easy essays

How to Write an Essay

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Essay Writing Fundamentals

How to prepare to write an essay, how to edit an essay, how to share and publish your essays, how to get essay writing help, how to find essay writing inspiration, resources for teaching essay writing.

Essays, short prose compositions on a particular theme or topic, are the bread and butter of academic life. You write them in class, for homework, and on standardized tests to show what you know. Unlike other kinds of academic writing (like the research paper) and creative writing (like short stories and poems), essays allow you to develop your original thoughts on a prompt or question. Essays come in many varieties: they can be expository (fleshing out an idea or claim), descriptive, (explaining a person, place, or thing), narrative (relating a personal experience), or persuasive (attempting to win over a reader). This guide is a collection of dozens of links about academic essay writing that we have researched, categorized, and annotated in order to help you improve your essay writing. 

Essays are different from other forms of writing; in turn, there are different kinds of essays. This section contains general resources for getting to know the essay and its variants. These resources introduce and define the essay as a genre, and will teach you what to expect from essay-based assessments.

Purdue OWL Online Writing Lab

One of the most trusted academic writing sites, Purdue OWL provides a concise introduction to the four most common types of academic essays.

"The Essay: History and Definition" (ThoughtCo)

This snappy article from ThoughtCo talks about the origins of the essay and different kinds of essays you might be asked to write. 

"What Is An Essay?" Video Lecture (Coursera)

The University of California at Irvine's free video lecture, available on Coursera, tells  you everything you need to know about the essay.

Wikipedia Article on the "Essay"

Wikipedia's article on the essay is comprehensive, providing both English-language and global perspectives on the essay form. Learn about the essay's history, forms, and styles.

"Understanding College and Academic Writing" (Aims Online Writing Lab)

This list of common academic writing assignments (including types of essay prompts) will help you know what to expect from essay-based assessments.

Before you start writing your essay, you need to figure out who you're writing for (audience), what you're writing about (topic/theme), and what you're going to say (argument and thesis). This section contains links to handouts, chapters, videos and more to help you prepare to write an essay.

How to Identify Your Audience

"Audience" (Univ. of North Carolina Writing Center)

This handout provides questions you can ask yourself to determine the audience for an academic writing assignment. It also suggests strategies for fitting your paper to your intended audience.

"Purpose, Audience, Tone, and Content" (Univ. of Minnesota Libraries)

This extensive book chapter from Writing for Success , available online through Minnesota Libraries Publishing, is followed by exercises to try out your new pre-writing skills.

"Determining Audience" (Aims Online Writing Lab)

This guide from a community college's writing center shows you how to know your audience, and how to incorporate that knowledge in your thesis statement.

"Know Your Audience" ( Paper Rater Blog)

This short blog post uses examples to show how implied audiences for essays differ. It reminds you to think of your instructor as an observer, who will know only the information you pass along.

How to Choose a Theme or Topic

"Research Tutorial: Developing Your Topic" (YouTube)

Take a look at this short video tutorial from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to understand the basics of developing a writing topic.

"How to Choose a Paper Topic" (WikiHow)

This simple, step-by-step guide (with pictures!) walks you through choosing a paper topic. It starts with a detailed description of brainstorming and ends with strategies to refine your broad topic.

"How to Read an Assignment: Moving From Assignment to Topic" (Harvard College Writing Center)

Did your teacher give you a prompt or other instructions? This guide helps you understand the relationship between an essay assignment and your essay's topic.

"Guidelines for Choosing a Topic" (CliffsNotes)

This study guide from CliffsNotes both discusses how to choose a topic and makes a useful distinction between "topic" and "thesis."

How to Come Up with an Argument

"Argument" (Univ. of North Carolina Writing Center)

Not sure what "argument" means in the context of academic writing? This page from the University of North Carolina is a good place to start.

"The Essay Guide: Finding an Argument" (Study Hub)

This handout explains why it's important to have an argument when beginning your essay, and provides tools to help you choose a viable argument.

"Writing a Thesis and Making an Argument" (University of Iowa)

This page from the University of Iowa's Writing Center contains exercises through which you can develop and refine your argument and thesis statement.

"Developing a Thesis" (Harvard College Writing Center)

This page from Harvard's Writing Center collates some helpful dos and don'ts of argumentative writing, from steps in constructing a thesis to avoiding vague and confrontational thesis statements.

"Suggestions for Developing Argumentative Essays" (Berkeley Student Learning Center)

This page offers concrete suggestions for each stage of the essay writing process, from topic selection to drafting and editing. 

How to Outline your Essay

"Outlines" (Univ. of North Carolina at Chapel Hill via YouTube)

This short video tutorial from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill shows how to group your ideas into paragraphs or sections to begin the outlining process.

"Essay Outline" (Univ. of Washington Tacoma)

This two-page handout by a university professor simply defines the parts of an essay and then organizes them into an example outline.

"Types of Outlines and Samples" (Purdue OWL Online Writing Lab)

Purdue OWL gives examples of diverse outline strategies on this page, including the alphanumeric, full sentence, and decimal styles. 

"Outlining" (Harvard College Writing Center)

Once you have an argument, according to this handout, there are only three steps in the outline process: generalizing, ordering, and putting it all together. Then you're ready to write!

"Writing Essays" (Plymouth Univ.)

This packet, part of Plymouth University's Learning Development series, contains descriptions and diagrams relating to the outlining process.

"How to Write A Good Argumentative Essay: Logical Structure" (Criticalthinkingtutorials.com via YouTube)

This longer video tutorial gives an overview of how to structure your essay in order to support your argument or thesis. It is part of a longer course on academic writing hosted on Udemy.

Now that you've chosen and refined your topic and created an outline, use these resources to complete the writing process. Most essays contain introductions (which articulate your thesis statement), body paragraphs, and conclusions. Transitions facilitate the flow from one paragraph to the next so that support for your thesis builds throughout the essay. Sources and citations show where you got the evidence to support your thesis, which ensures that you avoid plagiarism. 

How to Write an Introduction

"Introductions" (Univ. of North Carolina Writing Center)

This page identifies the role of the introduction in any successful paper, suggests strategies for writing introductions, and warns against less effective introductions.

"How to Write A Good Introduction" (Michigan State Writing Center)

Beginning with the most common missteps in writing introductions, this guide condenses the essentials of introduction composition into seven points.

"The Introductory Paragraph" (ThoughtCo)

This blog post from academic advisor and college enrollment counselor Grace Fleming focuses on ways to grab your reader's attention at the beginning of your essay.

"Introductions and Conclusions" (Univ. of Toronto)

This guide from the University of Toronto gives advice that applies to writing both introductions and conclusions, including dos and don'ts.

"How to Write Better Essays: No One Does Introductions Properly" ( The Guardian )

This news article interviews UK professors on student essay writing; they point to introductions as the area that needs the most improvement.

How to Write a Thesis Statement

"Writing an Effective Thesis Statement" (YouTube)

This short, simple video tutorial from a college composition instructor at Tulsa Community College explains what a thesis statement is and what it does. 

"Thesis Statement: Four Steps to a Great Essay" (YouTube)

This fantastic tutorial walks you through drafting a thesis, using an essay prompt on Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter as an example.

"How to Write a Thesis Statement" (WikiHow)

This step-by-step guide (with pictures!) walks you through coming up with, writing, and editing a thesis statement. It invites you think of your statement as a "working thesis" that can change.

"How to Write a Thesis Statement" (Univ. of Indiana Bloomington)

Ask yourself the questions on this page, part of Indiana Bloomington's Writing Tutorial Services, when you're writing and refining your thesis statement.

"Writing Tips: Thesis Statements" (Univ. of Illinois Center for Writing Studies)

This page gives plentiful examples of good to great thesis statements, and offers questions to ask yourself when formulating a thesis statement.

How to Write Body Paragraphs

"Body Paragraph" (Brightstorm)

This module of a free online course introduces you to the components of a body paragraph. These include the topic sentence, information, evidence, and analysis.

"Strong Body Paragraphs" (Washington Univ.)

This handout from Washington's Writing and Research Center offers in-depth descriptions of the parts of a successful body paragraph.

"Guide to Paragraph Structure" (Deakin Univ.)

This handout is notable for color-coding example body paragraphs to help you identify the functions various sentences perform.

"Writing Body Paragraphs" (Univ. of Minnesota Libraries)

The exercises in this section of Writing for Success  will help you practice writing good body paragraphs. It includes guidance on selecting primary support for your thesis.

"The Writing Process—Body Paragraphs" (Aims Online Writing Lab)

The information and exercises on this page will familiarize you with outlining and writing body paragraphs, and includes links to more information on topic sentences and transitions.

"The Five-Paragraph Essay" (ThoughtCo)

This blog post discusses body paragraphs in the context of one of the most common academic essay types in secondary schools.

How to Use Transitions

"Transitions" (Univ. of North Carolina Writing Center)

This page from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill explains what a transition is, and how to know if you need to improve your transitions.

"Using Transitions Effectively" (Washington Univ.)

This handout defines transitions, offers tips for using them, and contains a useful list of common transitional words and phrases grouped by function.

"Transitions" (Aims Online Writing Lab)

This page compares paragraphs without transitions to paragraphs with transitions, and in doing so shows how important these connective words and phrases are.

"Transitions in Academic Essays" (Scribbr)

This page lists four techniques that will help you make sure your reader follows your train of thought, including grouping similar information and using transition words.

