Peter Maurin
Peter Maurin (actually Aristide Pierre Maurin ) ( born May 9, 1877 in Oultet in the Languedoc, South France, † May 15, 1949 in New York), along with Dorothy Day the founder of the Catholic Worker movement.
Life
He grew up as the first child of a peasant family in southern France. At 16, he joined the teaching order of Christian Brothers, put the emphasis on a simple lifestyle, devotion and service to the poor.
The completion of military service 1898/99 interrupted Maurin community life. During this time he tensions between religious and political loyalties were aware. In 1903, he left the order and became a member of the founded by Marc Sangnier left the Catholic lay movement Le Sillon, which supported cooperatives and trade unions.
In 1909 he emigrated to Canada. There followed years as migrant workers, first in Canada, then in the United States. Despite these marked by hard work, ascetic lifestyle Maurin found time to read in public libraries theological and social works and slow to develop his theories to a transformation of society. In particular, the thinkers of the French personalism and related to them authors influenced him ( Emmanuel Mounier, Jacques Maritain ), and the Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin.
1932 Maurin met in New York on the Catholic a convert Dorothy Day, a journalist who had written previously for socialist and communist newspapers and was looking for a way to live their radical social and political beliefs within the Catholic Church. Together they founded the first newspaper, The Catholic Worker, from which emerged a lay movement, which began to implement Maurin's program of social transformation in practice: created houses of hospitality and farm communities.
Until his death in 1949 Maurin lived in houses and farms of the Catholic Worker movement. He traveled widely to give lectures on the program of the " green revolution "; the "Easy Essays " were published in several editions and editions in book form. About his death was reported in the New York Times and in the Vatican newspaper L' Osservatore Romano. Time magazine noted that Peter Maurin was buried in a suit and stored in a donated grave, an appropriate arrangement for a man who " has slept in your own bed and not only worn suits that someone had given him ."
Green Revolution
The model for its Green Revolution saw Peter Maurin in history at the iro -Scottish traveling monks of the early Middle Ages realized that would have preserved in the time of the fall of the Roman Empire, culture and Christian values by a three -point program:
Works
Easy essays
- Peter Maurin: Catholic radicalism - phrased essays for the green revolution. With drawings by Ed Willock. New York Catholic Worker Books.