Central to Catholic Worker lore is the story of Dorothy Day’s conversion from a life of socialist agitation to a life of Catholic piety, a conversion which both magnified her longing to join the struggle of the poor, and stymied the participation she once had in it. For four years following her conversion Dorothy was reluctant to participate in any form of social activism, a trend she parted with in 1932 when she went to Washington, D. C. to cover the “hunger march”. Her heart was pierced by the countless ragged, hungry men gathered there. The next day at the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, Dorothy prayed ardently that “I might find something to do in the social order besides reporting conditions. I wanted to change them, not just report them, but I had lost faith in revolution, I wanted to love my enemy, whether capitalist or communist.” Were it not for this prayer, she later admitted, she would likely not have been so receptive to “the French peasant whose spirit and ideas [would] dominate the rest of [her] life,” who awaited upon her return home.This French peasant, laborer, and itinerant scholar was Peter Maurin, who had immigrated to Canada in 1909, and then to the United States in search of his Christian vocation. This vocation eluded him throughout a decade of teaching and Catholic political activism in France, and then two more decades in the new world where he lived as a traveling laborer until World War One. This lifestyle created an in-road into a comfortable life as a French teacher. Like Dorothy, Peter had also experienced a radical conversion; at the age of fifty-three he walked away from the comfort he had struggled to gain in order to pursue a life of poverty, charity, and agitation, which four years later brought him to Dorothy’s door.
Not being one to talk of himself, Peter never revealed the details of his own inner-transformation, but rather when pressed by one interviewer explained dismissively that “a world in search of affluence and security had gone crazy, and I decided to be crazy in my own way.” One is left to speculate on just how Peter’s vocation was found. Peter is best known as an intellectual and as a synthesizer of the philosophy and wisdom of others. Being of such a nature, perhaps Peter’s conversion flowed naturally from the intellectual clarity and vision he arrived at after long studying the gospel, the lives of the saints, Catholic teaching, and the writings of a diverse group of philosophers and scholars. Peter formulated this clarity into a three-part program of action, a program that began with him, and through his graced encounter with Dorothy Day gave birth to the Catholic Worker Movement.
At the core of all Maurin’s thought lies the life and teachings of Jesus, the Sermon on the Mount in particular: “Blessed are the poor . . .” For Maurin, poverty was essential to entering into the life of Jesus and embodying the message of salvation Jesus preached, as was nonviolence or the love of enemies. One became poor because Jesus gave everything, even his life, to serve humankind. Voluntary poverty and nonviolence also gave witness to the primacy of the spiritual and prophetically demonstrated the orientation society had taken towards materialism and violence. The rumpled, old and only suit Peter Maurin wore on the occasion he met Dorothy gave evidence to the life of poverty he had chosen. After the onset of the Catholic Worker Movement, Peter had ample opportunity to model non-violence as a way of dealing with conflict. Dorothy relayed one account in the September 1948 Catholic Worker: When two men at Easton farm fought over an egg to eat, Peter refused to eat eggs or milk the rest of the summer, so that other might have more.
Peter also took to heart the teaching of Mathew 25:31: to serve those in need is to serve Christ. As the second pillar of his program he recommended Christian hospices, in the tradition of the early and medieval Christians, where the Corporal Works of Mercy would be practiced at a personal sacrifice. In Dorothy’s words: “We were to reach the people by practicing the works of mercy, which meant feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, visiting the prisoner, sheltering the harborless, and so on. We were to do this by being poor ourselves, giving everything we had; then others would give, too.” Peter did not hesitate to be the first to put his teachings into practice: “When a reader who had been sleeping in the subway came into the Catholic Worker office one day and disclosed her need (the apartment and the office were already full), Peter’s literal acceptance of ‘If thy brother needs food or drink, feed him, and if he needs shelter, shelter him’ meant that we rented a large apartment a block away which became the first House of Hospitality for women.” In the same spirit, Maurin would often stay overnight at Uncle Sam’s Hotel for forty cents a night, or simply sleep in the park because he had given his bed to someone in greater need.
Likewise, Peter paid great respect to the seven Spiritual Works of Mercy as described by the Catholic tradition: to admonish the sinner, to instruct the ignorant, to counsel the doubtful, to comfort the sorrowful, to bear wrongs patiently, to forgive all injuries, and to pray for the living and the dead. In particular, he embraced “instructing the ignorant” or “agitation” as his particular vocation, and sought to instruct Bishops and bums alike. One of his pedagogical techniques was reciting monologues that would continue uninterrupted until his point had been made and then listening to the fullness of his conversation partner’s ideas without interruption. Another technique of his, was to begin a conversation with one person in a crowded setting like Union Square but in a voice loud enough to attract others. In order to get profound ideas across to the common person, Peter wrote and recited Easy Essays, or pithy poems designed to get stuck in your head. With all these strategies it is no wonder John Woodlock of the Wall Street Journal wrote of Peter: “He can cram more truth into your cranium at high speed in a single hour than any ordinary person could do in a week.”
Nonetheless, one could argue that Peter’s pedagogy was a secondary factor in his success as an agitator; the greater factor was his unshakable belief that all individuals shared his interest in the big questions: What has gone wrong in contemporary society? And, how can society be recreated to better serve the common good and the flourishing of the human person? Moreover, he assumed that everyone was capable of grasping profound truths and willing to transform one’s life in conformity thereof. To this end, Peter proposed Round Table discussions as the first pillar of his three-part program. Round Tables were to compel the exchange of ideas across class divisions in order to understand the roots of social problems and thus forge radical answers.
