A!fred A. Knopf, New York 1983

Labor

The Catholic Worker, as the name implied, was directed to the worker, but we used the word in its broadest sense, meaning those who worked with hand or brain, those who did physical, mental, or spiritual work. But we thought primarily of the poor, the dispossessed, the exploited.

Everyone of us who was attracted to the poor had a sense of guilt, of responsibility, a feeling that in some way we were living on the labor of others. The fact that we were born in a certain environment, were enabled to go to school, were endowed with the ability to compete with others and hold our own, that we had few physical disabilities-all these things marked us as the privileged in a way. We felt a respect for the poor and destitute as those nearest to God, as those chosen by Christ for His compassion. Christ lived among men. The great mystery of the Incarnation, which meant that God became man that man might become God, was a joy that made us want to kiss the earth in worship, because His feet once trod that same earth. It was 'a mystery that we as Catholics accepted, but there were also the facts of Christ's life, that He was born in a stable, that He did not come to be a temporal King, that He worked with His hands, spent the first years of His life in exile, and the rest of His early manhood in a crude carpenter shop in Nazareth. He fulfilled His religious duties in the synagogue and the temple. He trod the roads in His public life and the first men He called were fishermen, small owners of boats and nets. He was familiar with the migrant worker and the proletariat, and some of His parables dealt with them. He spoke of the living wage, not equal pay for equal work, in the parable of those who came at the first and the eleventh hour.

He died between two thieves because He would not be made an earthly King. He lived in an occupied country for thirty years without starting an underground movement or trying to get out from under a foreign power. His teaching transcended all the wisdom of the Scribes and Pharisees, and taught us the most effective means of living in this world while preparing for the next. And He directed His sublime words to the poorest of the poor, to the people who thronged the towns and followed after John the Baptist, who hung around, sick and poverty-stricken, the doors of rich men.

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He had set us an example and the poor and destitute were the ones we wished to reach. The poor were the ones who had the jobs of a sort, organized or unorganized, and those who were unemployed or on work- relief projects. The destitute were the men and women who came to us in the breadlines, and we could do little with them but give what we had of food and clothing. Sin, sickness, and death accounted for much of human misery. But aside from this, we did not feel that Christ meant we should remain silent in the face of injustice and accept it, even though He said, "The poor ye shall always have with you. "

In the first issue of the paper we dealt with Negro labor on the levees in the South, exploited as cheap labor by the War Department. We wrote of women and children in industry and the spread of unemployment. The second issue carried a story of a farmers' strike in the Midwest and the condition of restaurant workers in cities. In the third issue there were stories of textile strikes and child labor in that industry; the next month coal and milk strikes. In the sixth issue of the paper we were already combating anti-Semitism. From then on, although we wanted to make our small eight-page tabloid a local paper, that is, covering the American scene, we could not ignore the issues abroad. They had their repercussions at home. We could not write about these issues without being drawn out on the streets on picket lines, and we found ourselves in 1935 with the Communists picketing the German consulate at the Battery.

It was not the first time we seemed to be collaborators. During the Ohrbach Department Store strike the year before, I ran into old friends from the Communist group, but I felt then, and do now, that the fact that Communists made issue of Negro exploitation and labor trouble was no reason why we should stay out of the situation. "The truth is the truth," writes St. Thomas, "and proceeds from the Holy Ghost, no matter from whose lips it comes."

There was mass picketing every Saturday afternoon during the Ohrbach strike, and every Saturday the police drove up with patrol wagons and loaded the pickets into them with their banners and took them to jail. When we entered the dispute with our slogans drawn from the writings of the popes regarding the condition of labor, the police around Union Square were taken aback and did not know what to do. It was as though they were arresting the Holy Father himself, one of them said, were they to load our pickets and their signs into their patrol wagons. The police contented themselves with giving us all injunctions. One seminarian who stood on the sidelines and cheered was given an injunction too, which he cherished as a souvenir.

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The most spectacular help we gave in a strike was during the formation of the National Maritime Union. In May 1936, the men appealed to us for help in housing and feeding some of the strikers, who came off the ships with Joe Curran in a spontaneous strike against not only the ship owners but also the old union leaders.

We had then just moved St. Joseph's House to 115 Mott Street and felt that we had plenty of room. Everyone camped out for a time while seamen occupied the rooms, which they made into dormitories. There were about fifty of them altogether during the course of the next month or so, and a number of them became friends of the work. ...

