Maurin moved to the States in 1911. Here he began, for the next 17 years or so, working as a laborer in the mines and factories. He came into contact with diverse laborers by continually travelling through Iowa, Minnesota, and Michigan; in fact throughout all of the central United States. He eventually wound up in New York.

His biography is difficult because he spoke very rarely of his life or of himself. Towards the end of those years in the 1920’s we do know that he was teaching French–a logical thing to do. About those days in which he was a laborer he simply said, “I was not living as a Catholic is supposed to live.” At some point in the late 1920’s he went through some kind of conversion.

A true conversion means that we rework the whole way we think. If we truly convert it does not mean that we just start going to Mass and everything else stays the same–our entire life changes. Things just aren’t going to be the way they were. Anyone who has ever really tried to live the Gospel realizes that he often loses all those people that were once called friends, because they don’t think the way he does, he no longer acts the way they act, and no, he is no longer concerned about the latest movie or the latest sale in the shopping mall. Conversion transformed Peter Maurin.

What he began to do was to look at the industrialism and the materialism of the modern world. These he judged from the optic of the Faith.

Our Lady at Fatima had said that Russia would spread its errors. Now, Maurin may not have been aware of Fatima at the time of his conversion, because it was still too close to the event. Now the message of Fatima is often portrayed as the Soviet Union dominating the entire world and we are all going to get eaten up. This she had not said. She did not say that Russia was going to spread a political machine; she said that Russia was going to spread its errors, and its errors are atheism and materialism. Atheistic materialism: to live as if God did not exist, and to live as if only material things and time existed. It is the opposite of conversion.

The world has now embraced the whole line of Russia’s thought as if nothing else existed.

Maurin’s concern for the laborers came from his firsthand experience of their condition. At one point, he had been denied his paycheck. And when he went to get paid for all the work he had done in the mines, they told him that his check was waiting for him in Chicago. The management made this man who was poor already try to figure out a way to ride the rails to get to Chicago to get a check that was due to him already. Experiences such as these made him aware of the depth of the problem concerning wages and the uprooting of men from any kind of grounded tradition.

If you keep in mind this background, you can easily see the dehumanizing aspect. Remember that one of the anniversaries the day Maurin died was that of the papal encyclical Quadragesimo Anno. Pius XI had condemned in 1931 the dehumanizing aspect of the factory system, which took raw materials and ennobled them while the same process degraded the people who worked in the factory, reducing them to machines. This was exactly the thought of Peter Maurin, but his had come from first hand experience.

After he converted, he continued to teach French, but now he felt that his abilities and his skills were to be a service to others. He would simply offer his services and tutor. If those who had learned from him would just pay or give him food, clothing, whatever they thought fit, he was content by this exchange of assistance, the communication of goods back and forth, but he was not to hire himself out for X amount of dollars. This is one manner in which Peter Maurin began to embrace voluntary poverty as a response to modern materialism.

A Poverello for the 20th Century

There is a photo of Peter Maurin from the 1920’s, and he’s quite dapper, very well dressed. It is probably from the years that he lived in Chicago. However, by the late twenties he began looking more like a bum. He had thought to himself, “How many jackets do I really need?” and “How many trousers do I need? I can only really wear one.” More fully he embraced poverty, a profound and a radical poverty in order to answer the materialism and the selfishness of the modern world. He never said that everyone should do this, but for him it was an answer to the modern world. When an encyclical was produced on St. Francis of Assisi, which most of us have probably never read, he was thrilled.

In many ways Peter Maurin did manifest the life of St. Francis, but in the 20th century this voluntary poverty was not only to follow Our Lord, it was also an answer to the materialism and the greed which he saw so easily manifested in the industrial world. In addition, he was a man who was always reading; he was well educated, and he used this grounded faith to begin to teach others. He would talk to anyone–anyone, from professors to street people. He spent lots of time in the Bowery. Throughout the years he would talk to the bag ladies on the buses and he would talk to university professors in Boston. It didn’t make any difference. Everyone is human and everyone has an intellect and everyone can come to know the things of God. He spoke with a heavy French accent and was at times hard to understand, but he talked continually to teach.

He was the man who was the mind, the thinker, behind what probably many regard as a leftist organization: The Catholic Worker. Maurin’s desire was to present Catholic doctrine in such a way that simple people could understand. He would write things in little phrases so that those who were not educated could still come to understand Catholic doctrine, especially as it concerned the social order. They became known as “Easy Essays” because he tried to make them understandable to the man on the street. They often dealt with usury or with the Church’s notion of how the State is supposed to be ordered. They dealt with the encyclicals that came out and the ideas of many of contemporary Catholic writers. Hundreds and hundreds of these things were produced over the years.

