Peter Maurin
“We need the kind of society where it is easier for people to be good.” Peter Maurin, co-founder of the Catholic Worker.
While today there is a lot of talk in the Catholic Church about making Dorothy Day the co-founder of the Catholic Worker a saint there is a little or no talk about the other co-founder of the Catholic Worker. Peter Maurin. Peter was an interment preacher and worker who help Dorothy Day find her true calling in life. Peter lived amidst the poor and promoted the ancient Christian principle of hospitality. He wrote:
“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.”
Peter wanted every home to have a “Christ Room” and every parish a house of hospitality ready to receive the “ambassadors of God.” God’s ambassadors were the poor, ill and marginalized.
I am reminded these days of Peter Maurin and his radical, getting to the roots, philopshy of life. There is much talk about change but little changes except the poor get poorer and the rich get richer. A parish in town is talking and talking about use of 1 million dollars of Church funds which came from a neighborhood where children sleep on the food and families have no refrigerators or stoves to store food.
Peter was a strong believer in education that comes from round table discussion with there is a clarification of thought. Not the local Catholic University calls talks to people while eating soup at lunch ‘round table discussions’.
Peter believes in “agronomic universities” where scholars, workers and farmers live together and work together. He talked of the ‘green revolution’ which now sounds like the “Good Food Revolution” of Will Allen and Growing Power.
You can find some of Peter Maurin’s “Easy Essays” on this web page. He died quietly and humbly in a Catholic Worker farm in 1949 after suffering a five year lost of memory. His death was noted in 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,” He died poor and marginalized but was a true prophet of how to change the world by making it “easier for people to be good.”
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