To Christ — To the Land!

For those who have put to us the question, “What have you to offer in the way of a constructive program for a new social order,” we have replied over and over, “Peter Maurin’s three-point program of Round-table Discussions, Houses of Hospitality, Farming Communes.” This program is so simple as to be unsatisfactory to most, who look for something to be complicated before it can be successful. Remembering the words of St. Francis that we cannot know what we have not practiced, we have tried not only to publish a paper but to put our program into practice. From the very beginning we have sought clarification of thought through The Catholic Worker, through round-table discussions, forums, through circulating literature. We have had a workers’ school where the finest scholars of the Church have come to teach. We have had a House of Hospitality now for two years, where we gave shelter to the homeless, fed the hungry, clothed the naked, and cared for the sick. We have tried, all of us, to be workers and scholars, and to combine work and prayer according to the Benedictine ideal. We have tried to imitate St. Francis in his holy poverty. Our aim has been to combat the atheism of the day by our devotion to the liturgical movement; to combat the bourgeois spirit by the Franciscan spirit; to oppose to class war technique the performance of the works of mercy.

Another Step Forward

We have not altogether neglected the farming commune idea, inasmuch as we had a halfway house in Staten Island where children were given vacations, week-end conferences were held and the sick cared for, and a garden cultivated.

March 1 will see the start of a serious attempt to put into practice [the] third point of our program. We are going to move out on a farm, within a few hours of New York, and start there a true farming commune. There are amongst us several families, three farmers and two builders. There will be twenty of us in all, including three children. The families will immediately have small houses built for them — we have the labor and need only the materials —; the men will bunk in the barn and the women in the house, and the work we will engage in will be providing for ourselves food, clothing, shelter and warmth. We wish to be near a village in order to work out rural problems with our neighbors, and we must be near a church because we realize that only a religious motive will keep us going and if we are away from the source of our spiritual life, we may as well be back in the city.

Startling Facts

Four fifths of the Catholic population is in the city.

The birth rate has been falling so steadily for the past hundred years, (with the rise of our industrial civilization) that according to the figures of the department of agriculture, we are already a middle-aged nation.

The Catholic Worker is opposed to the wage system but not for the same reason that the communist is. We are opposed to it, because the more wage earners there are the less owners there are, and Leo XIII said “the law should favor ownership. Its policy should be to induce as many as possible of the humbler classes to become owners.”

The pronouncement of the bishops of the United States was, “the majority must somehow become owners.”

And how will they become owners if they do not get back to the land?

We realize all the objections to our program. People will say, “You want to make peasants out of the paupers.” Vincent McNabb has listed the objections thus: 1. You can obtain token wealth easier in the city, which can in turn be turned into real wealth. 2. The town dweller can divide his time into work and leisure and so have time for more “pleasure.” 3. The life of the land dweller is in direct conflict with nature. The laboring poor have become so weakened by life in the city and the hardships attendant thereon that they are unable to endure the rigors of life on the land.

The Religious Motive

In the same essay, “The Economics of the Exodus” he points out that no sooner had Moses led the Jews out of the city civilization of Egypt than they began to long after the flesh pots; and then when they eventually got to the land flowing with milk and honey, they built themselves cities as quickly as possible.

He points out in another essay: “No people has ever left the town for the land, or remained on the land when it could have gone to the town except under the motive of religion.”

It is with a full knowledge of the difficulties involved that we are making this move to the country. There have been many groups going thus to the land in the search for a better life. But we do not know of one other which had with them a paper with such a wide circulation as ours.

We are making this move because we do not feel that we can talk in the paper about something we are not practicing. We believe that our words will have more weight, our writings will carry more conviction, if we ourselves are engaged in making a better life on the land. We do not expect to see the government moving people out to subsistence homesteads. It is not the place of the government so to regulate the lives of its citizens. We do not expect to see many groups at once following our example. What we do expect is that through the spreading of these ideals we will be furthering the personalist and the communitarian revolution, and that our constant propagandizing will have some effect on the thought of the country.

Apostolate of Labor

This does not mean that we are going to abandon the city, which we realize is above all, the home of the dispossessed, of the forgotten. We shall keep a group in New York City, and with the assistance of the Campion groups in other cities throughout the country, the work of the apostolate of labor will go on. We shall also be sending out apostles of labor from the farm, to scenes of industrial conflict, to factories and to lodging houses to live and work with the poor. The columns of the paper will be filled as usual with industrial news, discussion of unionism, the cooperative movement, maternity guilds, relief, public and private. But there will be more space devoted to rural life problems, and you will hear from month to month how the work of the farming commune is progressing, the difficulties, the mistakes, and the progress of the work, for the entertainment and encouragement and instruction of our readers.

We have a few places in view, but we have not definitely settled on a location. We are asking our readers, priest and laymen, in rural sections around New York, if they know of any farms of fifty acres, costing $3,000 and under, near a church where there is daily mass. If you know of any such place, write in. Help us in our search. We have all had our eyes open for the past year, and for the last month two members of the group have been devoting themselves to the search. One reader has donated us the use of a car. Other readers have promised us Raspberry bushes and strawberry plants, chicks, and even a Guernsey calf.

Help us in this venture, which is your venture, too. And pray with us that we get out of the city by March first.

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