"Transitions" (El Paso Community College)

This handout shows example transitions within paragraphs for context, and explains how transitions improve your essay's flow and voice.

"Make Your Paragraphs Flow to Improve Writing" (ThoughtCo)

This blog post, another from academic advisor and college enrollment counselor Grace Fleming, talks about transitions and other strategies to improve your essay's overall flow.

"Transition Words" (smartwords.org)

This handy word bank will help you find transition words when you're feeling stuck. It's grouped by the transition's function, whether that is to show agreement, opposition, condition, or consequence.

How to Write a Conclusion

"Parts of An Essay: Conclusions" (Brightstorm)

This module of a free online course explains how to conclude an academic essay. It suggests thinking about the "3Rs": return to hook, restate your thesis, and relate to the reader.

"Essay Conclusions" (Univ. of Maryland University College)

This overview of the academic essay conclusion contains helpful examples and links to further resources for writing good conclusions.

"How to End An Essay" (WikiHow)

This step-by-step guide (with pictures!) by an English Ph.D. walks you through writing a conclusion, from brainstorming to ending with a flourish.

"Ending the Essay: Conclusions" (Harvard College Writing Center)

This page collates useful strategies for writing an effective conclusion, and reminds you to "close the discussion without closing it off" to further conversation.

How to Include Sources and Citations

"Research and Citation Resources" (Purdue OWL Online Writing Lab)

Purdue OWL streamlines information about the three most common referencing styles (MLA, Chicago, and APA) and provides examples of how to cite different resources in each system.

EasyBib: Free Bibliography Generator

This online tool allows you to input information about your source and automatically generate citations in any style. Be sure to select your resource type before clicking the "cite it" button.

CitationMachine

Like EasyBib, this online tool allows you to input information about your source and automatically generate citations in any style. 

Modern Language Association Handbook (MLA)

Here, you'll find the definitive and up-to-date record of MLA referencing rules. Order through the link above, or check to see if your library has a copy.

Chicago Manual of Style

Here, you'll find the definitive and up-to-date record of Chicago referencing rules. You can take a look at the table of contents, then choose to subscribe or start a free trial.

How to Avoid Plagiarism

"What is Plagiarism?" (plagiarism.org)

This nonprofit website contains numerous resources for identifying and avoiding plagiarism, and reminds you that even common activities like copying images from another website to your own site may constitute plagiarism.

"Plagiarism" (University of Oxford)

This interactive page from the University of Oxford helps you check for plagiarism in your work, making it clear how to avoid citing another person's work without full acknowledgement.

"Avoiding Plagiarism" (MIT Comparative Media Studies)

This quick guide explains what plagiarism is, what its consequences are, and how to avoid it. It starts by defining three words—quotation, paraphrase, and summary—that all constitute citation.

"Harvard Guide to Using Sources" (Harvard Extension School)

This comprehensive website from Harvard brings together articles, videos, and handouts about referencing, citation, and plagiarism. 

Grammarly contains tons of helpful grammar and writing resources, including a free tool to automatically scan your essay to check for close affinities to published work. 

Noplag is another popular online tool that automatically scans your essay to check for signs of plagiarism. Simply copy and paste your essay into the box and click "start checking."

Once you've written your essay, you'll want to edit (improve content), proofread (check for spelling and grammar mistakes), and finalize your work until you're ready to hand it in. This section brings together tips and resources for navigating the editing process. 

"Writing a First Draft" (Academic Help)

This is an introduction to the drafting process from the site Academic Help, with tips for getting your ideas on paper before editing begins.

"Editing and Proofreading" (Univ. of North Carolina Writing Center)

This page provides general strategies for revising your writing. They've intentionally left seven errors in the handout, to give you practice in spotting them.

"How to Proofread Effectively" (ThoughtCo)

This article from ThoughtCo, along with those linked at the bottom, help describe common mistakes to check for when proofreading.

"7 Simple Edits That Make Your Writing 100% More Powerful" (SmartBlogger)

This blog post emphasizes the importance of powerful, concise language, and reminds you that even your personal writing heroes create clunky first drafts.

"Editing Tips for Effective Writing" (Univ. of Pennsylvania)

On this page from Penn's International Relations department, you'll find tips for effective prose, errors to watch out for, and reminders about formatting.

"Editing the Essay" (Harvard College Writing Center)

This article, the first of two parts, gives you applicable strategies for the editing process. It suggests reading your essay aloud, removing any jargon, and being unafraid to remove even "dazzling" sentences that don't belong.

"Guide to Editing and Proofreading" (Oxford Learning Institute)

This handout from Oxford covers the basics of editing and proofreading, and reminds you that neither task should be rushed. 

In addition to plagiarism-checkers, Grammarly has a plug-in for your web browser that checks your writing for common mistakes.

After you've prepared, written, and edited your essay, you might want to share it outside the classroom. This section alerts you to print and web opportunities to share your essays with the wider world, from online writing communities and blogs to published journals geared toward young writers.

Sharing Your Essays Online

Go Teen Writers

Go Teen Writers is an online community for writers aged 13 - 19. It was founded by Stephanie Morrill, an author of contemporary young adult novels. 

Tumblr is a blogging website where you can share your writing and interact with other writers online. It's easy to add photos, links, audio, and video components.

Writersky provides an online platform for publishing and reading other youth writers' work. Its current content is mostly devoted to fiction.

Publishing Your Essays Online

This teen literary journal publishes in print, on the web, and (more frequently), on a blog. It is committed to ensuring that "teens see their authentic experience reflected on its pages."

The Matador Review

This youth writing platform celebrates "alternative," unconventional writing. The link above will take you directly to the site's "submissions" page.

Teen Ink has a website, monthly newsprint magazine, and quarterly poetry magazine promoting the work of young writers.

The largest online reading platform, Wattpad enables you to publish your work and read others' work. Its inline commenting feature allows you to share thoughts as you read along.

Publishing Your Essays in Print

Canvas Teen Literary Journal

This quarterly literary magazine is published for young writers by young writers. They accept many kinds of writing, including essays.

The Claremont Review

This biannual international magazine, first published in 1992, publishes poetry, essays, and short stories from writers aged 13 - 19.

Skipping Stones

This young writers magazine, founded in 1988, celebrates themes relating to ecological and cultural diversity. It publishes poems, photos, articles, and stories.

The Telling Room

This nonprofit writing center based in Maine publishes children's work on their website and in book form. The link above directs you to the site's submissions page.

Essay Contests

Scholastic Arts and Writing Awards

This prestigious international writing contest for students in grades 7 - 12 has been committed to "supporting the future of creativity since 1923."

Society of Professional Journalists High School Essay Contest

An annual essay contest on the theme of journalism and media, the Society of Professional Journalists High School Essay Contest awards scholarships up to $1,000.

National YoungArts Foundation

Here, you'll find information on a government-sponsored writing competition for writers aged 15 - 18. The foundation welcomes submissions of creative nonfiction, novels, scripts, poetry, short story and spoken word.

Signet Classics Student Scholarship Essay Contest

With prompts on a different literary work each year, this competition from Signet Classics awards college scholarships up to $1,000.

"The Ultimate Guide to High School Essay Contests" (CollegeVine)

See this handy guide from CollegeVine for a list of more competitions you can enter with your academic essay, from the National Council of Teachers of English Achievement Awards to the National High School Essay Contest by the U.S. Institute of Peace.

Whether you're struggling to write academic essays or you think you're a pro, there are workshops and online tools that can help you become an even better writer. Even the most seasoned writers encounter writer's block, so be proactive and look through our curated list of resources to combat this common frustration.

Online Essay-writing Classes and Workshops

"Getting Started with Essay Writing" (Coursera)

Coursera offers lots of free, high-quality online classes taught by college professors. Here's one example, taught by instructors from the University of California Irvine.

"Writing and English" (Brightstorm)

Brightstorm's free video lectures are easy to navigate by topic. This unit on the parts of an essay features content on the essay hook, thesis, supporting evidence, and more.

"How to Write an Essay" (EdX)

EdX is another open online university course website with several two- to five-week courses on the essay. This one is geared toward English language learners.

Writer's Digest University

This renowned writers' website offers online workshops and interactive tutorials. The courses offered cover everything from how to get started through how to get published.

Writing.com

Signing up for this online writer's community gives you access to helpful resources as well as an international community of writers.

How to Overcome Writer's Block

"Symptoms and Cures for Writer's Block" (Purdue OWL)

Purdue OWL offers a list of signs you might have writer's block, along with ways to overcome it. Consider trying out some "invention strategies" or ways to curb writing anxiety.

"Overcoming Writer's Block: Three Tips" ( The Guardian )

These tips, geared toward academic writing specifically, are practical and effective. The authors advocate setting realistic goals, creating dedicated writing time, and participating in social writing.

"Writing Tips: Strategies for Overcoming Writer's Block" (Univ. of Illinois)

This page from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's Center for Writing Studies acquaints you with strategies that do and do not work to overcome writer's block.

"Writer's Block" (Univ. of Toronto)

Ask yourself the questions on this page; if the answer is "yes," try out some of the article's strategies. Each question is accompanied by at least two possible solutions.

If you have essays to write but are short on ideas, this section's links to prompts, example student essays, and celebrated essays by professional writers might help. You'll find writing prompts from a variety of sources, student essays to inspire you, and a number of essay writing collections.

