“For the sake of new readers, for the sake of men on our breadlines, for the sake of the employed and unemployed, the organized and unorganized workers, and also for the sake of ourselves, we must reiterate again and again what are our aims and purposes. Together with the Works of Mercy, feeding, clothing and sheltering our brothers, we must indoctrinate. We must “give reason for the faith that is in us.” Otherwise we are scattered members of the
Body of Christ, we are not “all members one of another.” Otherwise, our religion is an opiate, for ourselves alone, for our comfort or for our individual safety or indifferent custom. We cannot live alone. We cannot go to Heaven alone. Otherwise, as Péguy said, God will say to us, “Where are the others?” (This is in one sense only as, of course, we believe that we must be what we
would have the other fellow be. We must look to ourselves, our own lives first.) If we do not keep indoctrinating, we lose the vision. And if we lose the vision, we become merely philanthropists, doling out palliatives. The vision is this. We are working for “a new heaven and a new earth, wherein justice dwelleth.” We are trying to say with action, “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” We are working for a Christian social order.”
Dorothy Day wrote these words in 1940. 85 years later, we can hardly improve upon them. We write to promote the reconstruction of the social order. Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin started their movement in answer to Pope Pius XI’s call to “reconstruct the social order in the image of Christ.” Dorothy and Peter believed American society needed a fundamental reordering: the dignity of the person, rather than increase of profit, needed to become the basis of our social order.
We have named our community publication The Personalist because of the guiding philosophy of the Catholic Worker movement: personalism, which advocates for societies that promote the sanctity of each person’s dignity and their freedom. Emmanuel Mounier, the author of this philosophy, argued that bourgeois capitalism promoted our individual comfort; Marxism ignored the spiritual nature of the person and reduced all well-being to material goods, and fascism corrupted our spiritual desire for union with God into a lust for power and a worship of the nation-state. In our society, we see how all these lies have shaped different aspects of our economy, politics and social services. We strive to build a new society in the shell of the old, that is based on the sacredness of our neighbor rather the value of their bank account. We strive for a society based on communion and encounter rather than efficiency, maximization of profit, government funding, or bureaucracy.
Rich and poor alike today want to know how to make a good society. We know that we must do better than the violence, exploitation, greed, inequality, war, pollution, and destruction that fill our headlines and cause such suffering. We aim to create a society where it is easier to be good. We write to encourage each other that such a world is possible and to clarify with one another what that world looks like.
Our patron saint, St. Martin de Porres, was called a “gentle agitator” and “revolutionary personalist” in the May 1936 edition of The Catholic Worker, and was credited with starting the first Catholic Worker program in the Western Hemisphere.
Our house and our publication is dedicated to this “gentle personalist,” San Martín, who embodied Peter Maurin’s call to gentle personalism, to “be what you want the other fellow to be.” We are a small community, doing what we can, and have faith that Jesus will take our small efforts and do the rest. This work of ours, in trying to create “a new earth wherein justice dwelleth” is not ours, but God’s and is only done with God’s grace, and so we place our faith and love in God first, and then our neighbors, believing that in the neighbor we can see we find the face of the God we cannot (1 John 4:20).
“The Catholic Worker believes in the gentle personalism of traditional Catholicism…gentleness that finds its roots in the common doctrine of the common good” – Peter Maurin
The Catholic Worker believes in “the gentle personalism of traditional Catholicism,” as Peter Maurin writes. We decided to name our paper The Personalist to reflect the importance of this philosophy in Christian action. But
what is personalism?
Dorothy Day defined personalism in her 1939 autobiography House of Hospitality: “We are trying to work out the doctrine of gentle personalism, to live a life in which people do not do things by compulsion, but of their own free will.”
“I would describe Personalism as a way of pursuing and exercising justice, both as a person and as a community, which understands the human person’s infinite dignity and potential for excellence. It places all the tools of economics,
politics, and all social systems at the service of this excellence,” said Rev. Aaron Lynch.
Rev. Lynch was one of the members of our reading group of Emmanuel
Mounier’s A Personalist Manifesto (1938) last year. Another member, Rev. Matthew Best, of Christ Lutheran Church in Allison Hill, shared his definition of personalism with us:
“Personalism is a way of engaging the world that recognizes the full humanity and dignity of self and others,” Rev. Best said, “emphasizing our moral agency and the ways our lives are bound together within larger social and systemic relationships.”
The editors of The Catholic Worker shared a definition of personalism in the October 1936 edition of The Catholic Worker via a sermon of St. John Chrysostom on the Good Samaritan. Chrysostom says:
“The Samaritan did not say, ‘where now are the priests, where are the Pharisees, where are the doctors of the law,’ but as though he had come across a very great bargain, he grasped the opportunity for making profit. Therefore when you see someone in need of care, soul or body, don’t say to yourself, ‘Why didn’t so-and-so take care of him,’ but YOU attend him, and do not go into the reasons for the negligence of others. If you found gold lying on the road, would you say to yourself, ‘why didn’t someone pick this up?’ Wouldn’t you rather hurry to get it before the next person? Likewise then, pay attention to your fallen brother and think that you have found a treasure, the chance of caring for others.”
St. John Chrysostom, Pray for us.