That first strike was called off, but in the fall, after the men built up their organization, the strike call went out again. For the duration of the strike we rented a store on Tenth Avenue and used it as a reading room and soup kitchen where no soup was served, but coffee and peanut butter and apple butter sandwiches. The men came in from picket lines and helped themselves to what they needed. They read, they talked, and they had time to think. Charlie O'Rourke, John Cort, Bill Callahan, and a number of seamen kept the place open all day and most of the night. There was never any disorder; there were no maneuverings, no caucuses, no seeking of influence or power; it was simply a gesture of help, the dis-interested help of brothers. ...Our headquarters were a tribute to the seaman's dignity as a man free to form association with his fellows, to have some share in the management of the enterprise in which he was engaged. ...

Many times we have been asked why we spoke of Catholic workers, and so named the paper. Of course, it was not only because we who were in charge of the work, who edited the paper, were all Catholics, but also because we wished to influence Catholics. They were our own, and we reacted sharply to the accusation that when it came to private morality, the Catholics shone, but when it came to social and political morality, they were often conscienceless. Also Catholics were, the poor, and most of them had little ambition or hope of bettering their condition to the extent of achieving ownership of home or business, or further education for their children. They accepted things as they were with humility and looked for a better life to come. They thought, in other words, that God meant it to be so.

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One winter I had a speaking engagement in Kansas and my expenses were paid, which fact enabled me to go to Memphis and Arkansas to visit the Tenant Farmers' Union, which was then and is still headed by a Chris- tian Socialist Group. The headquarters were a few rooms in Memphis, where the organizers often slept on the floor because there was no money for rent other than that of the offices. Those days I spent with them I lived on sandwiches and coffee because there was no money to spend on regular meals either. We needed to save money for gas to take us around to the centers where dispossessed sharecroppers and tenant farmers were also camping out, homeless, in railroad stations, schools, and churches. They were being evicted wholesale because of the purchase of huge tracts of land by northern insurance agencies. The picture has been shown in Tobacco Road, In Dubious Battle, and Grapes of Wrath - pictures of such desolation and poverty and in the latter case of such courage that my heart was lifted again to hope and love and admiration that human beings could endure so much and yet have courage to go on and keep their vision of a more human life.

During that trip I saw men, women, and children herded into little churches and wayside stations, camped out in tents, their household goods heaped about them, not one settlement but many-farmers with no land to farm, housewives with no homes. They tried with desperate hope to hold on to a pig or some chickens, bags of seed, some little beginnings of anew hold on life. It was a bitter winter, and frame houses there are not built to withstand the cold as they are in the North. The people just endure it because the winter is short - accept it as part of the suffering of life.

I saw children ill, one old man dead in bed and not yet buried, mothers weeping with hunger and cold. I saw bullet holes in the frame churches, and their benches and pulpits smashed up and windows broken. Men had been kidnapped and beaten; men had been shot and wounded. The month after I left, one of the organizers was killed by a member of a masked band of vigilantes who were fighting the Tenant Farmers' Union.

There was so little one could do - empty one's pockets, give what one had, live on sandwiches with the organizers, and write, write to arouse the public conscience. ...

I spoke to meetings of the unemployed in California, to migrant workers, tenant farmers, steelworkers, stockyard workers, auto workers. The factory workers were the aristocrats of labor, yet what a struggle they had! ...Paul St. Marie, president of the first Ford local, took me around the auto plants

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and showed me what the assembly line meant. I met the men who were beaten to a pulp when they tried to distribute literature at plant gates, and I saw the unemployed who had fire hoses turned on them during an icy winter when they hung around the gates of the Ford plant looking for work. ...

Going around and seeing such sights is not enough. To help the organizers, to give what you have for relief, to pledge yourself to voluntary poverty for life so that you can share with your brothers is not enough. One must live with them, share with them their suffering too. Give up one's privacy, and mental and spiritual comforts as well as physical. ...

Yes, we have lived with the poor, with the workers, and we know them not just from the streets, or in mass meetings, but from years of living in the slums, in tenements, in our hospices in Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Harrisburg, Pittsburgh, New York, Rochester, Boston, Worcester, Buffalo, Troy, Detroit, Cleveland, Toledo, Akron, St. Louis, Chicago, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Oakland, even down in Houma, Louisiana, where Father Jerome Drolet worked with Negroes and whites, with shrimp shellers, fishermen, longshoremen, and seamen.

Just as the church has gone out through its missionaries into the most obscure towns and villages, we have gone, too. Sometimes our contacts have been through the Church, and sometimes through readers of our paper, through union organizers or those who needed to be organized.

