Peter Aristide Maurin

• Peter Maurin
• Born: May 9, 1877
• Died: May 15, 1949

Cofounder with Dorothy Day of the Catholic Worker movement, was born in Oultet, a mountain village in southern France, the oldest of three children of Jean Baptiste Maurin and Marie (Pages) Maurin. His mother died when he was seven, and his father, whose family had been landowning peasants in the region for centuries, soon remarried a woman who bore him nineteen more children. Peter Maurin attended a boarding school near Paris, and at the age of sixteen became a novice in the Christian Brothers, the teaching order that operated the school. After receiving his teaching license two years later he taught for eight years in elementary schools in and near Paris.

Maurin was evidently not suited to formal teaching, and his interests were shifting to social questions. After the expiration of his religious vows in 1903 he left the Christian Brothers to begin work with Le Sillon (The Furrow), a Catholic youth movement that sought to reconcile the rising forces of democracy with the essential spirit of Catholicism and was hostile to both capitalism and nationalism. For a time he sold one of its publications, L’Eveil democratique (The Democratic Awakening) but soon left the movement because of its anti-intellectual character and propensity for emotional demonstrations, showy parades, and even street fighting. While working as a chocolate salesman and reading widely Maurin became deeply impressed with the communitarian principles of the Russian philosophical anarchist, Peter Kropotkin, and with his view that intellectual life could be enriched by manual labor.

During this period Maurin was also influenced by a wave of advertising in France about free land in Canada, and in 1909 he emigrated. When the partner with whom he was homesteading a parcel of land was killed in a hunting accident Maurin gave up the farm and became a wandering casual laborer. In 1911 he came to the United States, where he worked in the Pennsylvania coalfields, on railroad gangs, and in Chicago as a janitor. His religious-intellectual quest continued throughout these wanderings, and in the mid-1920s became more clearly focused through the writings of the French antibourgeois philosopher Leon Bloy, who viewed poverty as a hellish thing for those forced to suffer it but a purifying and liberating experience when voluntarily embraced. By 1925, when he left Chicago for the East, Peter Maurin had changed from a man with some concern for dress and grooming to one who seldom bathed and dressed in rags. No longer an introspective intellectual, he had become an active “indoctrinator” of his views. He lived for a time in the artists’ colony of Woodstock, New York, where he gave French lessons without pay, and then became a caretaker at a nearby Catholic boys’ camp. On weekends during the Great Depression he traveled to New York City, where he read in the public library, slept in a forty-cent room on the Bowery, and talked with the radicals who gathered in Union Square.

Maurin’s philosophy, strongly influenced by Jacques Maritain and other French “personal-ists” who viewed individual redemption as the path to social regeneration, and by his own experience among the despised outcasts of American society, had now matured, or “clarified,” into an amalgam of medieval Catholicism, philosophical anarchism, and romantic agrarianism. Advocating Christian communalism and a “green revolution” that would return people to handicrafts and subsistence agriculture, he began to formulate a rough plan for what he called a “Utopian Christian Communism” and to look for someone who could help put his ideal into practice. Advised by the editor of the liberal Catholic magazine, Commonweal, he sought out Dorothy Day, a radical journalist and recent convert to Catholicism who was also seeking a way to relate her new religious faith to her social concerns, now sharpened by the horrors of the depression. For several months he visited her daily, interpreting current affairs in the light of Catholic faith and history and urging immediate organized radical action in the form of a newspaper that would expound personalist principles to the working man. On May 1, 1933, the first issue of The Catholic Worker was distributed, at one cent a copy, among the crowd assembled in Union Square in honor of the socialist holiday. In a June issue of the weekly, after disclaiming any desire to be regarded as an editor because that might commit him to support all the paper’s policies, Maurin set forth the main points of his program for “Utopian Christian Communism”: roundtable discussions to bring about “clarification of thought,” communal houses for the urban unemployed, and “agronomic universities,” or communal farms.

The Catholic Worker became the focal point and inspiration for a loose association of institutions called the Catholic Worker movement, which had spread to most large American cities by 1940: roundtable discussions on the Maurin model, which attracted prominent clergy and laymen as participants, more than forty Hospitality Houses, which appealed strongly to young Catholic intellectuals, and twelve communal farms. Each of these entities was autonomous, and the movement purposefully lacked a unified policy. While Dorothy Day and others helped organize labor unions and The Catholic Worker generally supported the social programs of the New Deal, Maurin opposed both on the ground that they helped to perpetuate capitalism. A stocky, very ill-kempt figure who was frequently mistaken for a tramp, he traveled about the country “indoctrinating” his ideas in a heavy French accent and in free-verse “easy essays,” and doing manual labor between lecture tours. One of his most-expounded themes was the unity of intellect and action: “The trouble with the world is that the man of action does not think and the man of thought does not act.” A collection of his Easy Essays was published in 1936, and Catholic Radicalism in 1949.

Along with most of the Catholic Worker movement, Peter Maurin spoke out against the anti-Semitic preaching of Father Coughlin, Catholic support of General Franco in the Spanish Civil War, and American military preparedness and the draft in the early days of World War II. In the fall of 1944, showing signs of arteriosclerosis, he retired to the Catholic worker farm at Newburgh, New York. He stopped writing, and remained an invalid until his death. His body was brought to New York City, and he was buried in a cast-off suit in St. John’s Cemetery, Queens, in a grave provided by a Dominican priest. For many years his “easy essays” appeared in The Catholic Worker, and he continues to provide inspiration to a social and intellectual movement whose abiding influence has spread far beyond the Catholic church.

Collections of Maurin’s writings are The Green Revolution (1961; the revised version of Catholic Radicalism) and Radical Christian Thought, ed. C. Smith (1971). A. Sheehan, Peter Maurin: Gay Believer (1959) is the only biography, but see also W. D. Miller’s biography of Dorothy Day, A Harsh and Dreadful Love (1972), Day’s autobiography. The Long Loneliness (1952), and chapters on the Catholic worker movement in D. J. O’Brien, American Catholics and Social Reform (1968).