Fools for Christ

Catholic scholars

have taken the dynamite

of the church;

they have wrapped it up

in nice phraseology,

have placed it

in an hermetically

sealed container,

placed the lid

over the container,

and sat on the lid.

It is about time

to take the lid off

and to make

the Catholic dynamite

dynamic.

The man who wrote this is listed in the American Catholic Who's Who as an "apologist" for the faith. He is really an agitator. For 35 years he traveled up & down the U.S. in the dirty, ragged clothes which were his only possessions, sleeping in flophouses, eating in skid row joints, inveighing to everyone he met against industrialism, war and Christian smugness. His name is Peter Maurin.

Respectable people did not often listen to Peter Maurin. But in 1933, his Catholic dynamite set off Dorothy Day, a young Manhattan radical who had flirted with Communism and Socialism until her rereading of Dostoevsky converted her to Roman Catholicism.

Together they launched a monthly paper, the Catholic Worker, and opened a "House of Hospitality" in Manhattan's tough and dirty lower East Side, where anyone that came could be fed, clothed and sheltered as long as there was anything to share. Money would somehow be provided, they felt. When the first issue of the Worker came off the press, the editors had 92-c- amongst them.

With this month's issue, the Catholic Worker begins its 16th year. Old Peter Maurin, now in his 70s, is crippled and numbly dying of arteriosclerosis of the brain. But the Christian dynamite he set off is still blasting away. The Worker's circulation now totals nearly 70,000. Nine other cities besides New York have Houses of Hospitality (one of them in London). Each is staffed by workers who have dedicated themselves to voluntary poverty, pacifism, and the "14 corporal and spiritual works of mercy."* Wrote Editor Day, 50, in the Catholic Worker's anniversary issue:

"All our talk about peace and the weapons of the spirit is meaningless unless we try in every way to embrace voluntary poverty and not work in any position, any job that contributes to war . . . We must give up our place in this world, sacrifice children, family . . . And we will be considered fools for Christ."

* Corporal works of mercy: to feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, clothe the naked, harbor the harborless, visit the sick, ransom the captive, and bury the dead. Spiritual works of mercy: to instruct the ignorant, counsel the doubtful, admonish sinners, bear wrongs patiently, forgive offenses willingly, comfort the afilicted, and pray for the living and the dead.

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