Essay Writing Prompts

"50 Argumentative Essay Topics" (ThoughtCo)

Take a look at this list and the others ThoughtCo has curated for different kinds of essays. As the author notes, "a number of these topics are controversial and that's the point."

"401 Prompts for Argumentative Writing" ( New York Times )

This list (and the linked lists to persuasive and narrative writing prompts), besides being impressive in length, is put together by actual high school English teachers.

"SAT Sample Essay Prompts" (College Board)

If you're a student in the U.S., your classroom essay prompts are likely modeled on the prompts in U.S. college entrance exams. Take a look at these official examples from the SAT.

"Popular College Application Essay Topics" (Princeton Review)

This page from the Princeton Review dissects recent Common Application essay topics and discusses strategies for answering them.

Example Student Essays

"501 Writing Prompts" (DePaul Univ.)

This nearly 200-page packet, compiled by the LearningExpress Skill Builder in Focus Writing Team, is stuffed with writing prompts, example essays, and commentary.

"Topics in English" (Kibin)

Kibin is a for-pay essay help website, but its example essays (organized by topic) are available for free. You'll find essays on everything from  A Christmas Carol  to perseverance.

"Student Writing Models" (Thoughtful Learning)

Thoughtful Learning, a website that offers a variety of teaching materials, provides sample student essays on various topics and organizes them by grade level.

"Five-Paragraph Essay" (ThoughtCo)

In this blog post by a former professor of English and rhetoric, ThoughtCo brings together examples of five-paragraph essays and commentary on the form.

The Best Essay Writing Collections

The Best American Essays of the Century by Joyce Carol Oates (Amazon)

This collection of American essays spanning the twentieth century was compiled by award winning author and Princeton professor Joyce Carol Oates.

The Best American Essays 2017 by Leslie Jamison (Amazon)

Leslie Jamison, the celebrated author of essay collection  The Empathy Exams , collects recent, high-profile essays into a single volume.

The Art of the Personal Essay by Phillip Lopate (Amazon)

Documentary writer Phillip Lopate curates this historical overview of the personal essay's development, from the classical era to the present.

The White Album by Joan Didion (Amazon)

This seminal essay collection was authored by one of the most acclaimed personal essayists of all time, American journalist Joan Didion.

Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace (Amazon)

Read this famous essay collection by David Foster Wallace, who is known for his experimentation with the essay form. He pushed the boundaries of personal essay, reportage, and political polemic.

"50 Successful Harvard Application Essays" (Staff of the The Harvard Crimson )

If you're looking for examples of exceptional college application essays, this volume from Harvard's daily student newspaper is one of the best collections on the market.

Are you an instructor looking for the best resources for teaching essay writing? This section contains resources for developing in-class activities and student homework assignments. You'll find content from both well-known university writing centers and online writing labs.

Essay Writing Classroom Activities for Students

"In-class Writing Exercises" (Univ. of North Carolina Writing Center)

This page lists exercises related to brainstorming, organizing, drafting, and revising. It also contains suggestions for how to implement the suggested exercises.

"Teaching with Writing" (Univ. of Minnesota Center for Writing)

Instructions and encouragement for using "freewriting," one-minute papers, logbooks, and other write-to-learn activities in the classroom can be found here.

"Writing Worksheets" (Berkeley Student Learning Center)

Berkeley offers this bank of writing worksheets to use in class. They are nested under headings for "Prewriting," "Revision," "Research Papers" and more.

"Using Sources and Avoiding Plagiarism" (DePaul University)

Use these activities and worksheets from DePaul's Teaching Commons when instructing students on proper academic citation practices.

Essay Writing Homework Activities for Students

"Grammar and Punctuation Exercises" (Aims Online Writing Lab)

These five interactive online activities allow students to practice editing and proofreading. They'll hone their skills in correcting comma splices and run-ons, identifying fragments, using correct pronoun agreement, and comma usage.

"Student Interactives" (Read Write Think)

Read Write Think hosts interactive tools, games, and videos for developing writing skills. They can practice organizing and summarizing, writing poetry, and developing lines of inquiry and analysis.

This free website offers writing and grammar activities for all grade levels. The lessons are designed to be used both for large classes and smaller groups.

"Writing Activities and Lessons for Every Grade" (Education World)

Education World's page on writing activities and lessons links you to more free, online resources for learning how to "W.R.I.T.E.": write, revise, inform, think, and edit.

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• What is an essay? 

What makes a good essay?

Typical essay structure, 7 steps to writing a good essay, a step-by-step guide to writing a good essay.

Whether you are gearing up for your GCSE coursework submissions or looking to brush up on your A-level writing skills, we have the perfect essay-writing guide for you. 💯

Staring at a blank page before writing an essay can feel a little daunting . Where do you start? What should your introduction say? And how should you structure your arguments? They are all fair questions and we have the answers! Take the stress out of essay writing with this step-by-step guide – you’ll be typing away in no time. 👩‍💻

What is an essay?

Generally speaking, an essay designates a literary work in which the author defends a point of view or a personal conviction, using logical arguments and literary devices in order to inform and convince the reader.

So – although essays can be broadly split into four categories: argumentative, expository, narrative, and descriptive – an essay can simply be described as a focused piece of writing designed to inform or persuade. 🤔

The purpose of an essay is to present a coherent argument in response to a stimulus or question and to persuade the reader that your position is credible, believable and reasonable. 👌

So, a ‘good’ essay relies on a confident writing style – it’s clear, well-substantiated, focussed, explanatory and descriptive . The structure follows a logical progression and above all, the body of the essay clearly correlates to the tile – answering the question where one has been posed. 

But, how do you go about making sure that you tick all these boxes and keep within a specified word count? Read on for the answer as well as an example essay structure to follow and a handy step-by-step guide to writing the perfect essay – hooray. 🙌

Sometimes, it is helpful to think about your essay like it is a well-balanced argument or a speech – it needs to have a logical structure, with all your points coming together to answer the question in a coherent manner. ⚖️

Of course, essays can vary significantly in length but besides that, they all follow a fairly strict pattern or structure made up of three sections. Lean into this predictability because it will keep you on track and help you make your point clearly. Let’s take a look at the typical essay structure:  

#1 Introduction

Start your introduction with the central claim of your essay. Let the reader know exactly what you intend to say with this essay. Communicate what you’re going to argue, and in what order. The final part of your introduction should also say what conclusions you’re going to draw – it sounds counter-intuitive but it’s not – more on that below. 1️⃣

Make your point, evidence it and explain it. This part of the essay – generally made up of three or more paragraphs depending on the length of your essay – is where you present your argument. The first sentence of each paragraph – much like an introduction to an essay – should summarise what your paragraph intends to explain in more detail. 2️⃣

#3 Conclusion

This is where you affirm your argument – remind the reader what you just proved in your essay and how you did it. This section will sound quite similar to your introduction but – having written the essay – you’ll be summarising rather than setting out your stall. 3️⃣

No essay is the same but your approach to writing them can be. As well as some best practice tips, we have gathered our favourite advice from expert essay-writers and compiled the following 7-step guide to writing a good essay every time. 👍

#1 Make sure you understand the question

#2 complete background reading.

#3 Make a detailed plan 

#4 Write your opening sentences 

#5 flesh out your essay in a rough draft, #6 evidence your opinion, #7 final proofread and edit.

Now that you have familiarised yourself with the 7 steps standing between you and the perfect essay, let’s take a closer look at each of those stages so that you can get on with crafting your written arguments with confidence . 

This is the most crucial stage in essay writing – r ead the essay prompt carefully and understand the question. Highlight the keywords – like ‘compare,’ ‘contrast’ ‘discuss,’ ‘explain’ or ‘evaluate’ – and let it sink in before your mind starts racing . There is nothing worse than writing 500 words before realising you have entirely missed the brief . 🧐

Unless you are writing under exam conditions , you will most likely have been working towards this essay for some time, by doing thorough background reading. Re-read relevant chapters and sections, highlight pertinent material and maybe even stray outside the designated reading list, this shows genuine interest and extended knowledge. 📚

#3 Make a detailed plan

Following the handy structure we shared with you above, now is the time to create the ‘skeleton structure’ or essay plan. Working from your essay title, plot out what you want your paragraphs to cover and how that information is going to flow. You don’t need to start writing any full sentences yet but it might be useful to think about the various quotes you plan to use to substantiate each section. 📝

Having mapped out the overall trajectory of your essay, you can start to drill down into the detail. First, write the opening sentence for each of the paragraphs in the body section of your essay. Remember – each paragraph is like a mini-essay – the opening sentence should summarise what the paragraph will then go on to explain in more detail. 🖊️

Next, it's time to write the bulk of your words and flesh out your arguments. Follow the ‘point, evidence, explain’ method. The opening sentences – already written – should introduce your ‘points’, so now you need to ‘evidence’ them with corroborating research and ‘explain’ how the evidence you’ve presented proves the point you’re trying to make. ✍️

With a rough draft in front of you, you can take a moment to read what you have written so far. Are there any sections that require further substantiation? Have you managed to include the most relevant material you originally highlighted in your background reading? Now is the time to make sure you have evidenced all your opinions and claims with the strongest quotes, citations and material. 📗

This is your final chance to re-read your essay and go over it with a fine-toothed comb before pressing ‘submit’. We highly recommend leaving a day or two between finishing your essay and the final proofread if possible – you’ll be amazed at the difference this makes, allowing you to return with a fresh pair of eyes and a more discerning judgment. 🤓

If you are looking for advice and support with your own essay-writing adventures, why not t ry a free trial lesson with GoStudent? Our tutors are experts at boosting academic success and having fun along the way. Get in touch and see how it can work for you today. 🎒

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50 Easy Essay Topics To Write About

Are you tired of complicated writing prompts? Explore our list of easy essay topics that cater to different interests, plus writing tips to guide you.

