Some Thoughts About Peace, The Catholic Worker and Community

These are two pieces I shared earlier today on Facebook. Both are important because they give some sense of the Catholic Worker philosophy. We are in difficult times. People are not listening to each other. So I'm sharing these thoughts from two of my heroes, Peter Maurin and Dorothy Day.

The first appears below and it's a result of thinking about how separated we all are right now. I'm reminded of this Easy Essay by Peter Maurin, co-founder of the Catholic Worker with Dorothy Day. It goes like this:

Community or Crowd?

People say:
They don’t do this,
They don’t do that,
They ought to do this,
They ought to do that.
Always “They”
and never “I.”

The Communitarian Revolution
is basically/a personal revolution.
It starts with I,
not with They.

One I plus one I
makes two I’s
and two I’s
and two I’s make We.
We is a community
while “they” is a crowd.

And then as I think about war and peace in this difficult and dangerous time I tend to go back to my roots in the peace movement - listening to and reading Dorothy Day speak about the topic. So it seems that it's important to review some important thoughts about peace. As a barely 21 year old volunteer at the NYC Catholic Worker in 1965, this is some of what I heard from Dorothy:

Weapons of Peace

"One of our Catholic pacifists asked me to write a clear, theoretical, logical, pacifist manifesto, and he added so far, in these thirty-three year of The Catholic Worker, none had appeared from my pen.

I can write no other than this: Unless we use the weapons of the spirit, denying ourselves and taking up our cross and following Jesus, dying with Him and rising with Him, men will go on fighting, and often from the highest motives, believing that they are fighting defensive wars for justice for others and in self-defense against present or future aggression.

To try to stop war by placing before men’s eyes the terrible suffering involved will never succeed, because men are willing (in their thoughts and imaginations at least) to face any kind of suffering when motivated by noble aims like the vague and tremendous concept of freedom, God’s greatest gift to man, which they may not articulate by merely sense. Or, in their humility (or sloth, – who knows?) men are quite willing to leave decisions to others “who know more about it than we do.” Without religious conversion there will be few Franz Jagerstatters to stand alone and leave wife and children and farm for conscience sake. But as Jagerstatter said, it was God’s grace that moved him, more powerful than any hydrogen bomb."