Announcing the launch of The Catholic Worker Athenaeum in Scranton: A new part of the Gaudiumetspes 22 blog
As most of my followers know, Carrie and I sold our Catholic Worker farm last Fall and moved into a large former rectory in Scranton, Pennsylvania. There were three main reasons for the move. The first was the simple fact that I am now in my late 60’s and although I am in good shape for a man of my age the physical work of the farm was getting too much for my arthritic back to handle. The second reason had to do with changed priorities. When we started the farm in 2013 Carrie had an online job and could work from home and I had retired from teaching and had not yet started this blog and podcast. But Carrie is now gone three days a week for her job at St. Charles Seminary near Philadelphia and then works online from home for two days a week. And of course, I never expected this blog to go viral when I started it during Covid as a simple outlet for my bored and wandering mind. And as time progressed this endeavor became my main vocational focus and the farm became increasingly more of a “hobby” and, quite frankly, a distraction.
The final reason relates to the point of this announcement. Over the years we became increasingly active in St. Thomas More parish in Scranton, which is an Ordinariate parish. And therefore, we decided we wanted to move closer to the parish in order to establish an altogether different kind of Catholic Worker ministry in conjunction with all of the other great works being done at St. Thomas More. And after some prayer, conversations with friends, and our evolving use of this huge home, we have decided to open what we are calling “The Catholic Worker Athenaeum”.
What is an Athenaeum? The word dates back to ancient Greece and originally referred to temples dedicated to Athena and which became centers of conversation between philosophers, poets and other assorted intellectuals. There are now Catholic Athenaeums as well and, broadly speaking, represent centers for robust and open Catholic intellectual conversations, cultural events, lectures and so on. Our new house is uniquely suited for such an endeavor and we envision it becoming a hub of Catholic intellectual life here in Northeastern PA.
Furthermore, an often neglected aspect of the Catholic Worker movement was Peter Maurin’s vision for what he called “roundtable discussions”. It is no accident that Maurin became a champion of such gatherings since he was a French intellectual who knew that the Church could not evangelize the modern world through the simple repetition of catechism doctrines. It needed to engage the world in active intellectual conversation.
And it is high time for Peter Maurin’s vision of a Catholic Worker movement committed to the Catholic intellectual tradition to be rekindled. And it is therefore also high time for a return to his roundtable discussions as the foundation for true “dialogue” as opposed to the curated and ideologically manipulated discourse in the Church today that tries to pass itself off as “dialogue”. Sadly, this vision has largely withered on the vine in the Worker movement although it does live on here and there.
And a further sad fact is that it is far too often ignored that Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin were both deeply theological in their thinking, well read, and very interested in the world of ideas and the world of culture. Furthermore, and this is key, they were thoroughly “ressourcement” thinkers in their theology. They read all of the major ressourcement thinkers, as well as thinkers in related areas such as distributist economics and philosophical “personalism”.
Therefore, in starting a Catholic Worker Athenaeum as an adjunct to the Gaudium et Spes 22 blog, and in conjunction with Thomas More parish, we are hoping to retrieve Peter Maurin and Dorothy Day as true Catholic intellectuals whose thought has been neglected in favor of a very one-sided view of them as “activists”. I am not at all disparaging such activism! Let me be very clear on that! Nevertheless, such activism is not my or my wife’s charism and I think it is high time that we put our theological training to work in order to highlight a much neglected aspect of Dorothy and Peter. To wit, their profound theological vision.
In short, there was an intellectual dimension that animated Dorothy and Peter and yet there have been precious few Catholic Worker venues that have devoted themselves to the retrieval of this vision. Nor is this merely an academic exercise. Devoid of a proper theological grounding and animation, there is no way for the movement to avoid drifting into nothing more than a series of disparate “actions” that do nothing to move the cultural needle away from war, preparations for war, and the “Enchantments of Mammon” (Eugene McCarraher’s apt title for his book on the same). Such activism, in other words, is necessary but not sufficient.
Activism is always animated by a vision of some kind, a worldview, and a commitment to a set of moral goods. For Dorothy and Peter that vision was decidedly and constitutively Catholic to its core. Narratives are important since they contextualize and help to define the activist impulse. But there is a huge gap today in the Church’s activism since there seems to be a prevailing idea that somehow “doctrine” must not be allowed to trump “lived experience”, as if the latter is prelapsarian and devoid of sinful distorting influences from the counter narratives provided by modernity. Real dialogue in such a model is thwarted by the view of lived experience as somehow pristine and an unproblematic locus through which the Holy Spirit is taken to be speaking in an Oracular manner. When this concept of “dialogue” is put forward as part of the new “listening Church” it acts more as a conversation stopper rather than a starter, and as such represents the destruction of true dialogue.
What is needed instead is a stronger emphasis within the Church on offering to our culture a specifically Catholic alternative intellectual narrative. After all, if the Gospel is true (and it is), then we are more than material beings with pragmatic material needs. We are spiritual beings who hunger and thirst for the true, the good, and the beautiful. In short, we hunger for the God of the crucified Christ. And we need to set aside the risible notion that “evangelization” is little more than a dressed up “proselytizing” that is as obnoxious as it is useless. We need to put the nail in the coffin to the idea that “real evangelization” means engaging in the corporal works of mercy and leaving it at that, in the hope that our philanthropic actions will be seen as somehow grounded in Christ. But this is purely magical and romantic thinking since in our now radically post-Christian and secular world, public philanthropic actions are rarely associated with Christ unless this is made explicitly clear.
In other words, we must be about the business of creating a specifically Catholic counter narrative to that of secular modernity. We must create a different intellectual culture and “mystique”. We must repurpose the old French idea of the “salon” and with open arms invite into our Catholic culture and supernatural mystique anyone and everyone who is willing to engage us in the field of ideas. Not a “debate” club. Not an “apologetics” parlor. Not a Bohemian pot-fueled mélange of various conforming non-conformers. But a meeting house of friends and neighbors who seek, despite deep and sharp intellectual differences, the common ground of truth and goodness and beauty. A place where people who understand that in the age of artificial intelligence the question of “what is a human being” will become increasingly focused on that which is most deeply constitutive of the whole range of the “humanum”. And that if you want to explore what it means to be human, that you need to go to the Catholics.
We of course will not hide our devotion to Christ as the source of these things. But in a manner that seeks out the logoi spermatikoi and the spoils of Egypt in all that is true in the thinking of others. And in a manner that is humble enough to acknowledge that sometimes the deepest insights about the true significance of Christ can come, perhaps unwittingly, perhaps not, from the mouths of unbelievers. Ivan Karamazov comes to mind, who, when he finished his tale of the Grand Inquisitor was told by the believing Alyosha that his tale was actually in praise of Christ! And indeed it was, but only after the full range of Ivan’s indictment was plumbed to its depths.
And in so engaging in this enterprise we will hopefully contribute in our own small way to the perception that if you want to go where real thinking and real conversation is done, then you must go to the Catholics. Therefore, over the coming months we will be hosting a series of conversations here at our house. These will be announced well in advance. And since I am also on the editorial board of Communio, many of these conversations will take place as “Communio Study Circles” but will also go beyond that.
We have seven spare bedrooms in this house. So we can accommodate those who might want to join us for these meetings but who will be coming from a distance. No donations. No charge. That is Catholic Worker hospitality now put to use for housing penny poor intellectual types!
There is no other Catholic Worker Athenaeum in the world. So Carrie and I invite you to join us in this unique and new endeavor. Very soon I will be announcing our first events followed by an announcement of the dates and details for SpesFest 2027.
Dorothy Day, pray for us.