What Does It Mean to be a “Radical” Catholic?

Art: Detail from “The Works of Mercy” by Jen Norton. Used with permission.

Read part 1 of this essay: Looking for a More Joyful, Vibrant Church? Catholic Worker Ideas Point the Way, Author Says

Not Liberal or Conservative—Catholic

I am a convert to Catholicism. In 2016, I was received into the Church, having previously been a priest in the Episcopal Church, a Protestant denomination. My reasons for conversion were complex, being both practical and intellectual.

As an Episcopal priest, I had been in charge of the hospitality house that eventually would grow out of the friendships we had made at St. Joseph’s. There we had tried, and to a large extent succeeded (while not yet Catholics) in, following the way of life we found so compellingly embodied by Maurin and Day.

Upon my conversion, I knew very well that the Catholic Church was not perfect, but I was convinced that the Church that was the source of the things we had learned from Maurin and Day must be the true one.

It shouldn’t have surprised me, but once I was a Catholic, it wasn’t long before I got the sense that my new coreligionists were trying to figure out what kind of Catholic I was. It became clear that Catholics defined themselves over and against other kinds of Catholics at least as much as I was used to Episcopalians defining themselves as not being Baptist or Evangelical or, for that matter, Catholic.

This was wearisome to me because I didn’t want to be a traditionalist Catholic or a liberal Catholic. As a Protestant you always have to choose what sort of Christian you are, in part at least by making enemies of the kind you aren’t. I had been a Catholic-leaning Episcopalian, but now I just wanted to be a Catholic. Yet it quickly became clear that there were various markers by which Catholics identified themselves—the things that made them “really” Catholic in their own minds.

For instance, some look for a Mass that is austere and reverent, and maybe in Latin; others seek a Mass that is casual and inviting, maybe in plain English. Some look for a firmness and passion for certain dogmas and rituals or, on the other hand, a flexibility and gentleness with such formalities. Some look for a rigidness about traditional morals in the Church and society; others want the Church to speak to those on the margins of these morals. Some worry about our society’s marginalizing of the traditional family; others worry about its marginalization of the poor. We all know people on both sides of these divides. We all are, in one way or another, these people.

This need to choose a side seemed odd to me, especially in light of the example of Maurin and Day. Their Catholicism was rooted deep in the heart of the tradition—it grew from the same soil that sprouted the Benedictines and the Franciscans and St. Thomas Aquinas and any of the saints. They didn’t ever seem to identify as liberal or conservative, or anything but Catholic.

And the difference was, I think, that they were doing the unflashy but radical things plain old Catholicism had always taught. They had turned their backs on the status quo by living the heart of the Gospel, and so there was no question that they were really Catholic.

On the other hand, if the details of our daily lives as Catholics are basically indistinguishable from the non-Catholic world around us, it’s no surprise that many of us feel we have something to prove by our liturgical styles or moral emphases. But Maurin and Day majored in the majors and minored in the minors, and so Catholic was all the identity and all the seriousness they needed. No chest puffing necessary.

Radical Catholics

Another way of saying this is that the Catholic Worker movement is about getting back to our Catholic roots. This is what Peter Maurin called being a “radical.”

Today, we usually think being a radical means being contrarian or denouncing the world just for the sake of it. But to be radical is to be rooted—from the Latin radix, a root—and so to be a Catholic radical, Maurin meant, is to be rooted deep in the essential traditions and practices of the Church. It is not to be a strange, marginal, or fringe Catholic—it is to be fully Catholic. It is to go to the root of one’s own life and to be transformed into Christ’s image at the deepest level. It doesn’t get any more radical than that.

Maurin’s call to be radical Catholics is what the Second Vatican Council called the “universal call to holiness.” Sometimes today that is dumbed down to mean that just being ordinary is being holy, but it’s actually the opposite of that. This call to holiness means that the example of the saints, the tough demands of the Gospel, the invitation to be utterly transformed and give everything for Christ—and indeed receive everything from him—are meant not just for a select few Christians, but for all of us. The Catholic Worker prophetically anticipated this universal call and was part of a chorus of voices that brought it forth.

The movement did more than that too. It articulated a particular shape, a specific set of practices, a way of life, that would be that holiness embodied in our world today. For the real question for us is not whether we should be holy—of course we should. The real question is, What does the universal call to holiness look like in America today? What should I do to be holy?

As clearly now as almost a hundred years ago, Maurin and Day’s answer points us back to the root: small communities of common worship, lay leadership, local living, hospitality, simplicity or even voluntary poverty, friendship with the poor, and a serious, deep Catholic analysis of our culture. While this is not the only example of faithful Catholic life out there (and I won’t be suggesting that we all must become Catholic Workers ourselves in any formal sense), the movement is instructive for all of us because at its best it is simply the practice of traditional Catholicism given fresh expression for our own culture.

In other words, our world being what it is, and the Gospel being what it is, something like the Catholic Worker vision is increasingly prophetic for those of us looking for an alternative to the status quo. While utterly faithful to the Church and its tradition, it is in some ways a new sort of holiness, necessary to meet the demands and complexities of a challenging new age. Or rather, as Maurin might say, it’s a holiness so old it looks like it’s new.

The Christian Adventure

Each chapter of this book focuses on one major part of the Catholic Worker vision. The book is not a history of the movement, but an introduction to and application of its way of life to our world. We begin by focusing on the theme of community because this is really what makes the Catholic Worker tick. Only if we get this piece in place first will we be able to see its other hallmarks as aspects of the social life of the Church, rather than as impossible individual moral demands. Subsequent chapters then explore these other hallmarks, giving examples from my own life of what they look like on the ground, showing how they are rooted deeply in the Catholic tradition, and describing how ordinary Catholics like you and me can put them into practice today.

This book is a call to an adventure. It’s not for the spiritual elite; it’s for everyone, because the Gospel is for everyone. And because it’s the Gospel, the Lord knows that none of us will take it on all at once. Adventures are journeys, after all. They are baby steps for all of us, and no one is expecting perfection.

For while Christians are idealists in the best sense of the word, part of the genius of the Catholic Worker is its absolute clarity that there has to be a deep humor and gentleness suffusing everything we do. Laughter and silly stories and failure are the norm. “Judge not” should always be on everyone’s lips. We have to live and preach and pray hard because Jesus is real, and we have to be merciful and jovial and infinitely indulgent with our neighbors and ourselves because, you might say, the point of the counsels of perfection is that we don’t keep them perfectly.

But the Catholic Worker is an adventure just the same. You will come back changed, if you make it back at all. Like the Gospel, this adventure is not just an adjustment of something that we need a little work on, or a mere change in perspective. It’s a total revolution.

For the truth of the matter is that there are no half measures. Christ, without exception, calls all of us to leave everything and follow him. He asks us to spend all of ourselves—all of our time and money and intelligence and energy—in loving God and taking care of one another. What else do we have to do before we die?

As with the Gospel, even if following this call makes a lot of things harder, it really will make everything better. Could we be Christians if we thought anything else?

This excerpt from We are Only Saved Together by Colin Miller is reprinted with permission of Ave Maria Press.