Saturday, May 19, 2012

Peter Maurin: A Fool for Christ

This is the title of a short biographical piece written by Christopher Shannon for Crisis Magazine. It's striking how applicable the ideas of Maurin (which are really the ideas of the Church) are to South Africa today. Shannon writes:
Maurin embraced and promoted holy poverty in a modern industrial age that presented new challenges to the Church’s understanding of wealth. Whereas St. Francis had stood against a greed and decadence acknowledged by the moral authorities of his age as a sin, Maurin set himself against a capitalist modernity that held up the pursuit of wealth as a positive virtue in itself. This new attitude toward material gain presented the additional challenge of fostering new inequalities of wealth even as it destroyed the traditional social bonds that had softened and humanized the old inequalities of traditional European Catholic societies. Secular critics of capitalism accepted the passing of traditional society as a positive good and focused on equalizing the distribution of wealth created by capitalist modernity. Maurin decried the poverty that he saw in the slums of the urban, industrial West, but saw both reformist and revolutionary plans for wealth redistribution as simply the democratization of greed. Against the modern alternatives of material poverty and material wealth, Maurin sought to lead the modern poor from their current, negative state of destitution—which combined material deprivation with social dislocation—to a future, positive condition of poverty, which allowed for the satisfaction of basic material needs but sought true wealth in communion with God and man.
Read the entire article here

3 comments:

  1. Hi Jonathan,

    I've been thinking a bit about distributionism recently, especially against the backdrop of the farm protests and the issues that they raise. I was wondering if anybody was discussing distributionism in SA and when I googled for it discovered this blog! I'd love to know if there are others discussing such things. Have been meaning to do a blog post that touches on such things, but haven't got to it, which unfortunately is too often the case. But I would be interested in getting in touch at some point...

    In Christ,
    Macrina

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  2. I'm so glad to discover your blog. I was thinking that i was the only one -- see here Christian communitarian anarchists | Khanya

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  3. Hi Jonathan,

    I'm in Robertson, although I'm still getting settled here and still come into Cape Town regularly (was there until a couple of months ago, although I was coming out here on weekends). There's a bit more about what I'm trying to do here although it is in serious need of an update/revamping. Like you, I'm not finding the time for everything I want to do and recently I've been spending time in the garden when I should probably be updating websites! Reading up on distributism is one of the things that's been on my to-do list for the last couple of years (I once knew a fair bit about Catholic Social teaching but am probably somewhat hazy on that now, although still sympathetic) but somehow always seems to get squashed out by other priorities. But recent events have raised the questions for me again, and even at a very small scale personal level it makes a lot of sense.

    Would love to be in touch more at some stage if that were possible.

    In Christ,
    Macrina

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