And he would talk. He talked to the men in the Bowery. And he prayed. He went to Mass everyday, and would spend each day an hour before the Blessed Sacrament. There was a prayer life behind his activity. He was not what one expected in hearing about him. And so it was with the saints in the history of the Church. Their lives are unexpected and they stand out.

Peter Maurin lived the true virtue of prudence. This virtue usually receives a bad rap because in the name of prudence we don’t do a lot of things that we know we should be doing. “What will others think?” and so for “prudential reasons” we abstain from things that should be done. Peter Maurin said there is only God to serve, He must be served faithfully, and therefore he became itinerant. He began to wander all over. He spent years in New York wandering the streets, talking to everybody.

The Catholic Worker Movement

A Radical Change The order of the day is to talk about the social order. Conservatives would like to keep it from changing but they don’t know how. Liberals try to patch it and call it a New Deal. Socialists want a change, but a gradual change. Communists want a change, an immediate change, but a Socialist change. Communists in Russia do not build Communism, they build Socialism. Communists want to pass from capitalism to Socialism and from Socialism to Communism. I want a change, and a radical change. I want a change from an acquisitive society to a functional society, from a society of go-getters to a society of go-givers.

Catholics must think radically different from those who live non-Catholic lives. Why would you expect non-Catholics to live by principles that are Catholic? That a Catholic should be living a life that is more or less identical with the non-Catholics who live down the street would be anathema to Peter Maurin. It would simply be a sign that one had not assimilated the teaching of the Gospel. The Gospel principles that we live by are transcendent and are completely different from those notions of pagan prudence and worldly wisdom.

The movement which he developed was more of an organism than an organization. The whole Catholic Worker Movement was chaotic at times. Maurin was a man who spent years just talking, but in the end, he lost this ability and went senile the last four or five years of his life. When Dorothy Day, another one of known reputation, wrote of him, she wrote of his holiness and of the fact that Peter Maurin was a talker but he didn’t ramble. He talked and he talked all night long, but it always had a purpose.

She gave a magnificent tribute of this man because she said that he had given everything that he had, and what he had was his education, his sense of Tradition and the Catholic Faith which was profound. His way of doing this was almost in the sense of a Christian Brother, a teacher of the simple–he always remained one of the teachers who taught the poor and made things uncomplicated. Read the life of St. John Baptist de la Salle and his method of teaching by silence and simplicity, a manner of teaching which was quite revolutionary in its own day, but by which St. John Baptist de la Salle transformed education.

Peter Maurin continued that tradition and work. Dorothy Day brought up the fact that he talked incessantly; sometimes she had to beg for mercy. He would stop for ten minutes and then it would go on again for the rest of the night.

She said that she thought that in the end he had given everything he had, including his bed. Oftentimes if someone came in and needed a bed, he gave his up for them and slept on the floor. But most profoundly, what he gave was his education and what he knew of the Catholic Faith. She said what he gave most precisely was his knowledge, and in the end God asked him to give even that up. This included his mind. His silence was a magnificent example those last four years.

There was a point in 1944 when he had all the pages of all the essays he had written. He closed the file and handed it to one of the younger men and said, “It is time now for the younger ones to do this.” And at that point he began to realize the things that he was saying were not what were in his mind, so he stopped talking. All of his talking had a purpose and when it no longer worked because of age, he stopped. He continued those last years in silence, but he still went to Mass. He would sit in a chair, they would come in and say, “Mass, Peter.” He would get up and shuffle out, go down to Mass, breakfast, and back. He had to give the example of detachment, not just of poverty where he would take nothing. He had nothing further to give but the perfect detachment from what he loved most, his teaching. He remained, in a sense, imprisoned in that silence knowing that his mind was not working. He died in 1949.

The Knowledge of Our Faith

Peter Maurin enjoyed large groups in conversation, but if someone got up and started getting blue in the face and getting angry at him he would simply stop talking and sit down. He would not argue nor fight back, because truth is not something that you become blue in the face over. You may discuss it, you may be convinced of it, but you don’t become belligerent when you defend a thesis. If you were standing on the street and a man told you, “This tree is turquoise,” and you said, “No, I do believe it’s green,” you would not argue over this, but probably would walk away at some point and remember this man in your Rosary because he’s crazy.

