The name of Servant of God Dorothy Day is a familiar one, but most people don’t know about Peter Maurin, the holy philosopher who inspired her work.
A recent conference in Chicago was the first to draw attention to Maurin’s life and work. The first academic conference dedicated to Peter Maurin, co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement, was a collaboration between Mary, Mother of God Parish; the Hank Center for The Catholic Intellectual Heritage at Loyola University Chicago; and DePaul University’s Department of Catholic Studies.
The Peter Maurin Conference examined the life and vision of Peter Maurin, co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement. Maurin's pithy Easy Essays were a staple of The Catholic Worker newspaper from its inception. The essays promoted philosophical personalism and economic distributism and a program of renewal based on Catholic Social Tradition. Maurin's program called Catholics to commit to houses of hospitality, voluntary poverty, the works of mercy, agrarianism, and public roundtable discussions.
The conference featured keynote addresses and roundtable discussions on key topics of Maurin's thought and asked how Peter's program can inspire us to “blow the dynamite” of the Gospel to create a world in which it is easier to be good.
Aleteia had the chance to catch up with Fr. Geoffrey Gneuhs, a personal friend of Dorothy Day who spoke at the conference. He served as chaplain to Dorothy Day and the New York Catholic Worker and offered the eulogy at her funeral in December 1980. He continues to help at St. Joseph House of Hospitality. An artist, he lives in New York City. Here is our conversation:
Would you share a bit about your friendship with Dorothy Day?
I first met Dorothy in 1973 at a Pax Christi conference in Washington, D.C., where I was studying in the seminary. The following summer I served at St. Joseph House, the Catholic Worker house of hospitality in New York City, and after my ordination I came back to become the first officially assigned chaplain to the Catholic Worker.
Dorothy was very grateful that my superiors had granted me permission and said to me, “Father, your being here is an affirmation of my life.” She also was grateful that I had written my Master of Sacred Theology thesis at Yale on Peter Maurin, saying, “I’m glad you wrote about Peter; everybody writes about me!”
Why is the work of Peter Maurin needed today? What was his “Third Way”?
Dorothy always acknowledged the fundamental role of Peter Maurin in the founding of the Catholic Worker movement. She said, “He was the saint… he showed me the way. His ideas would dominate my thinking for the rest of my life.”
He wanted to build a “new world within the shell of the old” based on the Gospels, the papal social encyclicals, and the lives of the saints. His Easy Essays promoted his ideas for economic democracy, rejecting both state socialism and state capitalism, and for expanded ownership opportunities for all, such as employee-owned businesses. This is the “just third way.”
They both rejected the welfare state; He wrote: “He who is a pensioner of the State is a slave of the State.” Peter and Dorothy advocated a decentralized society, where the dignity and creativity of each person could be realized.
Today the elites of the World Economic Forum, the United Nations, and our own regulatory, bureaucratic State treat human beings as statistics and as pawns in their materialist, atheist worldview.
Why is Maurin’s philosophy of “personalism” so central to Catholic Worker?
He called his philosophy “personalism,” that is, direct engagement with others, based on the corporal and spiritual works of mercy and the Sermon on the Mount. French thinkers like Emmanuel Mounier and Jacques Maritain developed this further.
Maritain, by the way, visited Peter and Dorothy when he was in exile in the United States.and teaching at Princeton University. This personalist understanding of Christian responsibility is what attracted me to the Catholic Worker originally so many years ago.
Peter's ideas continue to be important not just as ideals and inspiration but as practical ways, economically and socially, to maintain the dignity, freedom, and creativity of the individual person in our technological, self-centered world. Peter wanted a Christ-centered world.