Having found a disciple at last in Dorothy, Peter spent every day for the next four months, from three in the afternoon until eleven, following her around the house in order to give her a “Catholic education.” Respecting that Dorothy was a working, single mom, Peter would not only bring books, but also summaries of them, which he wrote as an act of service for those without the time to read the works he recommended. Peter’s summaries included a digest of Kropotkin’s Fields, Factories, and Workshops (1889), which concluded, from the study of peasant society, that the principals of cooperation and mutual aid, rather than competition, were the most natural tendencies of humankind. Other sources Peter eagerly brought to Dorothy’s attention were the English Distributists who decried the evils of industrialism and advocated a land and craft society, and the French Personalist, Emmanuel Mounier (1905-1950), who emphasized the absolute value of each person, made in the image of God, as the proper philosophical foundation for society. In the words of Mounier, Peter described his own program as a personalist one, a “green revolution,” which begins with an awakened sense of vocation that compels one to take an active role in history.
Another source of inspiration which Maurin brought to Dorothy was the example of the saints. Peter said, “In the Catholic Worker we must try to have the voluntary poverty of St. Francis, the charity of St. Vincent de Paul, the intellectual approach of St. Dominic, the easy conversations about things that matter of St. Philip Neri, and the manual labor of St. Benedict.”
“Peter loved St. Benedict,” wrote Dorothy, “because he said that what the workers needed most was a philosophy of work.” This philosophy flows out of the Benedictine motto: Laboreare et Orare—Labor and Pray—which emphasized an ideal unity between work and prayer, religious life and economic life. In his own life, Peter had seen the degrading effects of capitalism and communism, both materialistic economic models that emphasize wealth and production rather than the wholeness of the human person or the flourishing of human relationships within society. As an alternative, Peter proposed Christian communalism, believing that the development of one’s interior life was best fostered by a spiritually-centered communal life emphasizing poverty over affluence, self-giving over self-advancement, and cooperation over competition.
Peter cited Benedictine monasticism with its emphasis on hospitality, prayer, life on the land, art, and labor, as just such a model which could transform not only the person but also the wider culture. From his studies of monasticism, Peter also acquired the idea that human goodness can be fostered by appropriate structures. Therefore, Peter would formulate a daily schedule with set times for prayer, work in the fields, meals, rest, crafts, study, etc., for himself and whoever cared to follow. It was these small structures as well as the practice of the works of mercy, and the return to a village-like land and craft based culture, which fleshed out Peter’s idea of a “society where it is easier to be good.” To this end, Peter proposed farming communes or “agronomic universities,” to reintroduce city dwellers to the spiritual richness and simplicity of life on the land as the third and final pillar of his program. On Peter’s farming communes, community members were to live not only in cooperation with one another, but also in cooperation with their animals, which were considered as community members, and with the land, which was to be farmed using the most earth-friendly methods available—all of which was akin to living in cooperation with God.
Nonetheless, it is St. Francis, not St. Benedict, to whom Peter Maurin has commonly been compared, and who was arguably his greatest source of inspiration. The radical conversion Peter underwent coincided with his reading a series of books and papal encyclicals on St. Francis. In one of his Easy Essays Peter summarized the way of St. Francis, which he sought to emulate:
Saint Francis desired that we should give up
superfluous possessions.
Saint Francis desired that we should work with our hands.
Saint Francis desired that we should offer
our services as a gift.
Saint Francis desired that we should ask other people for
help when work fails us.
Saint Francis desired that we should live as free as birds.
Saint Francis desired that we should go through life giving
thanks to God for God’s gifts.
Like St. Francis, Peter was described by Dorothy as possessing “a freedom and joyousness that come from a clear heart and soul.” This joy and freedom flowed from his adoption of Franciscan poverty and the clarity he possessed about his own vocation, which was, in the spirit of St. Francis, to preach the gospel at all times in both word and action. Peter’s method of “agitation”, employed to awaken the human intellect and to compel one towards conversion, as well as his three part program, were his attempt to bring the gospel to the common person and to the social realities of his time. In short, Peter sought not only to talk of salvation (one’s growth towards holiness, or the full realization of oneself moving towards God), but to make salvation more possible by creating a spiritually nourishing culture.It is remarkable how precisely Dorothy’s prayer “to find something to do in the social order” for the poor was answered in Peter Maurin. “Without him,” Dorothy concluded, “I would never have been able to find a way of working that would have satisfied my conscience. Peter’s arrival changed everything, I finally found a purpose in my life and the teacher I needed.” In turn, Peter found in Dorothy the student he had searched for, one with the capacity and charisma to put his program into action. Because of Peter and Dorothy’s student-teacher relationship, Peter has commonly been understood as the intellectual founder of the Catholic Worker Movement. Yet from the beginning, Dorothy sought that Peter would be known for more than just his ideas and even insisted that biographers writing about her write instead about Peter. In the end, Dorothy set out to write her own biography of Peter which, though unfinished, was recently published in Peter Maurin: Apostle to the World. Dorothy’s reflections within, make it clear that Peter was not only her teacher but also her spiritual mentor in whom she saw the “face of Christ.” Upon Peter’s death, Dorothy compared their time together to the time the disciples walked unknowingly with the risen Jesus, quoting Luke 24:32: “Was not our heart burning within us whilst he spoke along the way?”
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