(Editor's note: Today is the 76th anniversary of the founding of the Catholic Worker Movement.)
When I was managing a Catholic Worker soup kitchen in Seattle, I not only gave Dorothy Day an iconic status, I also tended to marvel from time to time at the wisdom of the Catholic Worker’s “second founder,” Peter Maurin.
He said this long before I was born, but when I first read it, I blinked twice. Maurin said, "We must make the kind of society in which it is easier for people to be good.” Then he proceeded, with Day, to show the world the kind of society he had in mind. The two of them founded the Worker's one-penny newspapers, and set up a vast network of soup kitchens and houses of hospitality that “made it easier for people to be good” by steering clear of bureaucracy.
When Day and Maurin started their noble project in 1933, they made sure to promote human warmth and personal connections above all else. Catholic Worker houses strongly discourage the public posting of signage or the printing of rules, in order to promote face-to-face communication among all members of the community. Along similar lines, Catholic Worker soup kitchens have always been adamant about offering food to the hungry without any strings attached. Unlike other meal programs that require people to attend a chapel service, Catholic Worker outreach efforts will not force needy neighbors to listen to a sermon if they want to eat dinner.
In the neighborhood setting of a communal house, or in the urban milieu of a soup kitchen, the guiding principle of Catholic Worker communities has remained the same over 75 years: People should govern themselves not to police wrongdoing, but to encourage the flourishing of the human spirit; not to serve ideas or institutions, but to love everyone abundantly. In word and deed, in its spirituality and its structure, the Worker has certainly made the fruits of charity, subsidiarity, and agape-love more accessible to much of Catholic America.
Employing Maurin’s thought now, I’d like to ask, "How can we make it easier for our presidents to be good?” Phrased differently, “How can principles of Catholic Worker governance permeate the highest levels of American government?”
Lord knows President Obama was trying his hardest to be good when he picked his first major appointees. But, as it turned out, some of the men he selected had come to his notice by reason of their success in a system that was already compromised. I started wondering whether there were any power players in Washington or Wall Street who were free of taint. Or whether, under Obama, they could chart a course appreciably different from that of George W. Bush.
It stands to reason that if we, the people, all participate in analyzing a wider range of prospective (or current) White House employees, the whole nation will benefit from such engaged and widespread vigilance. Just as every person has a place at the table in the intimate environment of a Catholic Worker house, a similarly communal process of political examination -- undertaken and shared by everyone -- will make it much easier for Barack Obama to act in the interests of all.
America needs to make a society in which it is easier for its president to be good. We don't have such a society right now, but with some fresh thinking in the political realm, combined with a much more multi-layered view of our government’s architecture, the American presidency can become a place Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin -- two skeptics of entrenched power -- could embrace.
[Matt Zemek is a freelance writer living in Seattle. He is the author of Liberalism the Right Way: A Liberal Vision for Christian Conservatives (2003, BookLocker.com, Inc.).]
