Conference explores work of Catholic Worker movement co-founder

Peter Maurin isn’t as well-known or studied as much as Dorothy Day, his co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement.

Most of the writings he left behind were his pithy “Easy Essays,” blank verse compositions that were published in the Catholic Worker newspaper beginning with its very first issue.

A Sept. 6-8 conference hosted by St. Gregory Hall and Canterbury House, both ministries of Mary, Mother of God Parish, drew about 100 scholars and members of Catholic Worker communities around the United States.

Maurin was a proponent of “cult, culture and cultivation,” according to Sept. 7 keynote speaker Lincoln Rice, which is roughly equivalent to liturgy, education and agriculture. Maurin proposed that church teaching on the innate dignity and importance of the human person should be the organizing principal of society, rather than economics or politics.

His essays promoted philosophical personalism and economic distributism and a program of renewal based on Catholic social tradition, according to conference organizers. Maurin’s program called Catholics to commit to houses of hospitality, voluntary poverty, the works of mercy, agrarianism and public roundtable discussions.

Maurin was born in France in 1877 and was a La Sallian Christian brother for several years before leaving the community and becoming affiliated with a lay Catholic movement in France. Only a few years later, he became disillusioned with the movement’s increasing political activity and left for North America in 1909.

He homesteaded for two years in Saskatchewan; when that failed, he took whatever work he could find wherever he could find it.

Maurin lived in Chicago from 1917 to 1925, according to Mark Franzen, director of St. Gregory Hall.

“His life in Chicago is a mystery to biographers, but he told Dorothy Day that he was not living as a Catholic should live for most of his time here, until he experienced some sort of conversion that returned him to his Catholic faith,” Franzen said in an email. “Whatever happened to Peter Maurin in Chicago, it was an important stepping stone to creating the Catholic Worker movement.”

He introduced himself to Day at the end of 1932, and by May 1, 1933, the Catholic Worker movement had been born.

Day, a convert to Catholicism, needed Maurin’s background in the church, said Tommy Cornel, who lives at the Peter Maurin Farm in Marlboro, New York. Maurin envisioned communal farms as places Catholics could gather to learn agricultural skills and participate in roundtable discussions on intellectual and religious topics; he thought of them as “agronomic universities.”

“Dorothy spoke this truth,” Cornel said. “People don’t understand that she needed his intellectual grounding in Catholicism, his Catholic view of history.”

Maurin also had a lot to say about the effects of an industrial economy on the environment, effects that have increased and accelerated until they are undeniable, Cornel said.

“I think he has a lot to say to us in the present moment, if we’re able to listen,” he said.

Maurin’s Easy Essays were published in groups, and they are meant to be read that way, said Rice, author of “The Forgotten Radical Peter Maurin: Easy Essays from the Catholic Worker” (Fordham University Press, 2020).

The essays that ran in the first two issues of the Catholic Worker constitute Maurin’s “Magna Carta,” Rice said, with the essays in the first issue proposing the problem — that the world has been snared into an economic system that makes money the first value — and the second issue offering Maurin’s solutions, including houses of hospitality, roundtable discussions and farming communes for people to get back to the land.

Kelly Johnson, an associate professor of religious studies at the University of Dayton, said she attended the conference because Maurin is “a really understudied figure in the work for social and economic justice amongst many Catholics.”

“I found Peter’s work in my 20s,” said Johnson, now 60. “It just opened up a whole area of professional and personal possibility for me. He was a thinker, and his writings are bold expressions of truth.”

Still, Johnson said, Maurin did not get everything right.

After the Sept. 7 keynote, Johnson asked Rice about the lack of attention to colonization and racism in Maurin’s view of economic history, and Rice acknowledged that Maurin simply didn’t address them very much and seemed unaware of the extent of their effects.

“He writes about colonization in the late ‘30s, early ‘40s, as we’re ramping up for war, and he’s trying to get at the root causes of war,” Rice said, and most of his work about racism focused on antisemitism, although he at one point offered free French lessons in Harlem in a storefront center meant to evangelize Black residents of the neighborhood.

Maurin left New York in 1938 to live at Mary Farm, a Catholic Worker community in eastern Pennsylvania. He appeared to suffer a stroke in 1944, and lived out the rest of his life at Catholic Worker’s Maryfarm Retreat Center near Newburgh, New York.

When Maurin died in 1949, his obituary ran in the New York Times and L’Osservatore Romano. According to the Catholic Worker website, 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.”