We have lived with the unemployed, the sick, the unemployables. The contrast between the worker who is organized and has his union, the fellowship of his own trade to give him strength, and those who have no organization and come in to us on a breadline, is pitiable.

They are stripped then, not only of all earthly goods, but of spiritual goods, their sense of human dignity. When they are forced into line at municipal lodging houses, in clinics, in our Houses of Hospitality, they are then the truly destitute. Over and over again in our work, many young men and women who come as volunteers have not been able to endure it and have gone away. To think that we are forced by our own lack of room, our lack of funds, to perpetuate this shame, is heartbreaking.

"Is this what you meant by Houses of Hospitality?" I asked Peter. " At least it will arouse the conscience," he said.

Many left the work because they could see no use in this gesture of feeding the poor, and because of their own shame. But enduring this shame is part of our penance.

" All men are brothers. " How often we hear this refrain, the rallying call

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that strikes a response in every human heart. These are the words of Christ, "Call no man master, for ye are all brothers." It is a revolutionary call which has even been put to music. The last movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony has that great refrain - "All men are brothers." Going to the people is the purest and best act in Christian tradition and revolutionary tradition and is the beginning of world brotherhood.

Never to be severed from the people, to set out always from the point of view of serving the people, not serving the interests of a small group or oneself. "To believe in the infinite creative power of the people," Mao Tse-tung, the Secretary of the Communist Party in China, wrote with religious fervor. And he said again in 1943, "The maxim 'three common men will make a genius' tells us that there is great creative power among the people and that there are thousands and thousands of geniuses among them. There are geniuses in every village, every city. " It is almost another way of saying that we must and will find Christ in each and every man, when we look on them as brothers.

As Peter pointed out, ours was a long-range program, looking for owner- ship by the workers of the means of production, the abolition of the assembly line, decentralized factories, the restoration of crafts and ownership of property. This meant, of course, an accent on the agrarian and rural aspects of our economy and a changing of emphasis from the city to the land. ...

We published many heavy articles on capital and labor, on strikes and labor conditions, on the assembly lines and all the other evils of industrialism. But it was a whole picture we were presenting of man and his destiny and so we emphasized less, as the years went by, the organized - labor aspect of the paper.

It has been said that it was The Catholic Worker and its stories of poverty and exploitation that aroused the priests to start labor schools, go out on picket lines, take sides in strikes with the worker, and that brought about an emphasis on the need to study sociology in the seminaries.

And many a priest who afterward became famous for his interest in labor felt that we had in away deserted the field, had left the cause of the union man. Bishops and priests appearing on the platforms of the A.F. of L. and C.I.O. conventions felt that we had departed from our original intention and undertaken work in the philosophical and theological fields

that might better have been left to the clergy. The discussion of the !. morality of modern war, for instance, and application of moral principle in

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specific conflicts. Labor leaders themselves felt that in our judgment of war, we judged them also for working in the gigantic armaments race, as indeed we did. Ours is indeed an unpopular front.

When we began our work, there were thirteen million unemployed. The greatest problem of the day was the problem of work and the machine.

The state entered in to solve these problems by dole and work relief, by setting up so many bureaus that we were swamped with initials. N.I.R.A. gave place to N.R.A., and as N.R.A. was declared unconstitutional another organization, another administration was set up. The problem of the modem state loomed up as never before in American life. The Communists, stealing our American thunder, clamored on the one hand for relief and on the other set up 1effersonian schools of democracy.

Peter also quoted Jefferson -"He governs best who governs least." One of his criticisms of labor was that it was aiding in the creation of the Welfare State, the Servile State, instead of aiming for the ownership of the means of production and acceptance of the responsibility that it entailed.

The Lone Loneliness

Our Stand on Strikes

Let us be honest, let us say that fundamentally, the stand we are taking is not on the ground of wages and hours and conditions of labor, but on the fundamental truth that men should be treated not as chattels, but as human beings, as "temples of the Holy Ghost." When Christ took on our human nature, when He became man, He dignified and ennobled human nature. He said, "The Kingdom of Heaven is within you. " When men are striking, they are following an impulse, often blind, often uninformed, but a good impulse-one could even say an inspiration of the Holy Spirit. They are trying to uphold their right to be treated not as slaves, but as men. They are fighting for a share in the management, for their right to be considered partners in the enterprise in which they are engaged. They are fighting against the idea of their labor as a commodity, to be bought and sold.

