In the past few columns, I’ve been introducing key aspects of the Catholic Worker Movement, founded in 1933 by Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin. This month, I want to begin to focus on the way the movement emphasizes the importance of community in the Christian life.
Maurin used to call the Catholic Worker’s vision “communitarian.” By this, he was emphasizing that daily community life and shared tasks were essential to the life of the Church. This was long before anyone had ever thought of our Archdiocesan Synod or the invitation to join a small group, but it’s certainly the sort of thing Maurin would have heartily endorsed.
By “communitarian,” then, Maurin didn’t have in mind any political party, then or now, that might go by that name. Rather, he wanted to distinguish the Catholic Worker from “communism” on the one hand (which was a political option at that time), and from the normal “individualism” of American life on the other. He emphasized the Church itself as a distinctive way of life, an alternative to others on offer.
The Catholic Worker, in other words, was meant to simply be an embodiment of the Church being itself. And this necessarily meant that it would include Catholics being deeply enmeshed in the business of each other’s lives. Hospitality houses, the daily practice of the works of mercy, shared work, regular meetings for discussion and reflection, corporate liturgy, weekly or daily meals together, the pooling of resources — all these were ways that Maurin advocated that the Church could be more of a community. This is what he meant by communitarianism.
Once again, Maurin saw this kind of thick community as essential for the life of the Church. In other words, we can’t really be Christians without it. Yet too often we think of community as an optional add-on to our faith. For most of us, churchgoing consists of coming together for Mass — even perhaps for daily Mass — but too often not having any real-life connections with one another. We wave during the sign of peace, say our prayers and then head off to our own lives.
But things were not always this way. I regularly hear stories about a time, still within the memory of some older members of our parishes, where there were thick social bonds uniting Catholics in St. Paul. One octogenarian I talk to often tells of living on a block with a half dozen other Catholic families. Each morning around breakfast time, she relates, her back door would open and 10 neighborhood kids would scurry by as she made breakfast, using her kitchen as a shortcut as they all went off to the parish school down the street. The families cooked together, ate together, shared childcare, took care of each other when someone was sick, shared lawnmowers and cars and rides, grieved together when someone died, helped when someone lost a job, played football in the street, and dropped in unexpectedly just to chat.
Surely such communities were not perfect, but they do show a much closer resemblance to the ideal held out to us in Scripture than the reality of most of our lives today. The early Church, says the Acts of the Apostles, ate together, prayed together, took care of the poor together, shared their possessions freely, and met regularly in each other’s homes (see Acts 2:42-47). Such daily fellowship was not just “hanging out,” but doing these things that simply were the practice of the faith. Their social bonds, you might say, were the Gospel itself. They couldn’t be Christians without each other.
Of course, exactly what the Church’s community looks like will vary from place to place and from time to time. It looked one way in first-century Palestine, one way in a medieval village, one way in Maurin’s New York City, and yet another way in St. Paul 60 years ago. But there is no doubt that we will have to reclaim, in our own way, something like Maurin’s communitarianism, something like what we see in Acts of the Apostles, if the Church is once again to become at all socially credible to a world that sees mere individualistic piety as totally irrelevant. We will have to become, in other words, a way of life that makes people once again say “see how they love one another” (Tertullian).
We’ll continue our introduction to the Catholic Worker in coming months by unpacking more of Maurin’s vision for how we might do this.
Miller is director of pastoral care and outreach at Assumption in St. Paul. He has a Ph.D. in theology from Duke University, and lives with his family at the Maurin House Catholic Workers community in Columbia Heights. You can reach him at colin.miller1@protomail.com.
