Peter Maurin and Easy Essays

A friend recently wrote about Peter Maurin, one of the co-founders of the Catholic Worker movement, and posted one of Maurin’s Easy Essays. As a fan of Maurin, I appreciated that. I have long been a fan of Maurin.

Some background.

Peter Maurin was born in France in 1877. He wandered from job to job and vocation to vocation for many years, even tried homesteading in Canada, and eventually emigrated to the United States. He had drifted away for the Catholic Church, but in the 1920’s, inspired by St. Francis of Assisi, he returned to the faith and started trying to live in a Franciscan way. He also read extensively - including works by G. K. Chesterton - and began promoting his thoughts about how to live as Christians in the world, expressing his ideas in a poetic form in what became known as “Easy Essays.”

He met Dorothy Day in 1932, and with her founded the Catholic Worker movement. His Easy Essays were featured in the Worker newspaper, the Catholic Worker.

Maurin died in 1949. But his Easy Essays have been collected. I own one collection put out by the Catholic Worker years ago. I also own a more comprehensive recent collection, The Forgotten Radical Peter Maurin: Easy Essays from the Catholic Worker, edited by Lincoln Rice. (I also have two biographies of him, one by Arthur Sheehan, and one by Marc Ellis.) I even briefly served on the live-in staff at a Catholic Worker House!

Maurin believed in the power of the Church to bring about change in the world, but noted that that power was not being used. One of his Easy Essays was about that problem.

BLOWING THE DYNAMITE

Writing about the Catholic Church,
   a radical writer says:
   “Rome will have to do more
   than to play a waiting game;
   she will have to use
   some of the dynamite
   inherent in her message.”
To blow the dynamite
   of a message
   is the only way
   to make the message dynamic.
If the Catholic Church
   is not today
   the dominant social dynamic force,
   it is because Catholic scholars
   have failed to blow the dynamite
   of the Church.
Catholic scholars
   have taken the dynamite
   of the Church,
   have wrapped it up
   in nice phraseology,
   placed it in an hermetic container
   and sat on the lid.
It is about time
   to blow the lid off
   so the Catholic Church
   may again become
   the dominant social dynamic force.

I’ll post more of his Easy Essays in the future.

Pax et bonum