Peter Maurin
Co-Founder of the Catholic Worker movement 

This essay by Jim Forest on Peter Maurin was written for The Encyclopedia of American Catholic History to be published by the Liturgical Press. Jim Forest, once a managing editor of The Catholic Worker, is the author of Love is the Measure: a Biography of Dorothy Day; and Living With Wisdom: a Biography of Thomas Merton. Both are published by Orbis.

Aristotle Pierre Maurin, later known as Peter Maurin, was co-founder with Dorothy Day of the Catholic Worker movement and is chiefly responsible for the movement's visionary qualities.

He was born into a peasant family in Oultet, a village in the Languedoc region of southern France, on May 9, 1877. At sixteen he entered the Christian Brothers, a teaching order which stressed simplicity of life, piety, and service to the poor. In 1898-99, his community life was interrupted by obligatory military service, in the course of which Maurin perceived a tension between religious and political duties. In 1902, when the French government closed many religious schools, Maurin left the order and became active in Le Sillon, a Catholic lay movement which advocated Christian democracy and supported cooperatives and unions. In 1908, disenchanted with the movement's increasingly political character, Maurin resigned from Le Sellon.

In 1909, he emigrated to Canada, where there was no military conscription. For two years he homesteaded in Saskatchewan. After the effort failed, he took whatever work he could find, first in Canada, then in the United States: digging ditches, quarrying stone, harvesting wheat, cutting lumber, and laying track. He worked in brickyards, steel mills and coal mines. At times he traded French lessons for his necessities. He was jailed for vagrancy and for riding the rails. He never married. In 1932, he was handyman at a Catholic boys' camp in upstate New York, receiving meals, use of the chaplain's library, and living space in the barn.

Through his years of reflection and hard labor, Maurin came to embrace poverty as a gift from God. His unencumbered life offered time for study and prayer, out of which a vision had taken form of a social order instilled with basic values of the Gospel "in which it would be easier for men to be good."

As often as his work allowed, he made his way to New York City, staying in Bowery flop houses. His days were spent either at the Public Library or expounding his ideas to anyone who showed interest. After all, he reasoned, "the way to reach the man on the street is meet the man on the street." He was a born teacher, lively, insightful and good humored, and found willing listeners, among them George Shuster, editor of Commonweal magazine, who gave him the address of Dorothy Day, a Catholic convert supporting herself as a freelance journalist. Maurin introduced himself to her in December 1932.

To many Maurin would have seemed just one more street-corner prophet. Day quickly came to regard him as an answer to her prayers, someone who could help her discover what she was supposed to do.

Maurin saw Dorothy Day as a new St. Catherine of Siena, the medieval reformer and peace negotiator. Maurin believed Day could "move mountains, and have influence on governments, temporal and spiritual." But first she needed a truly Catholic education. Maurin wanted her to look at history in a new way which centered not on the rise and fall of nations but on the lives of the saints. She had to understand that sanctity was what really mattered and that any program of social change must emphasize sanctity and community.

Maurin proposed that Day start a newspaper to publicize Catholic social teaching and promote steps to bring about the peaceful transformation of society. Day responded positively, though unsure how she would ever find the money for such a venture. "In the history of the saints," Maurin assured her, "capital is raised by prayer. God sends you what you need when you need it. You will be able to pay the printer. Just read the lives of the saints."

The name Maurin proposed for the paper was The Catholic Radical. The radical -- from the Latin word radix meaning root -- is someone who doesn't settle for cosmetic solutions, he said, but goes to the root of personal and social problems. Day felt that the name should refer to the class of the readers she hoped the paper would have and so named it The Catholic Worker. "Man proposes and woman disposes," Maurin responded meekly.

However when the first issue of was ready for distribution May 1, 1933, Maurin was disappointed and asked that his name not be included among the list of editors. He found the paper short on ideas, principles and a strategy for a new social order. Apart from his own blank verse "Essay Essays" and a few quotations from the Bible and papal encyclicals, the rest of the paper struck him as just one more journal of radical protest.