Why would we argue over something that is equally true, the Trinity for example, or the divinity of the Church, or the Incarnation? Fighting would indicate the fact that we do not know our Faith very well. We become angry because someone shows us the instability of our positions. We are shown that we do not really grasp these principles well. We grasp the fact that trees are green–it’s an evident fact and that’s why we don’t get upset with others who disagree; we just feel sorry for them. That was Peter Maurin’s approach. The Triune God exists; the Redemption is a historical reality and a historical fact. The Church is a reality here and now. If you get up and start yelling at me, well, I’m sorry for you, but I am not going to try to prove my Faith by getting in your face and turning blue and spitting. That doesn’t prove anything except the fact that I’m perhaps insecure. Peter Maurin’s answer would have been “Know your Faith better.”

Know truly that a tree is green and know what the realities of the Mass, the Incarnation, and the Church are. When we have that security it makes us the most compassionate of men, because we then know how much is lacking to so many, and we begin to understand the reaction of Our Lord when He looked upon the crowds and had compassion on them because they were like sheep without a shepherd and they didn’t know where they were going.

Walk through the streets of New York like a bum and look at all the people. How many of these people really have any idea of the Faith? And if they claim to know the Faith, then how much do they live the Faith? They know that they go to a church on Sunday. For Peter Maurin, that was not sufficient. It is clear that his entire life was centered upon the reality of the Church and the sanctification of grace. He was never beguiled by magnificent brick buildings, central heating and indoor plumbing. The reality of the Gospel requires this tremendous change in our lives. Our standard of judgment must be different from the world’s. That is what he pointed out even by his life.

Peter gave an example by embracing voluntary poverty. It was not something that he expected each to follow, but for him it was an answer to the materialism and to the deracination of people in the modern world of industrialization. Our world is geared for profit, to make money. For this reason it’s important now to read the things that Peter Maurin had written and the things that are recorded of what he said. They’re extraordinary. I will come just short of saying that the man was a prophet. He saw the way the modern world was organized; he would not have been surprised by our so-called downsizing. Maurin already in the 1930’s denounced a system which made people secondary, a system where people were simply belched out because it made a greater profit and a greater dividend. Peter Maurin in the 1920’s, ‘30’s, ‘40’s, saw scandals like Enron coming. What he said then is just as true today. Human nature does not change, nor does its greed for mammon. The modern world is still based upon the machinery that desires profit, and this desire is its primary concern.

You Cannot Serve God and Mammon

This is the meaning of Our Lord in the Sermon on the Mount when He says that you cannot serve God and mammon. Mammon doesn’t mean money, it means profit. Always more, always bigger, always remodeled, always newer. Peter Maurin, at the beginning of the 1920’s, understood the whole modern spirit of business. Voluntary poverty was his answer to this materialism. It was also his response to the poverty that is imposed upon so many workers by this machinery. Industrialism takes them in, uses them, and then expels them when they are no longer profitable. And they remain with no productive wealth.

Many do not realize that even in the Soviet Union, you could own your home and car. The notion of common property is not that everyone just shares everything; but that you could not own productive property. You could not own anything that produced. Everything that produced, every factory, every large farm, everything that could acquire large profit, had to be owned by the proletariat, the masses. This is one of the errors of Russia of 1917 which is very much the reality that we live in now. Almost no one owns anything that has any productivity, and even the homes that we live in are owned by the bank. If you are good and earn the dividends for the bank over the next thirty years you can live in your house, and they’ll even give it to you at the end because you’ve been so good–now that you’re in your sixties and have paid for the house two or three times over. You work for something and it’s not yours, and if at any time you’re bad and you don’t give them the dividend, then they’re going to take it back from you.

The people that live today, as Peter Maurin pointed out, have fewer rights than the serfs on the land in the Middle Ages. The serfs may have been attached to the land, but the landlord could not just throw them off because they belonged to it. There was a give and take then, and even a form of mutual responsibility. For Peter Maurin, those who are in forced poverty–and we can say our society is generally impoverished in the sense that we have nothing that has any productivity–must be cared for. Christian charity must take care of the impoverished, the sick, and the wayfarers. These places of refuge came to be known as the Houses of Hospitality.

The origin of these places actually dates from the Council of Nicea. In the Middle Ages every bishop was required to have a place or places, depending upon the size of his diocese, which would take in pilgrims who were traveling, the orphans, widows, the poor and the sick, the people who had no place else to go. This practice continued as an organization and an institution which used to be called hospitals. And I purposely say “used to,” because hospitals since the 1950’s have been for profit also. They were the last of the major Christian institutions in the Western world, and now they’ve also been destroyed. It is very good that they now call them “medical centers,” because they are not hospitals. They no longer operate by any notion of hospitality.

