The Poor Man

Dressed in a castoff suit and consigned to a donated grave, the mortal remains of a poor man were buried last week. These arrangements were appropriate; during most of his life Peter Maurin had slept in no bed of his own and worn no suit that someone had not given away. But to his funeral among the teeming, pushcart-crowded slums of lower Manhattan, Cardinal Spellman himself sent his representative. There were priests representing many Catholic orders, and there were laymen rich & poor from places as far away as Chicago. All night long before the funeral they had come to the rickety storefront where the body lay, to say a prayer or touch their rosaries to the folded hands. For many of them were sure that Peter Maurin was a saint.

Make a Point. Aristide Pierre Maurin was born 71 years ago on a farm in the Languedoc region of southern France. When Pierre was 14, he went away to a school near Paris run by the Christian Brothers; five years later he was teaching there. He heard much talk then of the "proletariat" and of revolution. But to farm-boy Maurin such solutions did not seem to be solutions at all. Man, he felt, should stay close to the land.

After a few years he gave up his teaching, shipped to Canada and began to pick up jobs in work gangs. With one gang, in 1911, he illegally entered the U.S. He worked on railroads, on farms, in brickyards, in steel mills. For a while he taught French in Chicago. And everywhere he went, he studied--Jesuit Educator Wilfrid Parsons once called him "the best-read man I have ever met."

Peter Maurin (rhymes with bore in) studied because he wanted to teach, for he regarded teaching as his spiritual vocation. In city streets, in buses and in quiet parks he was always beginning discussions with strangers. These conversations were not casual. Each was carefully designed to "make a point," as he liked to say; they were dialogues carefully distilled from the works of such writers as Peter Kropotkin, G. K. Chesterton and Eric Gill.

Poverty on Purpose. His aim was to change modern society into one in which "it would be easier for people to be good." His message was simple and uncompromising: capitalism, with its foundations in usury and its dehumanizing of man by machines, is just as bad for mankind as socialism with its depersonalizing state. Workers, he thought, should leave the factories and work the land in agrarian communities retaining the barest minimum of private property. Participation in modern war he held to be always wrong--all Christians should be pacifists. And the best state of all for a Christian, said Peter Maurin, is voluntary poverty.

In 1933 Peter Maurin formed a spiritual partnership with free-lance writer Dorothy Day that has since become an international movement. Its intellectual nucleus is the monthly paper, the Catholic Worker. Strongly anti-capitalist and pacifist, the Catholic Worker sometimes makes the Communist Daily Worker Jook by comparison almost like a journal of reaction. Peter Maurin and Dorothy Day also opened a chain of "Houses of Hospitality," currently operating in ten U.S. cities, where anyone who applies is given free shelter and such food and clothing as there is for as long as anyone wants to stay. In addition, the movement has nine communally run farms scattered across the country.

Easy Essays. Five years ago, Peter Maurin, who had stripped himself of everything else, lost the use of his mind, through arteriosclerosis of the brain. Virtually unable to think or talk, Maurin numbly lived out the end of his life at one of the communal farms he helped build near Newburgh, N.Y. But every issue of the Catholic Worker has carried at least one of the old "Easy Essays," and readers unaware of Maurin's illness have often written in to congratulate him on their timeliness. Wrote he in 1933:

1] The order of the day

in Catholic circles

is to fight Communism.

2] To denounce Communism

in Catholic halls

is not an efficient way

to fight Communism.

3] The daily practice

of the Works of Mercy

is a more efficient way

to fight Communism.

4]The daily practice

of the Works of Mercy

by the first Christians

made the Pagans

say about the Christians , "See how they love each other."

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