Easy essay topics are straightforward and are not complex. Writers won’t have a problem researching information about these essay topic ideas as there are many details available they can use to whip up thesis statements or start an argument to stimulate the readers. When writing easy essay topics, you should focus on the quality of your writing, not the difficulty of your chosen subject. Try out some of the best essay checkers when writing your next essay!

Easy Narrative Essay Topics

Easy descriptive essay topics, easy persuasive essay topics, easy argumentative essay topics, easy expository essay topics, easy informative essay topics , easy compare-and-contrast essay topics, easy cause and effect essay topics, easy college (application) topics.

Narrative essays show the writers’ point of view as they share their stories with the readers. These descriptive essays are often from personal experience and let the writers be as creative as they want.

• My first childhood memory

Think back to your earliest memory and describe what happened. Try to recreate it through words by adding as many details as possible. Then, describe the emotions you feel when recalling this memory.

• A travel experience that I want to relive

Pick an adventure you want to do again and recount your journey. Begin your essay with how you planned your travel and arrived at the destination, then tell the reader things you did there. Your essay should make the readers feel like they are on the trip with you.

• The day I met my best friend

Write how you met your best friend, what you felt, and what you talked about or did that day. Point out what made them your best friend and share how your friendship developed over time.

•  My first day as a student

Take the readers with you on your first day as either a middle school, high school, or college student. Talk about your first impression of the school, teachers, and classmates. You can also compare your expectations to your first day’s actual events.

• My most embarrassing moment

Write about what led to the embarrassing scene, how you reacted to it, and other details that made it a vivid memory for you. Add what you learned from the experience, and if other people still tease you.

• My most recent summer vacation

Pick a recent memory so you can recall as much detail as possible. Discuss how you spent your summer vacation, whether you stayed home because it was too hot or visited the beach and got sunburned.

As the name suggests, a descriptive essay asks writers to describe a subject, including their thoughts and experiences. The key to writing this type of essay is to be imaginative and focused on the details of your writing.

• My treasured place

Pick the place that holds a special meaning to you. It can be a local park where you and your friends play, your childhood home, etc., and describe the location’s sounds, colors, and other details. For instance, if it’s the park, you can say that the sun is shining bright, and the kid’s laughter is loud.

• My best friend

Describe your best friend – their appearance, personality, and habits. Paint a picture of them through words and additional reasons why you consider them your closest friend. 

• My favorite food

When writing about your favorite food, ensure to describe its appearance, taste, texture, and anything else that can make the reader feel like they are eating the same thing as you. Then, share why you enjoy it so much.

• My hometown

Stroll around your neighborhood to get more details about your hometown to let readers visualize it better. Point out any landmark and detail the scenery, history, and culture of where you live.

• My dream vacation

Select a place you want to visit someday and describe what you’re most excited to see there. For instance, you may want to visit Japan to watch the white and cherry blossoms floating in the wind.

• My favorite book or movie

Choose what stands out the most among the many books and movies you’ve read and watched. Present a summary of its plot, including your favorite characters, and explain why it stands out. Your reasons can also be the movie’s atmosphere or the author’s writing style. Just describe them as best you can. You might also be wondering what is a synthesis essay ?

Persuasive essay topics have one goal: to urge the readers to take their stance and convince them that the writer is correct. Good essays about challenges using persuasive writing often rely on opinions, are more personal, and have a more emotional or passionate tone.

• You should exercise regularly

Encourage your readers to exercise regularly by listing benefits such as improved physical and mental health. You can include your experience and share its impacts on your life.

• We should practice recycling

Tap on your readers’ emotions by identifying the adverse effects of waste on the environment. Then, discuss how recycling can reduce those consequences by citing successful recycling programs.

• Why we should help illegal immigrants

Choose this topic if you want to support undocumented immigrants and help them settle down legally. Encourage your readers to do the same by showing this group’s contributions to the economy and debunking immigration myths.

• We should advocate for mental health awareness

Increased awareness of mental health issues reduces the stigma around the subject and improves treatment options for those who suffer from it. If you also live with mental health problems, share your experience and include campaigns and initiatives you appreciate.

• We should volunteer often

Volunteering opens up many opportunities through social connections and improved networks. Plus, it offers the feeling of personal fulfillment. Use your essay to persuade your readers to consider volunteering and positively impacting their communities.

• Why we should set goals and deadlines to combat procrastination

Everyone has procrastinated before, so we all have our tales about it. Focus your essay on the benefits of setting goals to improve productivity. Include any prior experience of how doing this helped you or someone you know.

Argumentative writing presents facts to get the readers to see the writer’s point of view. These interesting essay topics acknowledge that another side exists and counter the other side’s points. Argumentative essay topics present credible evidence to show the readers the writer’s perspective on the issue.

• Should college be free for everyone? 

Indicate your stance on the matter and identify the disadvantages and drawbacks of free college. Present a clear argument supporting the side you choose.

• Is social media harmful to society?

Discuss the impact of social media sites on mental health, privacy, and communication. Show how social media helps or harms society by sharing your experience and citing examples. Then, you can add tips on how we can use social media in a way that isn’t harmful to our well-being.

• Should schools ban junk foods in cafeterias?

Ensure to tackle the pros and cons of banning junk foods in school. Some pros can include teaching students to choose healthier foods. Cons may include increased food prices, which not every student can afford.

• Should animal testing be illegal? 

Start your essay by discussing the history and purpose of animal testing and the available alternatives today. Pick a side on whether you support animal testing and make your case by considering ethics and scientific validity.

• Is capital punishment effective?

One of the most important social issues includes the death penalty. Argue for or against the effectiveness of capital punishment in deterring crime through statistics and case studies. You can also add the cost of capital punishment and identify other related inmate expenses, like healthcare.

Expository essay writers explain, evaluate, and inform. The thesis statement in expository essay topics should be in the first paragraph, with the supporting arguments and evidence scattered over the essay body to convince the readers that the logic presented is credible.

•  Reading is vital for personal growth

Start by defining what personal growth means and why it’s crucial. Then, explore the benefits of reading on personal growth through much research already available online. Some benefits are improved vocabulary and broader knowledge. If you’re a bookworm, include any other effects you observe in yourself.

• The history of the internet

Provide a brief overview of the subject and delve into how the internet was created. Add key events and technological advancements that led to the development of the internet as we know it today.

• The process of becoming a licensed driver

Begin by explaining why obtaining a driver’s license is important. Then, provide a step-by-step breakdown of the process, including driver education, practice driving hours, and taking the driver’s test.

• Types of natural disasters and their causes

Explain what natural disasters are and enumerate their types. Then, dive into their causes, like seismic activity, climate change, and human actions. Add the impacts of these disasters on the environment, people, and the economy.

• The importance of a college education

Explain what a college education is and its purpose in one’s life. Survey the benefits one can reap from college, like increased job options and higher earning potential. Discuss the possible downsides of pursuing higher education, such as needing more technical skills and incurring a large debt.

•  How to start a small business

Talk about the concept of a small business and the gains of owning one. Outline the steps in starting a small business, like planning, securing funds, and marketing your product or service.

Informative writing aims to educate the readers with uncomplicated facts, often to help understand how something came about or works and is never about personal opinions. Informative essay topics can be anything as long as the readers learn something new.

• Global warming and the planet

Research and gather information about how global warming and the greenhouse effect affect the environment, such as rising sea levels, extreme weather patterns, and animal and plant extinctions. Organize your essay into different sections, each focusing on one of the effects of global warming, and provide scientific evidence and statistics.

•  COVID-19 and vaccination

Since there has been a lot of information during the spread of the pandemic, you already have ample knowledge of the vaccination process. In your essay, relay how the vaccine was made and used to mitigate the spread of the COVID-19 virus.

• All about modern homeschooling

This prompt is best if you’re homeschooled or know someone who is homeschooled. Briefly discuss the history of homeschooling, then explain how modern schooling is done. Include the best practices that help parents and their children manage their time and efficiently learn.

• World War II and women’s rights

Delve into how World War II affected women’s rights and societal roles during and after the war. Explore how women contributed to the war effort and how this led to today’s changing social and political landscape.

• English as an international communication tool

Analyze the importance of English as a global language and how it is used for international communication in business, education, and diplomacy. Add how English works with other languages and cultures.

• The history of chocolate

Begin with the origins of chocolate, then trace its history through time, with special attention to its cultural significance and evolution as a food item. Include methods of making chocolates and examples of different types of chocolate.

Compare and contrast essay topics focus on two subjects to highlight the subtle differences or similarities between the two. It’s best to present your thesis statement in the introduction and tell your readers why you compare and contrast the ideas.

• Online Classes vs. In-Person Classes

This is a timely and relevant topic in today’s world, as more and more people prefer online classes. In your essay, compare and contrast the benefits and drawbacks of online and traditional courses regarding convenience, flexibility, student engagement, and learning outcomes.