Peter Maurin said that every family should have what he called a “Christ room,” some place in the home that would always be open to those who were in need. St. Peter had written, “You must not be afraid with their fear.”4 For this reason Peter Maurin possessed a great sense of freedom, he shared a sense of freedom even to those around him. This freedom was that of St. Francis of Assisi the day he had stripped off all of his clothes, handed them to his father and said, “From now on, my Father is in heaven.” From that point on he was free. The Faith and Lady Poverty can accomplish such things.

Maurin also sought to remedy the general ignorance of Catholics through what he called the “clarification of thought.” To know Church history, to know doctrine, and to think: these were constant teaching. We can not do anything unless we think.

A Green Revolution

We come now to the displaced laborers and uprooted people living in the cities. Historically this was caused by the huge machinery of industrialism. The contrary idea tries to get people back to some kind of productive land. Maurin was part of the back to the land movement of the 1920’s, ‘30’s, and ‘40’s. Catholics today do not realize how widespread these ideas, and individuals, were. G.K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, Distributism, the National Catholic Rural Life Conference–who’s ever heard of them? But all the same, they did tremendous work.

Take the National Catholic Rural Life Conference. It was founded in 1923, but it would take another article to go into depth about their history, ideals, and accomplishments. Suffice it to say that it was a magnificent attempt to get people into something which was more normal, and to give them some kind of productivity. Maurin used to say “Back to the land and back to Christ.” This was all summed up in what he called cult, culture, and cultivation: Cult–worship, the worship of God, which must be the primary reason, for it is the reason why people were created. Culture, because one must know something of history and how the social order is supposed to look. This is to be done from the vantage point specifically of the popes, but also of Catholic doctrine in general, and the writings of Catholic theologians. And lastly cultivation, to live on the land; to be able to understand the manner in which working the land ends up being something beneficial, not because it’s a domination or a profit-making endeavor using the soil, but because it is a cooperation and collaboration with that which God has created.

Remember that Adam and Eve were created in the Garden in order to take care of it, so it is from the very beginning part of our destiny. It doesn’t mean that everyone needs to move from the cities, but that some people should move on to some kind of land. This was the last thing that Maurin tried to do.

The Faith Produces Heroes

Hospices We read in the Catholic Encyclopedia that during the early ages of Christianity the hospice (or the House of Hospitality) was a shelter for the sick, the poor, the orphans, the old, the traveler, and the needy of every kind. Originally the hospices (or Houses of Hospitality) were under the supervision of the Bishops, who designated priests to administer the spiritual and temporal affairs of these charitable institutions. The fourteenth statute of the so-called Council of Carthage, held about 436, enjoins upon the Bishops to have hospices (or Houses of Hospitality) in connection with their churches.

I’ll leave you with two quotations of Peter Maurin. “The human heart is not made for mediocrity, it was made for heroism.” This is one of the reasons why in the 1930’s he caused a tremendous fire to be cast among the young Catholics. They would follow him around, handing out pamphlets and newspapers in Union Square and the streets of Manhattan. He would enthuse such a group of young people to do something for doctrine. He did not just enthuse them because he could tell such great stories, but they did something to try to clarify thought. Some of these young people followed him their entire lives.

The other noteworthy quote is: “The only true adventures are in the spiritual order.” Those who look for all of their enthusiasm, entertainment, amusements or excitement in the temporal order are wasting their time. The only true adventures are in the spiritual order.

These two things lay out the whole notion, and the mentality, behind his work which was accomplished in the thirties and the forties.

Some Historical Considerations

In the 1940’s when the Catholic Worker developed further, it added what was called the retreat movement. It can be said that the 1940’s were the high point of this movement. Many would argue that its direction changed from a clearly Catholic foundation to a more naturalistic, personalistic vision later on.

The Catholic Worker Movement was “born” on May 1, 1933. This day marked the first printing of the newspaper that was handed out in Union Square. This was, of course, May Day. We tend to forget that in the 1930’s May Day could rally thousands in New York, even tens of thousands on some occasions. Most people aren’t aware of the strength of the Communist movement in those years. In that year, I believe, it was claimed that there were 30,000 people all up and down Broadway and Union Square. Into that crowd they plunged, handing out these papers, and being ridiculed.

