PERSONALISM

This Giving Tuesday I am taking up a collection for John. We need to raise $360 to keep a roof over his head for a month. It's not a lot of money. There are 30 million people out of work, and some are simply slipping through the cracks. If you are one among our 15,000 CONNECTIONS who are still working, please consider contributing a few dollars of your stimulus check to save just one life?

My stimulus check was already committed to our Catholic Worker Movement peer-supported sober houses. Our beds are full. We need a little extra help this month.

John is 55 years old, autistic and has comorbidity disease which puts him at high-risk if we refer him to the local public homeless shelter. He can not pay his rent and is facing eviction within 30 days if he can not find someone(s) willing to help him. John will become ineligible for public housing in the future if evicted from public housing. Food stamps and Medicaid is all that John has in the way of support.

John had a job at a local grocery store as a security guard. He was a good employee who showed up for work in a freshly pressed uniform each day. Six weeks ago he chased a thief out to his car to verbally confront. This is not easy for John, for it takes him much time to formulate and verbalize what he wants to say. His boss reprimanded John for chasing the crook. John has difficulty with emotions. He thought he was doing what he was hired to do. He got mad and impulsively quit his job two weeks before the State of Ohio went on lockdown. It's not his fault... autistic adults are differently-abled. He should have gotten a medal. He swallowed his pride, went back and begged his boss for his old job. He was told the job is filled. Because he quit the job, John is not eligible for unemployment insurance.

John has not ever filed an income tax return. He throws W-2s away. The IRS has no record of John other than W-2s that do not reflect a current mailing address. So, until the IRS office reopens and we can straighten out this paperwork mess, John will not be receiving the $1200 stimulus check in time to stay eviction.

John has no family he can turn to for help. He has been answering employment ads every day. No takers these last 6 weeks. And with 30 million out of work, it's a long line into those jobs that are available. During the best of times, the disabled face severe discrimination in the job market.

If you can, if you will, please give what you can so that John and others like John can keep a roof over their head long enough to find a suitable job and sustainable life platform. I will send you John's picture. We invite you to come over for coffee to meet John personally. We will place an underwriter banner on our site in your name and will pray for your special intentions every day.

To this end, we (Catholic Worker Movement) advocate:

--Personalism, a philosophy which regards the freedom and dignity of each person as the basis, focus and goal of all metaphysics and morals. In following such wisdom, we move away from a self-centered individualism toward the good of the other. This is to be done by taking personal responsibility for changing conditions, rather than looking to the state or other institutions to provide impersonal "charity." We pray for a Church renewed by this philosophy and for a time when all those who feel excluded from participation are welcomed with love, drawn by the gentle personalism Peter Maurin taught.

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Aims and Purposes (1940)

By Dorothy Day

The Catholic Worker, February 1940, 7.

For the sake of new readers, for the sake of men on our breadlines, for the sake of the employed and unemployed, the organized and unorganized workers, and also for the sake of ourselves, we must reiterate again and again what are our aims and purposes.

Together with the Works of Mercy, feeding, clothing and sheltering our brothers, we must indoctrinate. We must “give reason for the faith that is in us.” Otherwise we are scattered members of the Body of Christ, we are not “all members one of another.” Otherwise, our religion is an opiate, for ourselves alone, for our comfort or for our individual safety or indifferent custom.

We cannot live alone. We cannot go to Heaven alone. Otherwise, as Péguy said, God will say to us, “Where are the others?” (This is in one sense only as, of course, we believe that we must be what we would have the other fellow be. We must look to ourselves, our own lives first.)

If we do not keep indoctrinating, we lose the vision. And if we lose the vision, we become merely philanthropists, doling out palliatives.

The vision is this. We are working for “a new heaven and a new earth, wherein justice dwelleth.” We are trying to say with action, “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” We are working for a Christian social order.

We believe in the brotherhood of man and the Fatherhood of God. This teaching, the doctrine of the Mystical Body of Christ, involves today the issue of unions (where men call each other brothers); it involves the racial question; it involves cooperatives, credit unions, crafts; it involves Houses of Hospitality and Farming Communes. It is with all these means that we can live as though we believed indeed that we are all members one of another, knowing that when “the health of one member suffers, the health of the whole body is lowered.”

This work of ours toward a new heaven and a new earth shows a correlation between the material and the spiritual, and, of course, recognizes the primacy of the spiritual. Food for the body is not enough. There must be food for the soul. Hence the leaders of the work, and as many as we can induce to join us, must go daily to Mass, to receive food for the soul. And as our perceptions are quickened, and as we pray that our faith be increased, we will see Christ in each other, and we will not lose faith in those around us, no matter how stumbling their progress is. It is easier to have faith that God will support each House of Hospitality and Farming Commune and supply our needs in the way of food and money to pay bills, than it is to keep a strong, hearty, living faith in each individual around us - to see Christ in him. If we lose faith, if we stop the work of indoctrinating, we are in a way denying Christ again.

We must practice the presence of God. He said that when two or three are gathered together, there He is in the midst of them. He is with us in our kitchens, at our tables, on our breadlines, with our visitors, on our farms. When we pray for our material needs, it brings us close to His humanity. He, too, needed food and shelter. He, too, warmed His hands at a fire and lay down in a boat to sleep.

When we have spiritual reading at meals, when we have the rosary at night, when we have study groups, forums, when we go out to distribute literature at meetings, or sell it on the street corners, Christ is there with us. What we do is very little. But it is like the little boy with a few loaves and fishes. Christ took that little and increased it. He will do the rest. What we do is so little we may seem to be constantly failing. But so did He fail. He met with apparent failure on the Cross. But unless the seed fall into the earth and die, there is no harvest.

And why must we see results? Our work is to sow. Another generation will be reaping the harvest.

When we write in these terms, we are writing not only for our fellow workers in thirty other Houses, to other groups of Catholic Workers who are meeting for discussion, but to every reader of the paper. We hold with the motto of the National Maritime Union, that every member is an organizer. We are upholding the ideal of personal responsibility. You can work as you are bumming around the country on freights, if you are working in a factory or a field or a shipyard or a filling station. You do not depend on any organization which means only paper figures, which means only the labor of the few. We are not speaking of mass action, pressure groups (fearful potential for evil as well as good). We are addressing each individual reader of The Catholic Worker.

The work grows with each month, the circulation increases, letters come in from all over the world, articles are written about the movement in many countries.

Statesmen watch the work, scholars study it, workers feel its attraction, those who are in need flock to us and stay to participate. It is a new way of life. But though we grow in numbers and reach far-off corners of the earth, essentially the work depends on each one of us, on our way of life, the little works we do.

“Where are the others?” God will say. Let us not deny Him in those about us. Even here, right now, we can have that new earth, wherein justice dwelleth!