WE ARE ALL devoured by a passion for social justice today, and seeking an alternative to Communism and capitalism. This world’s goods do not belong to any one nation, any few men, he pointed out. He was speaking a gospel of love, and that meant here and now a redistribution of this world's goods, so that a man could have as many children as God sent him, and support them, have a home for them and work for them to do. He was making no anti-communist speech, he said. Patrick's Cathedral and on the Fordham campus, he spoke of the need to make a new social order. When Father Lombardi spoke a few weeks ago in St. These were Peter's ideas, and they are indispensable for the performing of the works of mercy. To be the least, to be the worker, to be poor, to take the lowest place and thus be the spark which would set afire the love of men towards each other and to God (and we can only show our love for God by our love for our fellows).
#The works of mercy demo manual#
To reach the workers, you begin to study a philosophy of labor, and take up manual labor, useful labor, instead of white collar work. To reach the man in the street you must go to the street. To get to the people, he pointed out it was necessary to embrace voluntary poverty, to strip yourself, which would give you the means to practice the works of mercy. He was a prophet with a social message and he wanted to reach the people with it. Peter Maurin, the founder of The Catholic Worker, was very much an apostle to the world today, not only to the poor. But, anarchists that we are, we want to decentralize everything and delegate to smaller bodies and groups what can be done far more humanly and responsibly through mutual aid, as well as charity, through Blue Cross, Red Cross, union cooperation, parish cooperation. In our fight against such a concept of Christian charity, we have been accused of lining up with Wall Street and private enterprise, and the rich opponents of state control and taxation. In the last fifteen years the all-encroaching State, as the Bishops of the United States have called it, has gained the upper hand.
It was a matter of social enlightenment, Holy Mother the City taking over, Holy Mother the State taking the poor to herself, gathering them to her capacious bosom studded with the jewels of the taxation of the rich and the poor alike, the subtle war between Church and State meanwhile going on at all times, in the field of education, charity, the family.
He pointed out that we have turned to State responsibility through home relief, social legislation and social security, and we no longer practice personal responsibility for our brother, but are repeating the words of the first murderer, “Am I my brother's keeper?" Not that our passing the buck is as crude as all that. When Peter Maurin talked about the necessity of practicing the works of mercy, he meant all of them, and he envisioned houses of hospitality in poor parishes in every city of the country, where these precepts of Our Lord could be put into effect.
The corporal works are to feed the hungry to give drink to the thirsty, to clothe the naked: to ransom the captive, to harbor the harborless to visit the sick, and to bury the dead. The spiritual works of mercy are: to admonish the sinner, to instruct the ignorant, to counsel the doubtful, to comfort the sorrowful, to bear wrongs patiently, to forgive all injuries, and to pray for the living and the dead.