Dorothy Day was 36 at the time. Thus, this relatively young woman with three young men headed into the middle of a crowd at a Communist rally handing out newspapers filled with Catholic doctrine, while Catholic encyclicals were being ridiculed and mocked. It was so bad, in fact, that two of the men left because treatment was so horrible. But Dorothy Day continued along with a seventeen-year-old handing out these papers. The Catholic Worker has been printed from that day forward.

Mercy and Charity Are a Harsh and Dreadful Reality

One of the things chosen because of Peter Maurin’s position is that the Catholic Worker has never been a tax-exempt organization. Any donations given for the last seventy years have been done at no tax gains. Peter Maurin said very simply that every corporal work of mercy, and the works of charity, should be done at a personal sacrifice and not for financial gain. To this day it remains without tax exemption status.

Dorothy Day described it with these words: “It’s not a community of saints, but rather it is a slipshod group of individuals who are trying to work out certain principles,” the chief of which was an analysis of man’s freedom and what it implied–to overcome hatred with love, to overcome evil by good. It was a practice in loving, in learning to love, and paying the cost of love.

Dorothy Day often quoted from The Brothers Karamazov since she loved Dostoevsky. She would especially quote the famous Fr. Zossima from The Brothers Karamazov, a work which some would claim is the greatest work of Dostoevsky. At one point in the story a well-bred, well-dressed, aristocratic woman goes to the monastery to see Fr. Zossima. Among other pilgrims who are there she exposes her confusion. She says “How can I know?” Fr. Zossima asks her in return, “Do you not have faith in God’s existence?” She replies, “No, it’s not that. It’s the immortality of the soul. How do I really know it will continue afterward? How do I know I will do all these things and then in the end there will be just flowers on my grave? How do I know that this life will actually go on?” Father answers her, “You must go out and you must live the Gospel and you must show this goodness to the poor and to your neighbor, and then you will know of God’s existence and of the immortality of your soul.” To this she answers with all of her aristocratic finery, “But I love humanity, I love mankind. But I don’t know what would happen if I started helping the poor and they began to treat me with harshness, or if there wasn’t gratitude. I need to be thanked for what I’m doing.” At least she was honest! “I need an immediate response; I just can’t do good and be rejected.”

Dorothy Day at one point was studying nursing, and there was a poor creature in one of the wings, a horrible being who hated all the world. The nurses would try to do things for her in the hospital. At one point Dorothy Day herself was in there trying to help this woman change linens or whatever it was, and the woman whipped a full bed pan at her. This was the kind of the thing the woman in The Brothers Karamazov was concerned about: what if we start helping humanity and they don’t show gratitude. Fr. Zossima answered by saying that the reality of loving our neighbor is a very harsh and dreadful thing, not at all like the love in dreams. All liberals love mankind; everyone loves the poor of the world. But to be down in the streets and actually picking a poor man up out of the gutter–“I don’t know that I can do that.”

The Sermon on the Mount has that famous conclusion of which we all know the quotation: “Be ye perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect.” We know this, but we don’t know the context, or at least, we don’t usually make reference to it. Just before this statement, Our Lord gave the example that God makes the sun to rise upon the good and the bad. He makes the rain to fall on the fields of the just and the unjust. If you greet only those who are your friends, what are you doing different than the pagans? Therefore be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect. In other words, what is the commandment of the Sermon on the Mount? You must do good to all regardless of what the response is; and this is the harsh and dreadful reality which no one is going to say is easy.

Dorothy Day was often accused of sentimentality regarding her pacifist stance. “She’s a woman, she just doesn’t want people to get hurt, and so we shouldn’t have wars.” She wrote an editorial in reply: “Those who claim, or those who think that we say these things because I’m only being sentimental or being a woman then I challenge them to come and live at the Worker House as we live, to live with the poor, to live with the screaming prostitutes fighting over things in the rooms, to deal with the mentally ill, to deal with the sick, taking them back and forth to the hospital. I can assure you that there are ten types of body lice because you share everything with them, you live with them.” It was an excellent answer. Can one still think it’s sentimentality? You see how sentimental it is living at this level. It was a response that becomes unanswerable.

Peter Maurin wanted goodness to be shown in the midst of the huge machinery which is the modern-day state. He wished the response to be at a personal level, because no one else is going to do it for you. It’s a question of how we respond to this. For this reason Maurin insisted on the question of personal freedom. How do we respond to the Gospel that has been preached to us? The sun rises on the good and the bad, and the rain falls on the just and the unjust. God is good to all. If you greet those who are kind to you, what are you doing different from the pagans? What reward do you expect different from the pagans? This is the reality of the Sermon on the Mount. I highly encourage you to read often the fifth, sixth, and seventh chapters of St. Matthew. They are extraordinary because they do demand much of us.