• Dogs vs. Cats

Dogs versus cats is a classic comparison topic you can use to develop your writing skills. Do this by discussing the differences between the two animals regarding their behavior, care needs, and popularity as pets. You can even explore the advantages and disadvantages of owning each animal.

• City Life vs. Rural life

Get your readers’ attention by describing the lifestyle in the city and rural areas and point out what sets the two apart. Include relevant factors like the cost of living, job opportunities, social life, and environmental conditions. Conclude the essay by giving your opinion on which lifestyle you prefer and why.

• The Harry Potter books vs. the Harry Potter movies

This topic would be perfect for fans of the series. Compare and contrast the books’ and films’ plots, characters, and themes, then discuss which medium you feel was more effective in telling the story. It’s best to focus on a few key aspects of the series and provide specific examples from the books and movies to support your assertions.

• High school vs. College

This common compare-and-contrast topic is still relevant and easy to write about today. Talk about the differences between the two regarding academic pressures, expectations, and level of independence between college and high school students. You can draw from your experiences or research and compare high school and college educational systems and cultures.

Cause and effect essay topics highlight the connection between a subject and its consequences. School essays in this category help develop student writers’ critical thinking skills.

• The causes and effects of obesity

Review the various factors contributing to obesity, like poor diet, inactive lifestyle, and genetics. Then, move on to the harmful effects of the disease, such as the increased risk of heart disease, diabetes, and other health issues. Obesity is a topic that still demands attention for its devastating impacts.

• Video games and children

For this topic, explain what video games are and comment on their impacts on children’s behavior and cognitive development. Be sure to cite relevant research and studies. You can also share ways parents and educators can mitigate any negative effects.

• The impact of technology on communication

This is an easy topic to write about, as technology’s effect on communication is a prevalent and often-discussed topic. Begin by describing what technology is all about, including its various forms and how it changed communication. Point out technology’s positive and negative impacts on communication and offer suggestions to reduce any cons.

•  Stress and our physical and mental health

For this prompt, explore the impact of stress on the body and mind, including its effects on the immune system, sleep, and mental health. Research the causes and effects of stress, such as how it influences an individual’s work, relationships, and lifestyle choices. You can also discuss stress management methods like exercise, mindfulness, and therapy.

Soon-to-be college students write college application essays to demonstrate why they fit into their chosen school. These essays show the applicant’s personality and drive and present the writer’s academic and career goals.

•  Discuss an experience or accomplishment that significantly impacted your personal growth. 

To write a great essay on this topic, reflect on a specific experience or achievement that taught you a valuable lesson or changed your perspective about something. Describe the experience or achievement and explain how it influenced your growth. For example, you can talk about winning a marathon and how it helped you become more disciplined and focused.

•  Describe a challenge you have faced and how you overcame it.

In this essay, discuss a particular hardship you had to deal with. It can be an academic or personal situation. Make sure to explain the steps you took to solve or overcome the problem. This essay prompt will help you showcase your resilience and problem-solving skills.

• Discuss a person who has significantly influenced your life.

Think of the person you hold in high regard, like a parent, teacher, or mentor, and talk about why you consider them an important person in your life. Then, reflect on experiences that highlight their influence and impact on you. These can be moments such as when they stayed up all night helping you on a project or when they received a community award for volunteering. 

•  Discuss your favorite academic subject and explain why you enjoy it.

This prompt lets you showcase your passion for a particular subject and demonstrate your intellectual curiosity. To write this essay effectively, you must share specific examples of how you pursued your interest and how it affected your academic and personal goals. For instance, you enjoyed physical education and joined a sports team.

• Explain why you have chosen your intended major and how it aligns with your future goals.

This essay topic lets you illustrate your academic and career aspirations and showcase how you prepared for your chosen field of study. Start by explaining why you’re eager to be in your major and share any relevant coursework or experiences that influenced your choice. Then, describe your future career goals.

• Discuss an extracurricular activity or community service project that’s important to you and how it has impacted your life.

Talking about having extracurricular activities on top of your standard academic units demonstrates your leadership skills and commitment to serving others. To write this essay, describe the project or activity you’ve participated in and explain why it’s meaningful. Share any personal or community benefits that have resulted from your involvement.

Maria Caballero is a freelance writer who has been writing since high school. She believes that to be a writer doesn't only refer to excellent syntax and semantics but also knowing how to weave words together to communicate to any reader effectively.

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Tips for Online Students , Tips for Students

How To Write An Essay: Beginner Tips And Tricks

Updated: July 11, 2022

Published: June 22, 2021

Many students dread writing essays, but essay writing is an important skill to develop in high school, university, and even into your future career. By learning how to write an essay properly, the process can become more enjoyable and you’ll find you’re better able to organize and articulate your thoughts.

When writing an essay, it’s common to follow a specific pattern, no matter what the topic is. Once you’ve used the pattern a few times and you know how to structure an essay, it will become a lot more simple to apply your knowledge to every essay. 

No matter which major you choose, you should know how to craft a good essay. Here, we’ll cover the basics of essay writing, along with some helpful tips to make the writing process go smoothly.

Photo by Laura Chouette on Unsplash

Types of Essays

Think of an essay as a discussion. There are many types of discussions you can have with someone else. You can be describing a story that happened to you, you might explain to them how to do something, or you might even argue about a certain topic. 

When it comes to different types of essays, it follows a similar pattern. Like a friendly discussion, each type of essay will come with its own set of expectations or goals. 

For example, when arguing with a friend, your goal is to convince them that you’re right. The same goes for an argumentative essay. 

Here are a few of the main essay types you can expect to come across during your time in school:

Narrative Essay

This type of essay is almost like telling a story, not in the traditional sense with dialogue and characters, but as if you’re writing out an event or series of events to relay information to the reader.

Persuasive Essay

Here, your goal is to persuade the reader about your views on a specific topic.

Descriptive Essay

This is the kind of essay where you go into a lot more specific details describing a topic such as a place or an event. 

Argumentative Essay

In this essay, you’re choosing a stance on a topic, usually controversial, and your goal is to present evidence that proves your point is correct.

Expository Essay

Your purpose with this type of essay is to tell the reader how to complete a specific process, often including a step-by-step guide or something similar.

Compare and Contrast Essay

You might have done this in school with two different books or characters, but the ultimate goal is to draw similarities and differences between any two given subjects.

The Main Stages of Essay Writing

When it comes to writing an essay, many students think the only stage is getting all your ideas down on paper and submitting your work. However, that’s not quite the case. 

There are three main stages of writing an essay, each one with its own purpose. Of course, writing the essay itself is the most substantial part, but the other two stages are equally as important.

So, what are these three stages of essay writing? They are:

Preparation

Before you even write one word, it’s important to prepare the content and structure of your essay. If a topic wasn’t assigned to you, then the first thing you should do is settle on a topic. Next, you want to conduct your research on that topic and create a detailed outline based on your research. The preparation stage will make writing your essay that much easier since, with your outline and research, you should already have the skeleton of your essay.

Writing is the most time-consuming stage. In this stage, you will write out all your thoughts and ideas and craft your essay based on your outline. You’ll work on developing your ideas and fleshing them out throughout the introduction, body, and conclusion (more on these soon).

In the final stage, you’ll go over your essay and check for a few things. First, you’ll check if your essay is cohesive, if all the points make sense and are related to your topic, and that your facts are cited and backed up. You can also check for typos, grammar and punctuation mistakes, and formatting errors.  

The Five-Paragraph Essay

We mentioned earlier that essay writing follows a specific structure, and for the most part in academic or college essays , the five-paragraph essay is the generally accepted structure you’ll be expected to use. 

The five-paragraph essay is broken down into one introduction paragraph, three body paragraphs, and a closing paragraph. However, that doesn’t always mean that an essay is written strictly in five paragraphs, but rather that this structure can be used loosely and the three body paragraphs might become three sections instead.

Let’s take a closer look at each section and what it entails.

Introduction

As the name implies, the purpose of your introduction paragraph is to introduce your idea. A good introduction begins with a “hook,” something that grabs your reader’s attention and makes them excited to read more. 

Another key tenant of an introduction is a thesis statement, which usually comes towards the end of the introduction itself. Your thesis statement should be a phrase that explains your argument, position, or central idea that you plan on developing throughout the essay. 

You can also include a short outline of what to expect in your introduction, including bringing up brief points that you plan on explaining more later on in the body paragraphs.

Here is where most of your essay happens. The body paragraphs are where you develop your ideas and bring up all the points related to your main topic. 

In general, you’re meant to have three body paragraphs, or sections, and each one should bring up a different point. Think of it as bringing up evidence. Each paragraph is a different piece of evidence, and when the three pieces are taken together, it backs up your main point — your thesis statement — really well.

That being said, you still want each body paragraph to be tied together in some way so that the essay flows. The points should be distinct enough, but they should relate to each other, and definitely to your thesis statement. Each body paragraph works to advance your point, so when crafting your essay, it’s important to keep this in mind so that you avoid going off-track or writing things that are off-topic.

Many students aren’t sure how to write a conclusion for an essay and tend to see their conclusion as an afterthought, but this section is just as important as the rest of your work. 

You shouldn’t be presenting any new ideas in your conclusion, but you should summarize your main points and show how they back up your thesis statement. 