A radical even among radicals, Maurin thought protest would do little to bring about real change. "Strikes don't strike me," he said, arguing that the old order would die from neglect, not censure. What was needed first of all was a vision of a future society, and with this a program of constructive steps with which to begin realizing bits of the vision in one's own life. The Catholic Worker, Maurin said, should not just one more group of complainers. It should work for what he called "the green revolution."

He saw no point in struggling for better hours or more pay in places where the work was dehumanizing. It was time, he said, "to fire the bosses." But where, he was asked, could they go? How would they live? "There is no unemployment on the land," Maurin replied. The Catholic Worker should stand for a decentralized society stressing cooperation rather than duress, with artisans and craftsmen in worker-owned small factories, and agricultural communities. Coming together in agricultural communities, worker and scholar could both sweat, think and pray together and in the process develop "a worker-- scholar synthesis."

Maurin was often accused of being a utopian romantic longing to return to travel backward rather than forward in time. But Day gradually became more open to his critique of assembly-line civilization and came to share his view that improved, unionized industrialism wasn't enough, that community was better than mass society.

In his Catholic Worker essays, Maurin repeatedly advocated renewal of the ancient Christian practice of hospitality:

People who are in need and are not afraid to beg give to people not in need the occasion to do good for goodness' sake. Modern society calls the beggar bum and panhandler and gives him the bum's rush. But the Greeks used to say that people in need are ambassadors of the gods. Although you may be called bums and panhandlers you are in fact the ambassadors of God. As God's ambassadors you should be given food, clothing and shelter by those who are able to give it.

Every home, Maurin said, should have its "Christ Room" and every parish a house of hospitality ready to receive the "ambassadors of God." Within a year of its founding, the Catholic Worker movement was known as much for its houses of hospitality as for its newspaper.

A strong believer in education through dialogue, Maurin advocated "round table discussions for the clarification of thought." Friday night meetings quickly became a tradition of the Catholic Worker community.

Catholic Workers also took up his call to start farming communes, which Maurin preferred to call "agronomic universities." In 1938 Maurin moved to Mary Farm, a ten-acre property the Catholic Worker community bought in Easton, Pennsylvania. Unfortunately there were always a surplus of people who preferred a discussion of theology or politics to work on the fields or the repair of a hinge. "It seemed," Day noted, "that the more people there were around, the less got done." Small matters took on divisive significance. Maurin alone seemed to look after basic chores. In 1944 part of the farm was sold, another part given away to a cantankerous group that regarded themselves as "the true Catholic Workers."

Other "farms" were set up, but were more rural houses of hospitality than agricultural communities.

From the founding of the Catholic Worker movement in 1933 until 1944, Peter often travelled, speaking in church halls and on street corners to anyone who cared to listen. In 1944, following what appeared to be a minor stroke, Maurin slowly began losing his memory. His last five years were lived quietly and humbly at the Catholic Worker's Maryfarm Retreat Center near Newburgh. His death in 1949 was reported by The New York Times and the Vatican newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano. Time magazine noted that Maurin was buried in a "castoff suit and consigned to a donated grave," appropriate arrangements for a man who "had slept in no bed of his own and worn no suit that someone had not given away."

After his death, a Catholic Worker farm located on Staten Island was named in his honor. Today the Peter Maurin Farm continues in Marlborough, New York.

Peter Maurin 1877-1977

By Dorothy Day

Reprinted from The Catholic Worker, May 1977, 1, 9.

When I first saw Peter Maurin my impression was of a short, broad-shouldered workingman with a high, broad head covered with graying hair. His face was weatherbeaten, he had warm grey eyes and a wide, pleasant mouth. The collar of his shirt was dirty, but he had tried to dress up by wearing a tie and a suit which looked as though he had slept in it. (As I found out afterward, indeed he had.)

What struck me first about him was that he was one of those people who talked you deaf, dumb and blind, who each time he saw you began his conversation just where he had left off at the previous meeting, and never stopped unless you begged for rest, and that was not for long. He was irrepressible and he was incapable of taking offense.

The night I met Peter I had come from an assignment for The Commonweal, covering the Communist-inspired "hunger march" of the unemployed to Washington. I had prayed at the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, 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.

I certainly did not realize at first that I had my answer in Peter Maurin. I was thirty-five years old and I had met plenty of radicals in my time and plenty of crackpots, too; people who had blueprints to change the social order were a dime a dozen around Union Square.