Here is where we really begin to understand the austerity of the Gospel. It is hard. It is difficult. It is the source of the magnificent quotation from Fr. Zossima “that love in reality is a harsh and a dreadful thing.” It is very difficult. It is easy to love “humanity”; it is difficult to love the person working next to you at the office. Humanity is an abstract–it doesn’t exist. Of course anyone can love “humanity.” We can feel all nice and warm and tingly about our compassion and our generosity and our kindness; but in the end it doesn’t really mean anything because it doesn’t do anything. For this reason St. James also said that faith without works, without the works of charity, is dead. It’s a very harsh reality. St. John says, “When you come across the man who’s hungry and cold and shivering and you say ‘be warm and be of good cheer’ and then walk away,” then what have you done for that man? Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

This is why Our Lord identifies, in a sense, the two main commandments: love of God and love of neighbor. The question is how we respond to each personally. The responsibility of love, of learning to love, and paying the cost of love, is that by which we shall be judged. We mentioned earlier that supernatural charity subordinates all of our love and all of our affections in this world. It all has to be subordinated to God; it has to become the single, vital, sovereign mover of the entire Christian life. Everything that we do is meant to be motivated by charity, ultimately. Everything in our life is meant to be geared towards this goal, towards service in the love of God and the love of our neighbor. That is what we mean when we speak about the Faith being alive or being dead. We speak of it as being animated, given life by the virtue, by that queen of all the virtues, charity.

Love Must Be Sovereign

Works of Mercy The best kind of apologetics is the kind of apologetics people do not have to apologize for. In the first centuries of Christianity pagans said about Christians: “See how they love each other.” The love for God and neighbor was the characteristic of the first Christians. This love was expressed through the daily practice of the Works of Mercy. To feed the hungry, to clothe the naked, to shelter the homeless, to instruct the ignorant at a personal sacrifice was considered by the first Christians as the right thing to do. Surplus goods were considered to be superfluous, and therefore to be used to help the needy members of the Mystical Body.

In passing, I would like to mention to you one of the great apparitions of St. Margaret Mary of the Sacred Heart. The example should be helpful. There were the four great apparitions which are unknown to most. Of course, all know the twelve promises, i.e. you can save your tail if you go nine times to Mass, and that type of a thing (and this we claim is love). If we judged it correctly, we would rather see ourselves to be mercenaries. If we pursue that reasoning as a motivation, whom do we actually love? Ourselves. We don’t want to go to hell. Do we have any knowledge of any of the great letters and of the writings of St. Margaret Mary? “No. We don’t have to. We have the twelve promises printed out on the card.” Do you know what is the origin and source of those twelve promises as they are presented? A business man from Ohio put them all together on one card. Pope Leo XIII thought that it was helpful at least to make them known, and he encouraged its publication. For me, it’s not too surprising that it came from America. It’s efficient, and you can just forgo all the other teachings of St. Margaret Mary. It makes “love” a simple affair, not at all a harsh and dreadful reality.

Let’s go to the core of this. What’s the real essence of this message? Ask a fellow Catholic. They will probably rattle off the requirements. “I’m done with those nine First Fridays.” I’ve come across numerous Catholics who don’t go on First Friday because “I’ve done mine.” This is a horrible thing. That’s what I’m trying to say in this conference–you must think, what motivates us? That’s the question that Peter Maurin was always provoking. He was a man who always taught by example. As I said, he never got angry at people. Our whole motivation has to be charity.

What St. Margaret Mary was given in these apparitions was an understanding of the offenses and disrespect of mankind against Our Lord. There was a point in which He appeared before her–and they were always associated with the Eucharist, either on a day of exposition, or after Mass, or on the feast of St. John–and when He appeared to her He gave her again an understanding of this great love. He said to Margaret Mary, “You at least return love for love.” She of course understanding the great chasm between the ingratitude of men and the greatness of God’s love said, “I can’t. This is impossible.” As she responded a light began to shine from Our Lord and penetrated her, giving her a great knowledge of the love of God, but at the same time, it penetrated and consumed. She thought she was going to be destroyed. At the very point in which she was going to beg that He stop, a light came from Our Lord’s chest, from His heart. He said to her, “I will be your strength.” He repeated the same request, “You must return love for love. But you can only love worthily with the love which is mine in fact.”