Essentially, the conclusion is similar in structure and content to the introduction, but instead of introducing your essay, it should be wrapping up the main thoughts and presenting them to the reader as a singular closed argument. 

Photo by AMIT RANJAN on Unsplash

Steps to Writing an Essay

Now that you have a better idea of an essay’s structure and all the elements that go into it, you might be wondering what the different steps are to actually write your essay. 

Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered. Instead of going in blind, follow these steps on how to write your essay from start to finish.

Understand Your Assignment

When writing an essay for an assignment, the first critical step is to make sure you’ve read through your assignment carefully and understand it thoroughly. You want to check what type of essay is required, that you understand the topic, and that you pay attention to any formatting or structural requirements. You don’t want to lose marks just because you didn’t read the assignment carefully.

Research Your Topic

Once you understand your assignment, it’s time to do some research. In this step, you should start looking at different sources to get ideas for what points you want to bring up throughout your essay. 

Search online or head to the library and get as many resources as possible. You don’t need to use them all, but it’s good to start with a lot and then narrow down your sources as you become more certain of your essay’s direction.

Start Brainstorming

After research comes the brainstorming. There are a lot of different ways to start the brainstorming process . Here are a few you might find helpful:

• Think about what you found during your research that interested you the most
• Jot down all your ideas, even if they’re not yet fully formed
• Create word clouds or maps for similar terms or ideas that come up so you can group them together based on their similarities
• Try freewriting to get all your ideas out before arranging them

Create a Thesis

This is often the most tricky part of the whole process since you want to create a thesis that’s strong and that you’re about to develop throughout the entire essay. Therefore, you want to choose a thesis statement that’s broad enough that you’ll have enough to say about it, but not so broad that you can’t be precise. 

Write Your Outline

Armed with your research, brainstorming sessions, and your thesis statement, the next step is to write an outline. 

In the outline, you’ll want to put your thesis statement at the beginning and start creating the basic skeleton of how you want your essay to look. 

A good way to tackle an essay is to use topic sentences . A topic sentence is like a mini-thesis statement that is usually the first sentence of a new paragraph. This sentence introduces the main idea that will be detailed throughout the paragraph. 

If you create an outline with the topic sentences for your body paragraphs and then a few points of what you want to discuss, you’ll already have a strong starting point when it comes time to sit down and write. This brings us to our next step… 

Write a First Draft

The first time you write your entire essay doesn’t need to be perfect, but you do need to get everything on the page so that you’re able to then write a second draft or review it afterward. 

Everyone’s writing process is different. Some students like to write their essay in the standard order of intro, body, and conclusion, while others prefer to start with the “meat” of the essay and tackle the body, and then fill in the other sections afterward. 

Make sure your essay follows your outline and that everything relates to your thesis statement and your points are backed up by the research you did. 

Revise, Edit, and Proofread

The revision process is one of the three main stages of writing an essay, yet many people skip this step thinking their work is done after the first draft is complete. 

However, proofreading, reviewing, and making edits on your essay can spell the difference between a B paper and an A.

After writing the first draft, try and set your essay aside for a few hours or even a day or two, and then come back to it with fresh eyes to review it. You might find mistakes or inconsistencies you missed or better ways to formulate your arguments.

Add the Finishing Touches

Finally, you’ll want to make sure everything that’s required is in your essay. Review your assignment again and see if all the requirements are there, such as formatting rules, citations, quotes, etc. 

Go over the order of your paragraphs and make sure everything makes sense, flows well, and uses the same writing style . 

Once everything is checked and all the last touches are added, give your essay a final read through just to ensure it’s as you want it before handing it in. 

A good way to do this is to read your essay out loud since you’ll be able to hear if there are any mistakes or inaccuracies.

Essay Writing Tips

With the steps outlined above, you should be able to craft a great essay. Still, there are some other handy tips we’d recommend just to ensure that the essay writing process goes as smoothly as possible.

• Start your essay early. This is the first tip for a reason. It’s one of the most important things you can do to write a good essay. If you start it the night before, then you won’t have enough time to research, brainstorm, and outline — and you surely won’t have enough time to review.
• Don’t try and write it in one sitting. It’s ok if you need to take breaks or write it over a few days. It’s better to write it in multiple sittings so that you have a fresh mind each time and you’re able to focus.
• Always keep the essay question in mind. If you’re given an assigned question, then you should always keep it handy when writing your essay to make sure you’re always working to answer the question.
• Use transitions between paragraphs. In order to improve the readability of your essay, try and make clear transitions between paragraphs. This means trying to relate the end of one paragraph to the beginning of the next one so the shift doesn’t seem random.
• Integrate your research thoughtfully. Add in citations or quotes from your research materials to back up your thesis and main points. This will show that you did the research and that your thesis is backed up by it.

Wrapping Up

Writing an essay doesn’t need to be daunting if you know how to approach it. Using our essay writing steps and tips, you’ll have better knowledge on how to write an essay and you’ll be able to apply it to your next assignment. Once you do this a few times, it will become more natural to you and the essay writing process will become quicker and easier.

If you still need assistance with your essay, check with a student advisor to see if they offer help with writing. At University of the People(UoPeople), we always want our students to succeed, so our student advisors are ready to help with writing skills when necessary. 

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Essay Topics – List of 500+ Essay Writing Topics and Ideas

List of 500+ essay writing topics and ideas.

Essay topics in English can be difficult to come up with. While writing essays , many college and high school students face writer’s block and have a hard time to think about topics and ideas for an essay. In this article, we will list out many good essay topics from different categories like argumentative essays, essays on technology, environment essays for students from 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th grades. Following list of essay topics are for all – from kids to college students. We have the largest collection of essays. An essay is nothing but a piece of content which is written from the perception of writer or author. Essays are similar to a story, pamphlet, thesis, etc. The best thing about Essay is you can use any type of language – formal or informal. It can biography, the autobiography of anyone. Following is a great list of 100 essay topics. We will be adding 400 more soon!

But Before that you may wanna read some awesome Essay Writing Tips here .

Get the Huge list of 100+ Speech Topics here

Argumentative Essay Topics

• Should plastic be banned?
• Pollution due to Urbanization
• Education should be free
• Should Students get limited access to the Internet?
• Selling Tobacco should be banned
• Smoking in public places should be banned
• Facebook should be banned
• Students should not be allowed to play PUBG

Essay Topics on Technology

• Wonder Of Science
• Mobile Phone

Essay Topics on Festivals on Events

• Independence Day (15 August)
• Teachers Day
• Summer Vacation
• Children’s Day
• Swachh Bharat Abhiyan
• Janmashtami
• Republic Day

Essay Topics on Education

• Education Essay
• Importance of Education
• Contribution of Technology in Education

Essay Topics on Famous Leaders

• Mahatma Gandhi
• APJ Abdul Kalam
• Jawaharlal Nehru
• Swami Vivekananda
• Mother Teresa
• Rabindranath Tagore
• Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel
• Subhash Chandra Bose
• Abraham Lincoln
• Martin Luther King
• Lal Bahadur Shashtri

Essay Topics on Animals and Birds

• My Favorite Animal

Essays Topics About Yourself

• My Best Friend
• My Favourite Teacher
• My Aim In Life
• My Favourite Game – Badminton
• My Favourite Game – Essay
• My Favourite Book
• My Ambition
• How I Spent My Summer Vacation
• India of My Dreams
• My School Life
• I Love My Family
• My Favourite Subject
• My Favourite Game Badminton
• My Father My Hero
• My School Library
• My Favourite Author
• My plans for summer vacation

Essay Topics Based on Environment and Nature

• Global Warming
• Environment
• Air Pollution
• Environmental Pollution
• Water Pollution
• Rainy Season
• Climate Change
• Importance Of Trees
• Winter Season
• Deforestation
• Natural Disasters
• Save Environment
• Summer Season
• Trees Our Best Friend Essay In English

Essay Topics Based on Proverbs

• Health Is Wealth
• A Stitch in Time Saves Nine
• An Apple a Day Keeps Doctor Away
• Where there is a will, there is way
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Sat / act prep online guides and tips, getting college essay help: important do's and don’ts.

College Essays

If you grow up to be a professional writer, everything you write will first go through an editor before being published. This is because the process of writing is really a process of re-writing —of rethinking and reexamining your work, usually with the help of someone else. So what does this mean for your student writing? And in particular, what does it mean for very important, but nonprofessional writing like your college essay? Should you ask your parents to look at your essay? Pay for an essay service?

If you are wondering what kind of help you can, and should, get with your personal statement, you've come to the right place! In this article, I'll talk about what kind of writing help is useful, ethical, and even expected for your college admission essay . I'll also point out who would make a good editor, what the differences between editing and proofreading are, what to expect from a good editor, and how to spot and stay away from a bad one.

Table of Contents

What Kind of Help for Your Essay Can You Get?

What's Good Editing?

What should an editor do for you, what kind of editing should you avoid, proofreading, what's good proofreading, what kind of proofreading should you avoid.

What Do Colleges Think Of You Getting Help With Your Essay?

Who Can/Should Help You?

Advice for editors.

Should You Pay Money For Essay Editing?

The Bottom Line

What's next, what kind of help with your essay can you get.

Rather than talking in general terms about "help," let's first clarify the two different ways that someone else can improve your writing . There is editing, which is the more intensive kind of assistance that you can use throughout the whole process. And then there's proofreading, which is the last step of really polishing your final product.