At that time Peter Maurin was fifty-seven, had never married, had been "away from the Church" in his youth, had worked with Sangnier and his social studies group in Paris, and had sold its paper, Le Sillon. He believed in going to the people in town and countryside, because first of all he was of the people himself.

He was born in a tiny hamlet in the southern part of France, 200 miles from Barcelona, one of a family of 24 children. His own mother had died after she had borne her fifth child, and his stepmother had had 19 and was still alive, he said.

`'I did not like the idea of revolution," he once told me. "I did not like the French revolution, nor the English revolution. I did not wish to work to perpetuate the proletariat. I never became a member of a union, even though here in America I did all kinds of hard labor. I was always interested in the land and man's life on the land. That is why I went homesteading in Canada, but after two years, after my partner was killed in a hunting accident, I went around Canada with work gangs and entered this country in 1911, where I have been ever since."

When I first knew Peter, I was busy at a research job which kept me at the library until three in the afternoon. When I got home to my little apartment on East Fifteenth Street, I'd find him there waiting for me, ready to indoctrinate, to give me a lesson in history from the Catholic point of view. He had been sent to me, he said, by George Shuster, later president of Hunter College, who at that time was editor of The Commonweal. George thought that we were alike in point of view, both interested in changing the social order and in reaching the masses with the social teaching of the Church.

I had been a Catholic only about four years, and Peter, having suggested that I get out a paper to reach the man in the street, started right in on my education; he was a born teacher, and any park bench, coffee shop counter, bus or lodging house was a place to teach. He believed in starting on a program at once, without waiting to acquire classroom or office or meeting hall. To reach the man in the street, you went to the street. Peter was literal.

I had met Peter in December, 1932, and the first issue of The Catholic Worker came out in time for the May Day celebration in Union Square, 1933. What Peter Maurin was interested in was the publication of his essays, and my journalistic sense led me to report conditions as they were, to paint a picture of poverty and destitution, homelessness and unemployment, in short, to so arouse the conscience that the reader would be willing and ready to listen to Peter when he talked about things as they should be.

Things as They Should Be

Peter was very much afraid of class war, and after his first essays were published he could not quite understand why I wrote so much about interracial injustice, hard conditions of labor, inadequate housing. He much preferred to write about how things should be--Houses of Hospitality for the needy, charity exercised in every home, voluntary poverty and the works of mercy, farming communes and agronomic universities that would teach people to earn a living by the sweat of their own brows instead of someone else's.

The Catholic Worker was financed like the publications of any radical "splinter group." If we had had a mimeograph machine, it would have been a mimeographed paper. But we had nothing but my typewriter, so we took our writing to a printer, found out it would cost $57 to get out 2,500 copies of a small, eight-page sheet the size of The Nation, and boldly had it set up. There were no office, no staff, no mailing list. I had a small pay-check coming in for the research job which was just finishing; two checks were due for articles I had written, but these were needed to pay overdue rent and light bills. Father Joseph McSorley, the Paulist, paid me generously for a small job of bibliography which I did for him; the late Father Ahearn, pastor of a black church in Newark, gave me ten dollars; Sister Peter Claver gave me one dollar which someone had just given her. Those were our finances. We took that first issue of the paper into Union Square that May Day and sold it for one penny a copy to Communists and trade unionists.

Peter slept in the back of The Catholic Worker office, and he soon brought in an Armenian anarchist poet and a German agnostic to share his quarters with him and to provide sparring partners for round-table discussions. He never took part in any of the work of the paper, except to turn in each month half a dozen "easy essays," many of which he insisted that we repeat over and over again. He was the kind of teacher who believed in repetition, restatement, and the continual return to first principles. He loved, however, to see visitors, and, if none came into the office, he went out into the highways and byways and found them.

The only time Peter got excited was when he found others agreeing with him approving his ideas. Then his voice would rise, his eyes would shine and he would shout out exultingly. He always expected so much in the way of results that I often felt called upon to put a damper on him, to tone down his optimistic enthusiasms. But I soon noticed that he was never depressed or discouraged by disappointments or failures.