Let us concede that the conditions at the RCA Victor plant down in Camden, where a strike involving 13,000 men started last month, are not bad conditions, and that wages and hours are not bad. There is probably a

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any union which is supposed to take care of such conditions and complaints, but it perpetuates the enslavement of the worker.

Let us concede that the conditions of the seamen are not so atrocious as the Daily Worker contends. Let us get down to the fundamental point that the seamen are striking for: the right to be considered partners, sharers in responsibility, the right to be treated as men and not as chattels.

Is it not a cause worth fighting for? Is it not a cause which demands all the courage and all the integrity of the men involved? Let us be frank and make this our issue.

Let us be honest and confess that it is the social order which we wish (i to change. The workers are never going to be satisfied, no matter how much pay they get, no matter what their hours are. And it is to reconstruct the social order that we are throwing ourselves in with the workers, whether in factories or shipyards or on the sea.

The popes have hit the nail on the head. "No man may outrage with impunity that human dignity which God Himself treats with reverence. ... Religion teaches the rich man and the employer that their work people are not their slaves; that they must respect in every man his dignity as a man and as a Christian; that labor is an honorable employment: and that it is shameful and inhuman to treat men like chattels to make money by, or to look upon them merely as so much muscle or physical power."

These are fundamental principles which the A.F. of L. has neglected to bring out. They have based their appeal on enlightened self-interest, a phrase reeking with selfishness and containing a warning and a threat. A warning to the workers of the world that they are working for themselves alone, and not as "members one of another." One can see how it has worked out in this country. What percentage of the workers are organized? Only a fraction. And how has the highly organized workman cared for his poorer brother? There has grown up an aristocracy of labor so that it is an irksome fact that bricklayers receive more than farmers in the necessary goods of this world-in goods which we should strive for in order that we may have those God-given means to develop to the full and achieve the Kingdom of Heaven.

We are not losing sight of the fact that our end is spiritual. We are not losing sight of the fact that these better conditions of labor are means to an end. But the labor movement has lost sight of this fact. The leaders have forgotten such a thing as a philosophy of labor. They have not given to the worker the philosophy of labor, and they have betrayed him.

And the inarticulate rank and file throughout the world are rising up in rebellion, and are being labeled Communists for so doing, for refusing to

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accept the authority of such leaders, which they very rightly do not consider just authority. They intuitively know better than their leaders what they are looking for. But they have allowed themselves to be misled and deceived.

We have so positive a program that we need all our energy, we have to bend all our forces, material and spiritual, to this end, to promulgate it. Let us uphold our positive program of changing the social order.

But let us, too, examine the Communist means to the end which they claim they are working for, a true brotherhood of man. We do not talk about a classless society, because we acknowledge functional classes as opposed to acquisitive classes.

We agree with this end, but we do not agree on the means to attain it.

The Communists say: " All men are our brothers except the capitalists, so we will kill them off. " They do not actually believe in the dignity of man as a human being, because they try to set off one or another class of men and say, "They are not our brothers and never will be. So let us liquidate them." And then to point their argument they say with scorn, "Do you ever think to convert J. P. Morgan, or Rockefeller, or Charlie Schwab?"

They are protesting against man's brutality to man, and at the same time they perpetuate it. It is like having one more war to end all wars. We disagree with this technique of class war, without which the Communist says the brotherhood of man can never be achieved.

"Nothing will be achieved until the worker rises up in arms and forcibly takes the position that is his," the Communist says. "Your movement, which trusts to peaceful means, radical though it may seem, is doomed to failure."

We admit that we may seem to fail, but we recall to our readers the ostensible failure of Christ when He died on the Cross, forsaken by all His followers. Out of this failure anew world sprang up. We recall to our readers the folly of the Cross St. Paul talks about.

When we participate in strikes, when we go out on picket lines and distribute leaflets, when we speak at strike meetings, we are there because we are reaching the workers when they are massed together for action. We are taking advantage of a situation. We may not agree that to strike was the wise thing to do in that particular case. We believe that the work of organization must be thorough before any strike action occurs, unless indeed the strike is a spontaneous one which is the outcome of unbearable conditions.

We oppose all use of violence as un-Christian. We do not believe in persuading scabs with clubs. They are workers, too, and the reason they are scabs is because the work of organization has been neglected.

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We oppose the misuse of private property while we uphold the right of private property. The Holy Father says that ''as many as possible of the workers should become owners," and how else in many cases except by developing the cooperative ideal?

