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Title: Farmer, Anarchist, Catholic Author: Wayne Sheridan Date: September 1, 2014 Language: en Topics: Catholicism, interview, religion Source: Retrieved on 3rd August 2022 from https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/farmer-anarchist-catholic
Tom Cornell has been a part of the Catholic Worker movement for more
than sixty years. He started in 1953 when he was nineteen years old. By
then, the movement, founded by Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin, had been
around for twenty years. Day was still leading the movement, and Cornell
often worked with her, especially as a writer and editor for the
Catholic Worker newspaper, to which he still contributes. He has also
been a leading peace activist, one of the first to publicly protest the
Vietnam War. Tom’s wife Monica was born into a Catholic Worker family;
her parents joined shortly after its founding.
Tom and Monica have lived for many years at the Peter Maurin Farm in
Marlborough, New York, about seventy miles north of New York City. Tom
and Monica’s dedication to the corporal works of mercy is evident as
soon as you meet them. The farm functions as a house of hospitality for
the formerly homeless and for men recovering from addiction or
struggling with physical or mental impairments. The farm also provides
rooms for a few volunteers and, occasionally, visiting guests.
The following interview took place primarily in the kitchen of the
farm’s “Green House.” Most of the men live in a second house, called the
“White House,” which includes a communal dining room and a chapel. There
are a few other buildings on the farm, including a hermitage in the
woods and a small residence for a beekeeper, who also serves as
caretaker of the walking trails on the farm’s property (about fifty
acres). The organic farm supplies most of the food for the residents, as
well as fresh produce for St. Joseph House and Maryhouse, Manhattan’s
two Catholic Worker houses. The Peter Maurin Farm also brings produce to
a soup kitchen in Newburgh, New York.
Wayne Sheridan: Thank you, Tom, for welcoming me back to Peter Maurin
Farm, and for sitting down for an interview on the occasion of the
eightieth anniversary of the Catholic Worker movement.
Tom Cornell: There was a period of time, about ten years—five during the
time of Dorothy’s final illness, and five years after her death—during
which the future of the movement was much in doubt. Dorothy was such a
dominant figure. She really held everything together. We have, however,
managed to survive and grow, with much trial and error.
As you know, Peter Maurin Farm is one of the Catholic Worker houses. We
are part of the New York Catholic Workers, which include St. Joseph
House and Maryhouse in Manhattan and, of course, the Catholic Worker
newspaper. I suppose we might be called a sort of “mother house” of the
movement. Today I believe there are about 217 houses worldwide, 195 in
the United States—the most in our history.
Peter Maurin Farm is quite engrossing for all of us. Monica, my wife, is
really the heart and soul of the place. And Tommy, our son, runs the
farming operation and does most of the maintenance. And I? Well, I’m not
sure what I do besides hang out and help where I can.
WS: You still write often?
TC: Well, I do write when I can. A twenty-nine-page article of mine on
“Christian Anarchism” has just been published in Vienna, in German. They
seemed very pleased with it. And American Catholic Studies will be
publishing an article I wrote about the Catholic Worker’s relationship
to Communism, Communists, and the Communist Party. I am pleased with
that.
I’ve been active in a new group called Catholic Scholars for Equal
Justice whose meeting in California I was able to attend and about which
I wrote recently in the Catholic Worker. The organization and the
article have had a very, very positive response. But I’m not able to
travel or write as much as I’d like to because of age.
WS: When were you born?
TC: I was born in 1934. The world seemed very stable to me when I was
young, especially the Catholic world. We still had the same pope two
years after I finished college as we did when I was very young—that was
Pius XII, of course.
WS: I haven’t been involved with the Catholic Worker movement since my
years in college some decades ago. But it seems to me that the core
values of the organization have not changed—that is, the focus remains
on the practice of the corporal works of mercy and peace work.
TC: “Peace activism,” to be precise. In fact “activism” is a very apt
word for all we try to do. In the Bible we read, “I was hungry and you
fed me.” It does not say, “I was hungry and you formed a committee”! Our
thing is just getting down and doing it. And that’s what keeps us sane.