A failure such as that of the first round-table discussion was an example. Peter had hoped for great results from a series of Sunday afternoon discussions he had planned. Optimistically, for the first one he rented the ballroom of the Manhattan Lyceum, where trade union conventions as well as balls were often held. Only twenty people showed up; they gathered around the speaker's table and had an uproarious discussion on political action versus Catholic Action. After that, Peter rented a small meeting room. The waste of money, laboriously collected, did not bother him. There was plenty of money in the world, he believed. What was needed was men and women absorbed by the right ideas. Given the people, the money would follow. All one needed to do was to pray. When bills piled up and creditors came, we used to go to church and pray, all of us taking turns, and we called this "the picketing of St. Joseph." Once when I asked an unemployed chambermaid if she would take a half-hour of "picketing Saint Joseph" over at Precious Blood Church, she asked me if she was to carry a sign. Once the printer sent us his bill with the notation, "Pray and pay!"

I asked Peter several times if he were not disappointed at the lack of success in indoctrinating the man on the street. I pointed to various examples of those who came to stay with us and whose condition seemed to get worse instead of better.

Getting Down to the Roots

"People are just beginning to realize how deep-seated the evil is," he said soberly. "That is why we must be Catholic Radicals, we must get down to the roots. That is what radicalism is--the word means getting down to the roots."

Peter, even in his practicality, tried to deal with problems in the spirit of "the Prophets of Israel and the Fathers of the Church." He saw what the Industrial Revolution had done to human beings and he did not think that unions and organizations, strikes for higher wages and shorter hours, were going to be the solution. "Strikes don't strike me," he used to say when we went out to a picket line to distribute literature during a strike. But he came with us to hand out the literature--leaflets which dealt with men and women's dignity and their need and right to associate themselves with their fellows in trade unions, in credit unions, cooperatives, maternity guilds, etc.

He was interested in far more fundamental approaches. He liked the name "radical" and he had wanted the paper to be called The Catholic Radical. To him, Worker smacked of class war. What he wanted was to instill in all, worker or scholar, a philosophy of poverty and a philosophy of work.

He was the layman always. I mean that he never preached; he taught. While decrying secularism, the separation of the material from the spiritual, his emphasis as a layman, was on our material needs, our need for work, food, clothing and shelter. Though Peter went weekly to confession and daily to Communion and spent an hour a day in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament, his study was of the material order around him. Though he lived in the city, he urged a return to the village economy, the study of the crafts and of agriculture. He was dealing with this world, in which God has placed us to work for a new heaven and a new earth wherein justice dwelleth.

He constantly urged individuals to practice the corporal and spiritual works of mercy; he urged Bishops to establish Houses of Hospitality. Somehow the two planks of the program got mixed up. I can remember well enough how it happened. He had written a series of essays addressed to the Bishops, pointing out to them that canon law called for the establishment of hospices in every bishopric. 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. Now we have two houses, on First St. and Third St. Here the works of mercy are still being practiced by the group who get out The Catholic Worker, living without salaries, in voluntary poverty. "Feeding thy brother" started with feeding a few poor men. It became a daily breadline in 1936, and the line still forms every day outside the door.

Round-table Discussions, Houses of Hospitality and Farming Communes--those were the three planks in Peter Maurin's platform. There are still Houses of Hospitality, each autonomous but inspired by Peter, each trying to follow Peter's principles. And there are farms, all different but all starting with the idea of the personalist and communitarian revolution--to use Emmanuel Mounier's phrase. Peter was not disappointed in his life's work. He had given everything he had and he asked for nothing, least of all for success. He gave himself, and--at the end--God took from him the power to think.

He was anointed at Easton for a bad heart condition, and a few years later, on May 15, 1949, he died at Maryfarm in Newburgh, New York. Garbed in a donated suit of clothes, he was buried in a donated grave in St. John's Cemetery, Brooklyn.

Obituaries were found not only in The Industrial Worker, a Chicago I.W.W. paper which was on the subversive list, but also in Osservatore Romano in Vatican City, which carried its notice on the front page.

God has taken him into Paradise, with Lazarus who once was poor. May He bring us, too, to a place of refreshment, light and peace.