Peter Aristide Maurin was a French social activist and religious leader.
Background
Peter Aristide Maurin was born on May 9, 1877 in the mountain village of Oultet in the Gévaudan area of Languedoc, southern France. He was the first of three surviving children of Jean Baptiste Maurin, a farmer, and Marie (Pages) Maurin. His mother died when he was seven, and two years later the father married again, his second wife bearing him nineteen children. It was a well-ordered family, secure in a tradition that came from centuries of Maurin ownership of the land on which they lived. Years later Maurin would exclaim, "I am neither a bourgeois nor a proletariat. I am a peasant. I have roots!"
Education
At fourteen Maurin entered a boarding school near Paris run by the Christian Brothers, a Catholic teaching order. He became a novice in the order in 1893, received a teaching license two years later, and for the next eight years taught at elementary schools in and near Paris.
Career
Like many other young Catholics at the time, Maurin became increasingly interested in social questions and joined Le Sillon (The Furrow), a Catholic youth movement that sought to support the rise of democratic forces as consonant with the essential spirit of Catholicism. On Jan. 1, 1903, at the expiration of his annual religious vow, he left the Christian Brothers and devoted himself to Le Sillon. His ardor cooled, however, after several years, a fact that his biographer attributes to Maurin's desire for a more scholarly approach to social problems, as against the Sillonist propensity for parades and oratory. In 1909 Maurin immigrated to Saskatchewan, Canada, attracted by the prospect of free land. When his partner in a homesteading venture was accidentally killed, he gave up the undertaking and took laboring jobs such as harvesting wheat and working in a stone quarry. In 1911, nearly penniless, he entered the United States, and for the next several years "rode the rails, " working occasionally in coal mines and sawmills and on railroad gangs. He finally settled in Chicago, where he became a janitor. During the 19206 he began giving French lessons and soon had a number of pupils. In 1926 he moved to Woodstock, N. Y. , taught French for a time at the art colony there, and then settled as caretaker at a nearby Catholic boys' camp. In 1944 he began to develop symptoms of arteriosclerosis. Complaining that "I can no longer think, " he retired to a communal farm in Newburgh, N. Y. , where he died five years later. He was buried in St. John's Cemetery, Queens, New York City, in a cast-off suit and in a grave provided by a Dominican priest.
Views
Maurin apparently underwent a religious experience that gave him a new sense of the significance of the Catholic church in his social philosophy. Although inactive in the church during his years of wandering, he had spent much time reading and pondering the question of community in a world increasingly impersonalized by technology and institutions. He now refused to accept fees for his French lessons and began to lead group discussions of his ideas. His primary aim was to restore the communal aspects of Christianity. Maurin opposed capitalism, nationalism, and other bourgeois values that emphasized competitive striving and the acquisition of "things. " He was distressed by the inability of scholars and workers to communicate with each other and favored a cooperative world where ideas and labor would be shared. Influenced by the European "personalist" writers, Maurin believed that man could be made good only by change in his individual personality, not through social engineering. His philosophy has been described as a blend of medieval Catholicism, romantic agrarianism, and the anarchism of Kropotkin. He preached a "Green Revolution" and hoped to see people abandon the complexity of cities and machines and return to the simplicity of subsistence agriculture and handcrafts. "My whole scheme, " he wrote, "is a Utopian, Christian Communism". In 1932 Maurin met Dorothy Day, a Catholic convert and radical journalist, who saw in his philosophy a way to relate her social concern to her new religious faith. Maurin gave her an intensive course of religious and historical instruction, and under his inspiration she founded a monthly periodical, the Catholic Worker, around which grew the loose association of programs known as the Catholic Worker movement. The first issue, published on May 1, 1933, was distributed among the unemployed radicals who gathered at Union Square; by the end of the year it had reached a circulation of 100, 000. Maurin's program had three aspects: public discussion, in which a mutual interaction of ideas would lead to what he called a "clarification"; urban hospitality houses, where the poor could receive food and lodging; and communal farms, to be operated on the principles of shared capital and distribution to the needy of any surplus. By 1940 the movement had spread to most major American cities; there were then over forty houses and twelve farms in existence, all autonomously operated, and the Catholic Worker had reached a circulation of over 150, 000. Maurin's vision of direct, personal action in meeting social problems inspired many followers, but the Catholic Worker movement by its nature had no strict organization or set of beliefs. Although Maurin opposed labor unions and liberal reform movements like the New Deal, which he felt merely served to perpetuate the capitalist system, Dorothy Day and other leaders helped in unionizing efforts and lent aid in a number of strikes, and the Catholic Worker gave editorial support to most of the New Deal's domestic programs. There was general agreement, however, on opposing military preparedness and war. This worker pacifism caused some loss of influence during World War II, but the movement survived, and remained a major influence on the mind and life of the Catholic church in America.
Quotations:
"The world would be better off if people tried to become better, And people would become better if they stopped trying to be better off. For when everyone tries to become better off nobody is better off. But when everyone tries to become better everyone is better off. Everybody would be rich if nobody tried to become richer. And nobody would be poor if everybody tried to be the poorest And everybody would be what he ought to be if everybody tried to be what he wants the other fellow to be. "
"If we are crazy, then it is because we refuse to be crazy in the same way that the world has gone crazy. "
"I want a change, and a radical change. I want a change from an acquisitive society to a functional society, from a society of go-getters to a society of go-givers. "
"In the first centuries of Christianity the hungry were fed at a personal sacrifice, the naked were clothed at a personal sacrifice, the homeless were sheltered at a personal sacrifice. .. And the pagans used to say about the Christians, "See how they love each other. " In our own day the poor are no longer fed, clothed, and sheltered at a personal sacrifice, but at the expense of the taxpayers. And because of this the pagans say about the Christians, "See how they pass the buck. ""
"What we give to the poor for Christ's sake, is what we carry with us when we die. "
"The coat that hangs in your closet belongs to the poor. "
"The scholars must become workers so the workers may be scholars. "
"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, the manual labor of St. Benedict. "
"The future will be different if we make the present different. "
Personality
Maurin was short and stocky. He cared little for money or what it could buy, wore old and disheveled clothes, and seldom had a penny in his pocket.
Quotes from others about the person
"He taught us what it meant to be sons of God, and restored us to our sense of responsibility in a chaotic world. He was holier than anyone we ever knew. " - Dorothy Day
