As we continue this month to introduce the ideas of the Catholic Worker Movement, I want to pick up once again the theme of “personalism” from the December column.
As I wrote there, personalism is the emphasis that humans should act on their own initiative to form community, care for others, and solve their problems, rather than demanding that institutions do it for them. Here I want to underline the way that personalism is the beating heart of any healthy community.
The social bonds of any community must exist within that community. If they do not — if the basis of its togetherness comes from somewhere else — then that somewhere else is their true community.
For example, in a workplace, often groups of friends develop. The members are not an independent community but are held together by a commitment to a common employer, rather than directly to each other. The company is the real community. So, when someone takes a different job, it is likely that person will leave the friend group. If they don’t, it’s because the group has found something besides the company to unite them — say, love of music or local beer.
Whatever it is, for the group to hold together, there must be something of personal interest, resulting in intentional and active participation. In Catholic language, this is called the common good. It’s the centripetal force — the social bond — of any community. Like a sports team or a brigade of soldiers, common goods mean that everyone in the community has an interest in everyone else, because they all have an active, personal interest in the same objectives. Common goods are the glue of healthy communities.
Moreover, to come to know a community’s true common good, one must be intimately involved with its people. Every place and its people are almost infinitely complex. To personally get to know it is the only way to know it at all. You cannot engage the common good from a distance, or by pushing buttons, or by a few abstract categories. You must live in it. This means that true solutions to social problems will have to come from within, and not without — from the people themselves. They will have to engage each other in the flesh, in the complexity of local life. This is personalism, and it is deep in the heart of the Catholic social tradition.
This suggests another reason Peter Maurin and Dorothy Day had deep reservations about our culture’s widespread institutionalization (mentioned in the December article). For we tend to assume that if we want to revitalize a neighborhood or engage a homeless encampment, the first thing to do is look to the professionals — to involve more social workers, lobbyists, doctors, mental health workers, or housing experts. We immediately think of getting people connected, as we say, to the right services.
Yet, what the personalism of Catholic social teaching helps us see is that, with the best of intentions, these services can unwittingly lead communities further from their own personalist pursuit of the common good and toward a growing dependence on external systems. Institutionalized services can pluck us out of our natural communities and graft our lives onto impersonal agencies and systems that manage large parts of our lives for us.
This is often detrimental to communities, because we become more members of those external systems than of the places where we live. The result is that we might still live near one another, but we have little in common with our neighbors, for we do not have to seek the common good with them. So, we lose our centripetal force, our glue. Too often, then, communities grow weak as systems grow strong.
At worst, we are left with a society of deeply isolated individuals, connected only indirectly by the agencies that do our living for us. The result is a massive dead space, a hole where living together used to be. It’s a hole we are largely filling by staring at screens. And screens are no substitute for the personalist pursuit of the common good.
Yet there is plenty of hope to be had. For the Church is God’s plan for bringing true community out of this brokenness. This is what Day and Maurin saw so clearly, and what we’ll continue to explore in future columns.
Miller is director of pastoral care and outreach at Assumption in St. Paul.