While we are upholding cooperatives as a part of the Christian social order, we are upholding at the same time unions, as organizations of workers wherein they can be indoctrinated and taught to rebuild the social order. While we stress the back-to-the-land movement so that the worker may be "deproletarianized," we are not going to leave the city to the Communists.

Month by month, in every struggle, 'in every strike, on every picket line, we shall do our best to join with the worker in his struggle for recognition. We reiterate the slogan of the old I. W. W 's: " An injury to one is an injury to all." St. Paul says, "When the health of one member of the Mystical Body suffers, the health of the whole body is lowered. "

We are all members, one of another, in the Mystical Body of Christ, so let us work together for Christian solidarity.

July 1936

Memorial Day in Chicago

On Memorial Day, May 3, 1937, police opened fire on a parade of striking steel workers and their families at the gate of the Republic Steel Company, in South Chicago. Fifty people were shot, of whom ten later died; one hundred others were beaten with clubs.

Have you ever heard a man scream as he was beaten over the head by two or three policemen with clubs and cudgels? Have you ever heard the sickening sounds of blows and seen people with their arms upraised, trying to protect their faces, stumbling blindly to get away, falling and rising again to be beaten down? Did you ever see a man shot in the back, being dragged to his feet by policemen who tried to force him to stand, while his poor body crumpled, paralyzed by a bullet in the spine?

We are sickened by stories of brutality in Germany and Russia and Italy. A priest from Germany told me of one man who came to him whose back was ridged "like a washboard," by the horrible beatings he had received at

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the hands of the German police in concentration camps. I shudder with horror at the thought of the tortures inflicted on Catholics, Protestants, Jews, and Communists in Germany today.

And here in America, last month, there was a public exhibition of such brutality that the motion-picture film, taken by a Paramount photographer in a sound truck, was suppressed by the company for fear that it would cause riots and mass hysteria, it was so unutterably horrible.

I am trying to paint a picture of it for our readers because so many did not read the story of the Memorial Day "riot" in Chicago in front of the Republic Steel Mills.

Try to imagine this mass of people - men, women, and children -  picketing, as they have la right to do, coming up to the police line and being suddenly shot into, not by one hysterical policeman, but by many. Ten were killed and one hundred were taken to the hospital wounded. Tear gas and clubs supplied by the Republic Steel Company were used.

I am trying to picture this scene to our readers because I have witnessed these things firsthand, and I know the horror of them. I was on a picket line when the "radical" squad shot into the line and pursued the fleeing picketers down the streets, knocking them down and kicking and beating them. I, too, have fled down streets to escape the brutality and vicious hatred of the "law" for those whom they consider "radical." And by the police anyone who protests injustice, who participates in labor struggles, is considered a radical.

Two years ago I wrote an account in The Catholic Worker of two plainclothesmen beating up a demonstrator. I told of the screams and the crumpling body of the man as two men who had dragged him into a hallway beat him up against the wall, aiming well-directed blows at his face, smashing it to a pulp.

We protested this to the Police Commissioner, and our protest was respected and acted upon. We are repeating the protest against the Chicago massacre because the only way to stop such brutality is to arouse a storm of protest against it.

On whom shall the blame be laid for such a horrible spectacle of violence? Of course, the police and the press in many cases Jay the blame on the strikers. But I have lived with these people, I have eaten with them and talked to them day after day. Many of them have never been in a strike before, many of them were marching in the picket line, as in a supplicatory procession, for the first time in their lives. They even brought children on that line in Chicago.

Shall we blame only the police? Or shall we blame just Tom Girdler of

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the Republic Steel Company? God knows how he can sleep comfortably in his bed at night with the cries of those strikers, of their wives and children, in his ears. He may not hear them now in the heat of battle, but he will hear them, as there is a just God.

Or shall we blame the press, the pulpit, and all those agencies who form public opinion, who have neglected to raise up their voices in protest at injustice and so have permitted it? In some cases the press have even instigated it so that it would come to pass. Inflammatory, hysterical head- lines about mobs, about expected riots, do much to arouse the temper of the police to prepare them for just what occurred. The calm, seemingly reasonable stories of such papers as the Herald Tribune and the Times, emphasizing the violence and the expectation of violence, do much to prepare the public to accept such violence when it comes to pass.

In that case we all are guilty inasmuch as we have not "gone to the workingman" as the Holy Father pleads and repeats. Inasmuch as we have not inclined our hearts to him, and sought to incline his to us, so that we could work together for peace instead of war, inasmuch as we have not protested such murder as was committed in Chicago-then we are guilty.