Let me go into some more detail about editing and proofreading, and then explain how good editors and proofreaders can help you."

Editing is helping the author (in this case, you) go from a rough draft to a finished work . Editing is the process of asking questions about what you're saying, how you're saying it, and how you're organizing your ideas. But not all editing is good editing . In fact, it's very easy for an editor to cross the line from supportive to overbearing and over-involved.

Ability to clarify assignments. A good editor is usually a good writer, and certainly has to be a good reader. For example, in this case, a good editor should make sure you understand the actual essay prompt you're supposed to be answering.

Open-endedness. Good editing is all about asking questions about your ideas and work, but without providing answers. It's about letting you stick to your story and message, and doesn't alter your point of view.

Think of an editor as a great travel guide. It can show you the many different places your trip could take you. It should explain any parts of the trip that could derail your trip or confuse the traveler. But it never dictates your path, never forces you to go somewhere you don't want to go, and never ignores your interests so that the trip no longer seems like it's your own. So what should good editors do?

Help Brainstorm Topics

Sometimes it's easier to bounce thoughts off of someone else. This doesn't mean that your editor gets to come up with ideas, but they can certainly respond to the various topic options you've come up with. This way, you're less likely to write about the most boring of your ideas, or to write about something that isn't actually important to you.

If you're wondering how to come up with options for your editor to consider, check out our guide to brainstorming topics for your college essay .

Help Revise Your Drafts

Here, your editor can't upset the delicate balance of not intervening too much or too little. It's tricky, but a great way to think about it is to remember: editing is about asking questions, not giving answers .

Revision questions should point out:

• Places where more detail or more description would help the reader connect with your essay
• Places where structure and logic don't flow, losing the reader's attention
• Places where there aren't transitions between paragraphs, confusing the reader
• Moments where your narrative or the arguments you're making are unclear

But pointing to potential problems is not the same as actually rewriting—editors let authors fix the problems themselves.

Bad editing is usually very heavy-handed editing. Instead of helping you find your best voice and ideas, a bad editor changes your writing into their own vision.

You may be dealing with a bad editor if they:

• Add material (examples, descriptions) that doesn't come from you
• Use a thesaurus to make your college essay sound "more mature"
• Add meaning or insight to the essay that doesn't come from you
• Tell you what to say and how to say it
• Write sentences, phrases, and paragraphs for you
• Change your voice in the essay so it no longer sounds like it was written by a teenager

Colleges can tell the difference between a 17-year-old's writing and a 50-year-old's writing. Not only that, they have access to your SAT or ACT Writing section, so they can compare your essay to something else you wrote. Writing that's a little more polished is great and expected. But a totally different voice and style will raise questions.

Where's the Line Between Helpful Editing and Unethical Over-Editing?

Sometimes it's hard to tell whether your college essay editor is doing the right thing. Here are some guidelines for staying on the ethical side of the line.

• An editor should say that the opening paragraph is kind of boring, and explain what exactly is making it drag. But it's overstepping for an editor to tell you exactly how to change it.
• An editor should point out where your prose is unclear or vague. But it's completely inappropriate for the editor to rewrite that section of your essay.
• An editor should let you know that a section is light on detail or description. But giving you similes and metaphors to beef up that description is a no-go.

Proofreading (also called copy-editing) is checking for errors in the last draft of a written work. It happens at the end of the process and is meant as the final polishing touch. Proofreading is meticulous and detail-oriented, focusing on small corrections. It sands off all the surface rough spots that could alienate the reader.

Because proofreading is usually concerned with making fixes on the word or sentence level, this is the only process where someone else can actually add to or take away things from your essay . This is because what they are adding or taking away tends to be one or two misplaced letters.

Laser focus. Proofreading is all about the tiny details, so the ability to really concentrate on finding small slip-ups is a must.

Excellent grammar and spelling skills. Proofreaders need to dot every "i" and cross every "t." Good proofreaders should correct spelling, punctuation, capitalization, and grammar. They should put foreign words in italics and surround quotations with quotation marks. They should check that you used the correct college's name, and that you adhered to any formatting requirements (name and date at the top of the page, uniform font and size, uniform spacing).

Limited interference. A proofreader needs to make sure that you followed any word limits. But if cuts need to be made to shorten the essay, that's your job and not the proofreader's.

A bad proofreader either tries to turn into an editor, or just lacks the skills and knowledge necessary to do the job.

Some signs that you're working with a bad proofreader are:

• If they suggest making major changes to the final draft of your essay. Proofreading happens when editing is already finished.
• If they aren't particularly good at spelling, or don't know grammar, or aren't detail-oriented enough to find someone else's small mistakes.
• If they start swapping out your words for fancier-sounding synonyms, or changing the voice and sound of your essay in other ways. A proofreader is there to check for errors, not to take the 17-year-old out of your writing.

What Do Colleges Think of Your Getting Help With Your Essay?

Admissions officers agree: light editing and proofreading are good—even required ! But they also want to make sure you're the one doing the work on your essay. They want essays with stories, voice, and themes that come from you. They want to see work that reflects your actual writing ability, and that focuses on what you find important.

On the Importance of Editing

Get feedback. Have a fresh pair of eyes give you some feedback. Don't allow someone else to rewrite your essay, but do take advantage of others' edits and opinions when they seem helpful. ( Bates College )

Read your essay aloud to someone. Reading the essay out loud offers a chance to hear how your essay sounds outside your head. This exercise reveals flaws in the essay's flow, highlights grammatical errors and helps you ensure that you are communicating the exact message you intended. ( Dickinson College )

On the Value of Proofreading

Share your essays with at least one or two people who know you well—such as a parent, teacher, counselor, or friend—and ask for feedback. Remember that you ultimately have control over your essays, and your essays should retain your own voice, but others may be able to catch mistakes that you missed and help suggest areas to cut if you are over the word limit. ( Yale University )

Proofread and then ask someone else to proofread for you. Although we want substance, we also want to be able to see that you can write a paper for our professors and avoid careless mistakes that would drive them crazy. ( Oberlin College )

On Watching Out for Too Much Outside Influence

Limit the number of people who review your essay. Too much input usually means your voice is lost in the writing style. ( Carleton College )

Ask for input (but not too much). Your parents, friends, guidance counselors, coaches, and teachers are great people to bounce ideas off of for your essay. They know how unique and spectacular you are, and they can help you decide how to articulate it. Keep in mind, however, that a 45-year-old lawyer writes quite differently from an 18-year-old student, so if your dad ends up writing the bulk of your essay, we're probably going to notice. ( Vanderbilt University )

Now let's talk about some potential people to approach for your college essay editing and proofreading needs. It's best to start close to home and slowly expand outward. Not only are your family and friends more invested in your success than strangers, but they also have a better handle on your interests and personality. This knowledge is key for judging whether your essay is expressing your true self.

Parents or Close Relatives

Your family may be full of potentially excellent editors! Parents are deeply committed to your well-being, and family members know you and your life well enough to offer details or incidents that can be included in your essay. On the other hand, the rewriting process necessarily involves criticism, which is sometimes hard to hear from someone very close to you.

A parent or close family member is a great choice for an editor if you can answer "yes" to the following questions. Is your parent or close relative a good writer or reader? Do you have a relationship where editing your essay won't create conflict? Are you able to constructively listen to criticism and suggestion from the parent?

One suggestion for defusing face-to-face discussions is to try working on the essay over email. Send your parent a draft, have them write you back some comments, and then you can pick which of their suggestions you want to use and which to discard.

Teachers or Tutors

A humanities teacher that you have a good relationship with is a great choice. I am purposefully saying humanities, and not just English, because teachers of Philosophy, History, Anthropology, and any other classes where you do a lot of writing, are all used to reviewing student work.

Moreover, any teacher or tutor that has been working with you for some time, knows you very well and can vet the essay to make sure it "sounds like you."

If your teacher or tutor has some experience with what college essays are supposed to be like, ask them to be your editor. If not, then ask whether they have time to proofread your final draft.

Guidance or College Counselor at Your School

The best thing about asking your counselor to edit your work is that this is their job. This means that they have a very good sense of what colleges are looking for in an application essay.

At the same time, school counselors tend to have relationships with admissions officers in many colleges, which again gives them insight into what works and which college is focused on what aspect of the application.

Unfortunately, in many schools the guidance counselor tends to be way overextended. If your ratio is 300 students to 1 college counselor, you're unlikely to get that person's undivided attention and focus. It is still useful to ask them for general advice about your potential topics, but don't expect them to be able to stay with your essay from first draft to final version.

Friends, Siblings, or Classmates

Although they most likely don't have much experience with what colleges are hoping to see, your peers are excellent sources for checking that your essay is you .

Friends and siblings are perfect for the read-aloud edit. Read your essay to them so they can listen for words and phrases that are stilted, pompous, or phrases that just don't sound like you.

You can even trade essays and give helpful advice on each other's work.

If your editor hasn't worked with college admissions essays very much, no worries! Any astute and attentive reader can still greatly help with your process. But, as in all things, beginners do better with some preparation.

First, your editor should read our advice about how to write a college essay introduction , how to spot and fix a bad college essay , and get a sense of what other students have written by going through some admissions essays that worked .

Then, as they read your essay, they can work through the following series of questions that will help them to guide you.