This makes it very clear that we cannot give. All we can give is a little, puny human response. It’s true. What do we have to give? Nothing. However, we do have a personal response to that grace, and that’s what Peter Maurin would indicate has a great importance. How do we respond to this grace, to this charity? That is the question. In one of the first apparitions to St. Margaret Mary Our Lord told her “I choose you as an infinite abyss of ignorance and unworthiness.” “Thank you.” (We get upset if it’s a hard sermon. “You don’t have to do all that, Father, that’s excessive!”) Imagine having Our Lord in front of you saying, “I choose you as an abyss of ignorance and unworthiness.” Margaret Mary once asked, “How am I going to acquire recognition and a feast day of this great work of the Sacred Heart?” His answer in not so many words was, “If I could have chosen someone more unworthy, more incapable, I would have.”

I think it is marvelous that in 1949 a man who looked like a bum inspired, and still inspires. He had a message which provokes us to at least think. In the analysis of the Catholic Worker I would say there are many things with which I disagree, but this doesn’t change the fact that those who were the leaders of it did what they said they would do. There was certainly an identification of what they taught and what they did. They practised what they preached.

What Is the Standard of Love?

Canonization sets a standard, and we are meant to learn from these kinds of lessons. God causes us to subordinate all our loves to Him; when this is done we have gone beyond ourselves. We spend too much time calculating what’s in it for us. That’s why I gave the example of the nine First Fridays. St. Thomas Aquinas makes it very clear that when we begin the spiritual life we’re looking to avoid hell and get to heaven, and he says quite bluntly that it’s with a love of what he calls concupiscence that we begin the spiritual life. It is not God whom we first love. We love rather what we are going to get from God. It is the love which does not love people, but what it receives from people. This is unfortunately very common. It is the man who deals with someone, and his response is: “She has pretty eyes.” And that’s fine. But what are we choosing? Her? Or is it the fact that you enjoy looking at her, which is a different thing altogether? St. Thomas applies this form of selfishness to the whole notion of the spiritual life.

For this reason Our Lord preached about hell. You have to begin with the fear of hell and the desire for heaven because, wishing to avoid hell, I am forced to look into heaven. I first love God because He’s going to help me get to heaven. At first, love is basically about “me” because I don’t want to burn in hell. We have not yet come to the knowledge of the great and infinite goodness which is God. The spiritual life begins always in selfishness, and this must be purified.

We must ultimately seek continual reliance upon the reality of God: “I will be your strength.” Therefore a life that is transformed by grace, a life which is transformed by virtues, is what the Fathers of the Church and the theologians call a divinized life, a God-like life. We use terms like divinization. We desire that our life be divinized by grace, by sanctification, because in fact it’s the only way that we can stand before God in any sense of worthiness; with this we find security.

With grace we are made into the very likeness of God. He sees in me Himself and His infinite bounty and goodness, and this is what makes us lovable. It is not some wretched little creature who’s paying mortgages every month and trying to keep a job or trying to buy a new car, scurrying around worried about this and worried about that.

This is the message in the parable of the great feast of the king. He goes out to those that are invited. “Don’t have time now. Bought a new farm, just got married, thanks for the invitation, sorry, can’t make it.” They’re very polite about it; they don’t spit in the king’s face, thus they think they’re okay. We really have to ask ourselves the question, “What is it that we love?” Where are our attachments? Recall the same Sermon on the Mount. “Do not lay up treasures on earth where the rust and the moth consume and where thieves can break in and steal.” If you want to know your loves and affections then look in your garage at all of those cardboard boxes. All those things you just had to have and now you don’t even know what’s in those boxes. How much time, how much effort, was wasted on those things?

Our Lord says very clearly that there where your heart is, there will your treasure be also. The things that we love, the things that we sacrifice ourselves for, those are our treasures. What do we do when the Gospel and the grace of God are presented to us? Learning to love requires that we be detached from these things. It is not because they are bad, but because they can get in the way of the service of the Gospel. All things which limit our loyalty must be torn away. Our Lord uses these great hyperbolic, oriental exaggerations: If your eye offends you, tear it out. If your hand offends you, cut it off. He’s saying no matter what it is, no matter how close you are attached to it, and no matter how much you love that entertainment system, if it stands as an obstacle to the service of God, smash it.

St. Thomas would say that charity has interior effects and exterior effects. Interiorly it causes this love, election, the act of love. It inclines us to an act of love which is election, and it brings interior order because our love is first for God, then of self, and our neighbor as ourself. It also inclines us towards compassion. It makes us merciful. St. Thomas says there is an external act and this is beneficence. Benevolence is to wish well, beneficence is to do good.