One more sin, suffering Christ, worker Yourself, for You to bear. In the garden of Gethsemane, You bore the sins of all the world - You took them on Yourself, the sins of those police, the sins of the Girdlers and the Schwabs, of the Graces of this world. In committing them, whether ignorantly or of their own free will, they piled them on Your shoulders, bowed to the ground with the weight of the guilt of the world, which You assumed because You loved each of us so much. You took them on Yourself, and You died to save us all. Your Precious Blood was shed even for that policeman whose cudgel smashed again and again the skull of that poor striker, whose brains lay splattered on the undertaker's slab.

And the sufferings of those strikers' wives and children are completing Your suffering today.

Have pity on us all, Jesus of Gethsemane - on Tom Girdler, those police, the souls of the strikers, as well as on all of us who have not worked enough for "a new heaven and anew earth wherein justice dwelleth. "

July 1937

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The Disgraceful Plight of Migrant Workers

An auto camp outside Bakersfield. The hot weather has begun and a haze of heat hangs over the valley, so that you can barely see the mountains. I have just come down through the San Joaquin Valley, and now forests of oil wells loom on the horizon. It has been ninety-five in the shade for the past three days and already, early in the morning, there is promise of another broiling day.

For the last week I have been covering the government migrant camps from Yuba City, north of San Francisco, down the valley. There are thirteen of these camps, housing 3,000 families. If you count five to an average family, that takes care of 15,000 people. But the estimate is that there are 300,000 migrant workers in the state. The season of peak labor, when 250,000 are used, lasts only five months, and the rest of the time only 50,000 are needed.

Mrs. Robert McWilliams is assistant chairman of the State Central Committee of the Democratic Party and for years she has been interested in the condition of the migrant. Last week we drove to Salinas, about a hundred miles down the valley from San Francisco, and as we drove she told me about the Salinas lettuce strike. The workers had a good union, A.F. of L., good wages and conditions. But the growers, packers, and shippers were determined to break the union by not renewing the contract when it expired. A strike followed, scabs were imported, sheds were built for them inside "riot fences. " The frames are still there; I saw them this afternoon, a threat and a warning to the workers.

It was a bloody strike; there were citizen's committees, vigilantes, everyone was deputized. They organized the shopkeepers not to sell to the thousands of workers living around the town.

Mrs. Mc Williams told of treating the eyes of the workers with a paregoric solution to ease the pain of the tear-gas attacks. Nauseating gas resulted in diarrhea and vomiting. The boys at the manual training high school were given the job of weighting ax handles with iron to be used as weapons against the strikers.

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It was a time of terror for three weeks; then an agreement was signed which left out of account the 6,000 Filipino workers. Another strike occurred and then the union was broken completely.

A trailer camp outside Marysville. Down in the hollow, back of the road, there are forty families encamped. On either side of the highway, nestled under the levee of the Feather River, there are more families. Many of the camps are surrounded by water and mud. The stars are reflected in the pools of water in the fields and the orchards. Last week there was a flood up here so bad that most of the roads were under water.

It is so sad to see this constant coming and going, hundreds of thousands of people on the move from place to place. In the Northwest there was the tragedy of greed in the over cut, ruined land. Here the tragedy is of a landless people, homeless, meagerly fed, housed like animals rather than like creatures made in the image and likeness of God. Those in power have waxed fat and have forgotten the things of the spirit. Those in misery have forgotten that they are temples of the Holy Spirit. And how could they remember?

More than ever I am convinced that the solution lies only in the Gospel and in such a leader as St. Francis. Peter Maurin has been talking these past two years of recruiting troubadours of Christ. More and more I am convinced that besides the purely material efforts of building up hospices and farming communes, we need these fellow travelers with the poor and dispossessed to share with them their poverty and insecurity and to bring them the reminder of the love of God.

It is the hardest work anyone could do, in the face of that saying, "Religion is the opiate of the people." It is a sad saying that has made cowards of many who are afraid to speak of God to those with empty stomachs. But they are not just mouths to be fed, bodies to be housed. They are creatures of body and soul. The Communist goes among them, lives with them in his zeal for "leaders who themselves are workers," in his zeal to build up a people who will fight oppression.

Where are our Catholic college youth who will make a vocation of their unemployment, and use it as an opportunity to tramp about the country like St. Francis and bring the Gospel to these forgotten ones?

May 1940