A perfectionist group like ours can get off the track by becoming a
little sect, but we try to avoid that by being grounded in reality.
WS: What reality keeps you grounded?
TC: The poor. People come to the Catholic Worker, and even if they stay
only a few years, or even just a few months, they often find their
vocation. Few of us aspire to living among the poor as a career path.
But, our modus operandi is direct action and works of mercy in small
intentional communities. We live in voluntary poverty. There is no
distinction between staff and guests. That’s the way it has always been,
and it’s been fun.
In fact, John Cort, the socialist leader [and a former Commonweal
editor], remembered when he first met Dorothy. She was giving a talk and
she seemed to be having so much fun that he thought, “I might like to
try that too. Have some of that fun.” So he became a Catholic Worker.
WS: You mentioned that there was a young Muslim man staying at St.
Joseph’s House in the city. How long has he been a resident there?
TC: About a year, maybe a bit longer. He goes to a mosque on Tenth or
Eleventh Street. It’s a bit conservative. He’s a resident volunteer at
St. Joseph’s and he helps around the house.
WS: What do you mean by “conservative”?
TC: The mosque does not have interfaith programs or sensibilities. As
you know, the Catholic Worker movement welcomes volunteers who are not
Catholic and who want to experience the way we live and who wish to
serve the poor. Some of these non-Catholic volunteers go on to found or
join intentional communities in their own faith traditions. A few
convert. We’ve also had many Jewish Catholic Workers over the years. We
don’t discriminate as to who can be called a Catholic Worker, just as we
don’t discriminate as to whom we serve.
WS: How do you keep the farm going with so few workers?
TC: We used to have two very good and strong men in addition to Tommy,
our son, and then they left. One, Tim is off to Italy, following the
woman he fell in love with, and they are both now trying to open a
Catholic Worker house to serve immigrants, appealing to the Italian
church to let them use abandoned church-owned buildings. And the other,
Michael, is in Massachusetts trying to open an intentional-community
farm to serve mentally challenged adult men. We admire them and
encouraged them, but it has left us short-handed as most of the guests
living here are unable to do the type of physical labor needed on the
farm. Somehow we made it through the bulk of the harvest in 2013.
WS: When I helped your son deliver fresh produce to St. Joseph’s House
in Manhattan, it was beautiful how all the volunteers came out to help
unload the van, sort it, and store the produce in the basement storage
areas—all with such joy and enthusiasm.
TC: We have people who come to our houses and are used to eating junk
food. Some of them continue the bad habit, but we try to provide all
organically grown vegetables and some fresh fruit and eggs. The meals at
St. Joseph’s are much, much better than they were when we were young. It
was awful then. Dorothy was a typical American in that she just focused
on the basics of food. But at least she did know that you don’t put
onion in a fruit salad, which is what one of our volunteer chefs would
often do.
Monica is our prime cook here on the farm, and she does an excellent
job. We do have a guest who was once in the catering business, and he
will cook the communal meals once or twice a week.
WS: In the early days of the Catholic Worker the emphasis was on feeding
the urban poor, and all else was secondary. Since then, the movement
seems to have widened its focus to other things, including ecology.
TC: Actually, there was no real awareness of the polluting of our planet
in the general public. The awareness was not there in the early part of
the twentieth century—and not even in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s. But I
think we in the Catholic Worker movement anticipated it, almost
providentially, much earlier. Caring for what is now called the
“biosphere” was a central part of Peter Maurin’s philosophy. We have had
small farms and have been pioneers in the modern “back to the earth”
movement for most our existence.
Today we all have to learn to live more simply and more responsibly. It
amazes me that the short-term goals of the very rich dictate the
policies in this country—policies from which their grandchildren will
suffer no less than our grandchildren. We have the rapid disappearance
of whole species. What happens when the sea can no longer support fish
because of acidity? What happens when large populations migrate out of
regions that can no longer support them? The Maldives Islands are
putting away money to buy a new homeland.