When we understand how drastically love changes our lives, the example of Peter Maurin then takes on an air of wisdom. What does it matter now if Peter Maurin spent twenty years living in absolute poverty, what does it matter now if he saved his soul? What does it matter now for all those wealthy men who were living in the twenties and the thirties in their fine houses? What does it matter if those attachments have brought them to perdition?

Other Connections

While I was editing The Angelus [July 1991-September 1992] we came out with the first volume of a compilation of articles called My Life with Thomas Aquinas [available from Angelus Press. Price: $14.95–Ed.]. These works, these articles which many of you I’m sure are familiar with–if you’re not, then you should be because they are excellent writings–are from a journal which was written from 1946-54, about ten years. It was a magazine called Integrity, and these articles we’ve compiled into three volumes, My Life with Thomas Aquinas, Raising Your Children [available from Angelus Press. Price: $14.95–Ed.], and the third volume is on Fatherhood [Fatherhood and Family, available from Angelus Press. Price: $12.95–Ed.] written by a man by the name of Ed Willock. They’re excellent. [See also, Ye Gods, by Ed Willock. Available from Angelus Press. See the inside back cover of this issue of The Angelus–Ed.].

Ed Willock died in 1960. He had also tried to work at forming a kind of Catholic community outside of New York. Integrity attempted to apply Catholic principles to the modern situation instead of simply talking about the lives of saints who had lived in the Middle Ages. Instead, the idea was to translate the life of the medieval saint into the 20th century and see what it makes us have to do.

Ed Willock was the co-founder of Integrity magazine, and, as he wrote in one of his letters to Dorothy Day, “I count myself as a godchild of you and Peter.” Integrity Magazine is one of the things which spun off from the Catholic Worker movement. Ed Willock was a disciple of Peter Maurin. He captured the radicalism of Maurin in his writings. The articles are excellent because they go to the root of the modern-day malaise. This is radicalism at it finest. From radical and foundational thought we can begin to change our lives for the better, and perhaps even the world around us as a result.

It does no good to be liberals and stand around just picketing and complaining about everything if we don’t change the way that we personally see things and we live. This is the reason that the Angelus Press began to re-edit the articles from Integrity Magazine; they cause one to think. When I was at The Angelus in the early nineties we brought out the first volume. It was only later that I began to figure out who these people were. In this conference there is about seven or eight years worth of reading and research. The connection found among these 20th-century thinkers is intriguing.

Ten years ago, I just simply dismissed these people, “Oh, the Catholic Worker, they’re just communist.” That was it; you just simply wrote them off and went on quite content, wondering how it was that these pinkos survived and the Church never condemned them. The great Cardinal Spellman didn’t do anything. Amazing. The mystery of iniquity! I say this all to my shame. Then I began to start reading what they actually wrote. Things kept coming back to Peter Maurin.

Where Are We Now?

Institutions and Corporations Jean Jacques Rousseau says: “Man is naturally good, but institutions make him bad, so let us overthrow institutions.” I say: Man is partly good and partly bad, but corporations, not institutions, make him worse. “An institution,” says Emerson, “is the extension of the soul of a man.” Institutions are founded to foster the welfare of the masses. Corporations are organized to promote wealth for the few. So let us found smaller and better institutions and not promote bigger and better corporations.

How do we get a whole group of young people who are just simply anti-everything? Sex and drugs were part of the ‘60’s. At the Catholic Worker it came to the point that Dorothy Day threw out a whole group of young people from one of the farms because of their mischief. She said it was completely unacceptable. When some argued against her correction, saying, “Well, you know, you need to respect their freedom,” she replied, “That’s nonsense. This is the Catholic Worker, it’s a question of the Gospel and it’s a question of morality.” She threw them out. She told them people did not donate money for this. They did not donate money to the Catholic Worker to support transients. “You’re doing nothing.” It was known from that day on as the “Dorothy stomp.”

Now how did we come to this point? In the 1930’s there were all those young enthusiasts around Peter Maurin following him, handing out booklets and teaching. Young people were working up in Harlem teaching Catechism to the little black children, teaching them art, and even teaching them how to sing the Kyriale. This interracial work was quite radical for the 1930’s. It was not something which was normally done. Yet regardless of race they are all either actually or potentially the children of God. They too were redeemed by Christ. From this apostolate to sex and drugs–what was the course?

There had been present already a danger, even in the early days. Without the Faith, the movement risked becoming radical pure and simple. This meant that it could remain a force of example of the works of mercy and of the Gospel, or it could, without this supernatural vision, simply degenerate into a utopian idealism. It is primarily an absence of the su

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