Also, the importance of employing active nonviolence was something I
believe we were ahead of the curve on. Dorothy would not support U.S.
participation in World War II. She urged men to refuse the draft. That
was a minority position within society and within the Catholic Worker
community itself. She was adamant about it. She welcomed back people who
went to the war, but she never wavered from her commitment to pacifism.
No one was sure whether a Catholic could be a conscientious objector
when I applied for that status in 1956. It took four years for the
Selective Service system to grant me an exemption as a conscientious
objector. I had no idea why it took so long. I had assumed that somebody
was doing my family a favor by putting my file at the bottom of some big
pile of paper. My godfather John Cornell was a well-known jurist and a
leader of the Democratic Party in Bridgeport, Connecticut, where we
lived. I thought they were just protecting someone with the name of
Cornell. It was an embarrassment.
But Fr. Ned Hogan, chair of the theology department at Fairfield
University, told me years later that my application was submitted for
review to the National Catholic Welfare Conference, which was what the
bishops conference was called at the time. Originally it was called the
Catholic War Council because it really was an open question: Can a
Catholic be a conscientious objector? And most people assumed the answer
was no. That was for Quakers, Mennonites, and Jehovah’s Witnesses.
The theologians said they would not make a judgment on this because they
never studied it; it was not in their manuals at the seminary. They had
just-war theory, and that was it. Finally, Fr. Hogan, who wasn’t himself
a pacifist because he couldn’t imagine excepting himself from the Irish
war, guided my study of the question. He said pacifism was orthodox; my
position was contrary to nothing in Catholic teaching. Later on, the
U.S. bishops’ 1985 pastoral letter on peace recognized pacifism as a
legitimate strain in Catholic tradition in addition to just-war theory.
The preferential option for the poor, which has been at the heart of
Catholic Worker activism since our founding, has also become central in
American Catholic thinking. There is now a higher awareness of the needs
and just claims of the poor. But there is need for more work here. In
the War on Poverty, poverty has won.
WS: I’m curious about the relationship of Catholic Workers to politics.
TC: It’s indirect. We do not get involved in politics per se. I knew a
Catholic Worker who was a Republican and later became a Christian
anarchist.
WS: Could you define what you mean by “Christian anarchist”?
TC: In 1954, Robert Ludlow, whom Dorothy named our “chief theorist,”
renounced the use of the word “anarchism,” saying it belongs to others,
not ourselves. He was quite bitter about it. He eventually left the
movement. At that time Ammon Hennacy’s brand of anarchism appealed to
many of the younger people in the movement. Ludlow was a scholar—of
Aquinas. Ammon’s simplistic one-liners drove him nuts. Dorothy advised
us not to listen so much to Ammon but to follow his example of personal
responsibility. His anarchism was not really compatible with Catholic
social teaching: too individualistic, not communitarian in the way
Dorothy’s was.
The anarchism that the Catholic Worker has adopted comes from the wider
socialist movement. The word “anarchist” was used by the so-called
scientific socialists (Marx, Engels, and their followers) as a
pejorative term to describe what they called “deviationists”—left-wing
deviationists. But you have people like Peter Kropotkin, Bakunin,
Tolstoy; theirs is the kind of anarchism we are aiming at with a great
emphasis on what’s called “horizontalization.” Authority, wealth, and
power have to be decentralized as much as possible. What is specifically
Christian about the Catholic Worker form of anarchism can be found in
Aquinas, who said positive laws that are not in harmony with the natural
law are not binding for us. Such laws are a species of violence.
In Catholic Worker thinking there is a set of preferences. We would
rather have people in charge of what they are doing. Who is the
authority in the kitchen? The cook. How do you get authority, how do you
exercise it? It isn’t by delegation or majority vote; it’s by good work.
And that authority is exercised as long as it is recognized by equals.
Anarchism of this kind should not be equated with sloppiness or
irresponsibility or chaos. That is not what we’re aiming at. And it is
not what we ordinarily have, although we fall down on occasion. It has
worked out extraordinarily well for us, although it does take time.