Introduction Questions

• Is the first sentence a killer opening line? Why or why not?
• Does the introduction hook the reader? Does it have a colorful, detailed, and interesting narrative? Or does it propose a compelling or surprising idea?
• Can you feel the author's voice in the introduction, or is the tone dry, dull, or overly formal? Show the places where the voice comes through.

Essay Body Questions

• Does the essay have a through-line? Is it built around a central argument, thought, idea, or focus? Can you put this idea into your own words?
• How is the essay organized? By logical progression? Chronologically? Do you feel order when you read it, or are there moments where you are confused or lose the thread of the essay?
• Does the essay have both narratives about the author's life and explanations and insight into what these stories reveal about the author's character, personality, goals, or dreams? If not, which is missing?
• Does the essay flow? Are there smooth transitions/clever links between paragraphs? Between the narrative and moments of insight?

Reader Response Questions

• Does the writer's personality come through? Do we know what the speaker cares about? Do we get a sense of "who he or she is"?
• Where did you feel most connected to the essay? Which parts of the essay gave you a "you are there" sensation by invoking your senses? What moments could you picture in your head well?
• Where are the details and examples vague and not specific enough?
• Did you get an "a-ha!" feeling anywhere in the essay? Is there a moment of insight that connected all the dots for you? Is there a good reveal or "twist" anywhere in the essay?
• What are the strengths of this essay? What needs the most improvement?

Should You Pay Money for Essay Editing?

One alternative to asking someone you know to help you with your college essay is the paid editor route. There are two different ways to pay for essay help: a private essay coach or a less personal editing service , like the many proliferating on the internet.

My advice is to think of these options as a last resort rather than your go-to first choice. I'll first go through the reasons why. Then, if you do decide to go with a paid editor, I'll help you decide between a coach and a service.

When to Consider a Paid Editor

In general, I think hiring someone to work on your essay makes a lot of sense if none of the people I discussed above are a possibility for you.

If you can't ask your parents. For example, if your parents aren't good writers, or if English isn't their first language. Or if you think getting your parents to help is going create unnecessary extra conflict in your relationship with them (applying to college is stressful as it is!)

If you can't ask your teacher or tutor. Maybe you don't have a trusted teacher or tutor that has time to look over your essay with focus. Or, for instance, your favorite humanities teacher has very limited experience with college essays and so won't know what admissions officers want to see.

If you can't ask your guidance counselor. This could be because your guidance counselor is way overwhelmed with other students.

If you can't share your essay with those who know you. It might be that your essay is on a very personal topic that you're unwilling to share with parents, teachers, or peers. Just make sure it doesn't fall into one of the bad-idea topics in our article on bad college essays .

If the cost isn't a consideration. Many of these services are quite expensive, and private coaches even more so. If you have finite resources, I'd say that hiring an SAT or ACT tutor (whether it's PrepScholar or someone else) is better way to spend your money . This is because there's no guarantee that a slightly better essay will sufficiently elevate the rest of your application, but a significantly higher SAT score will definitely raise your applicant profile much more.

Should You Hire an Essay Coach?

On the plus side, essay coaches have read dozens or even hundreds of college essays, so they have experience with the format. Also, because you'll be working closely with a specific person, it's more personal than sending your essay to a service, which will know even less about you.

But, on the minus side, you'll still be bouncing ideas off of someone who doesn't know that much about you . In general, if you can adequately get the help from someone you know, there is no advantage to paying someone to help you.

If you do decide to hire a coach, ask your school counselor, or older students that have used the service for recommendations. If you can't afford the coach's fees, ask whether they can work on a sliding scale —many do. And finally, beware those who guarantee admission to your school of choice—essay coaches don't have any special magic that can back up those promises.

Should You Send Your Essay to a Service?

On the plus side, essay editing services provide a similar product to essay coaches, and they cost significantly less . If you have some assurance that you'll be working with a good editor, the lack of face-to-face interaction won't prevent great results.

On the minus side, however, it can be difficult to gauge the quality of the service before working with them . If they are churning through many application essays without getting to know the students they are helping, you could end up with an over-edited essay that sounds just like everyone else's. In the worst case scenario, an unscrupulous service could send you back a plagiarized essay.

Getting recommendations from friends or a school counselor for reputable services is key to avoiding heavy-handed editing that writes essays for you or does too much to change your essay. Including a badly-edited essay like this in your application could cause problems if there are inconsistencies. For example, in interviews it might be clear you didn't write the essay, or the skill of the essay might not be reflected in your schoolwork and test scores.

Should You Buy an Essay Written by Someone Else?

Let me elaborate. There are super sketchy places on the internet where you can simply buy a pre-written essay. Don't do this!

For one thing, you'll be lying on an official, signed document. All college applications make you sign a statement saying something like this:

I certify that all information submitted in the admission process—including the application, the personal essay, any supplements, and any other supporting materials—is my own work, factually true, and honestly presented... I understand that I may be subject to a range of possible disciplinary actions, including admission revocation, expulsion, or revocation of course credit, grades, and degree, should the information I have certified be false. (From the Common Application )

For another thing, if your academic record doesn't match the essay's quality, the admissions officer will start thinking your whole application is riddled with lies.

Admission officers have full access to your writing portion of the SAT or ACT so that they can compare work that was done in proctored conditions with that done at home. They can tell if these were written by different people. Not only that, but there are now a number of search engines that faculty and admission officers can use to see if an essay contains strings of words that have appeared in other essays—you have no guarantee that the essay you bought wasn't also bought by 50 other students.

• You should get college essay help with both editing and proofreading
• A good editor will ask questions about your idea, logic, and structure, and will point out places where clarity is needed
• A good editor will absolutely not answer these questions, give you their own ideas, or write the essay or parts of the essay for you
• A good proofreader will find typos and check your formatting
• All of them agree that getting light editing and proofreading is necessary
• Parents, teachers, guidance or college counselor, and peers or siblings
• If you can't ask any of those, you can pay for college essay help, but watch out for services or coaches who over-edit you work
• Don't buy a pre-written essay! Colleges can tell, and it'll make your whole application sound false.

Ready to start working on your essay? Check out our explanation of the point of the personal essay and the role it plays on your applications and then explore our step-by-step guide to writing a great college essay .

Using the Common Application for your college applications? We have an excellent guide to the Common App essay prompts and useful advice on how to pick the Common App prompt that's right for you . Wondering how other people tackled these prompts? Then work through our roundup of over 130 real college essay examples published by colleges .

Stressed about whether to take the SAT again before submitting your application? Let us help you decide how many times to take this test . If you choose to go for it, we have the ultimate guide to studying for the SAT to give you the ins and outs of the best ways to study.

Anna scored in the 99th percentile on her SATs in high school, and went on to major in English at Princeton and to get her doctorate in English Literature at Columbia. She is passionate about improving student access to higher education.

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Easy Essays

by Peter Maurin

Peter Maurin

About peter maurin.

I first met Peter in December, 1932, when George Shuster, then editor of The Commonweal, later president of Hunter College, urged him to get into contact with me because our ideas were so similar, both our criticism of the social order and our sense of personal responsibility in doing something about it. It was not that “the world was too much with us” as we felt that God did not intend things to be as bad as they were. We believed that “in the Cross was joy of Spirit.” We knew that due to original sin, “all nature travailleth and groaneth even until now,” but also believed, as Juliana of Norwich said, that “the worst had already happened,” i.e., the Fall, and that Christ had repaired that “happy fault.” In other words, we both accepted the paradox which is Christianity…

Peter’s teaching was simple, so simple, as one can see from these phrased paragraphs, these Easy Essays, as we have come to call them, that many disregarded them. It was the sanctity of the man that made them dynamic.

Although he synopsized hundreds of books for all of us who were his students, and that meant thousands of pages of phrased paragraphs, these essays were his only original writings, and even during his prime we used them in the paper just as he did in speaking, over and over again. He believed in repeating, in driving his point home by constant repetition, like the dropping of water on the stones which were our hearts.

DOROTHY DAY

Introduction

When I first saw Peter Maurin* my impression was of a short, broad-shouldered workingman with a high, broad head covered with greying hair. His face was weatherbeaten, he had warm grey eyes and a wide, pleasant mouth. The collar of his shirt was dirty, but he had tried to dress up by wearing a tie and a suit which looked as though he had slept in it. (As I found out afterward, indeed he had.)

What struck me first about him was that he was one of those people who talked you deaf, dumb and blind, who each time he saw you began his conversation just where he had left off at the previous meeting, and never stopped unless you begged for rest, and that was not for long. He was irrepressible and he was incapable of taking offense.

The night I met Peter I had come from an assignment for The Commonweal, covering the Communist-inspired “hunger march” of the unemployed to Washington. I had prayed at the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, that I might find something to do in the social order besides reporting conditions. I wanted to change them, not just report them, but I had lost faith in revolution. I wanted to love my enemy, whether capitalist or Communist.

I certainly did not realize at first that I had my answer in Peter Maurin. I was thirty-five years old and I had met plenty of radicals in my time and plenty of crackpots, too: people who had blueprints to change the social order were a dime a dozen around Union Square.

At that time Peter Maurin was fifty-seven, had never married, had been “away from the Church” in his youth, had worked with Sangnier and his social studies group in Paris, and had sold its paper, Le Sillon. He believed in going to the people in town and countryside, because first of all he was of the people himself.

He was born in a tiny hamlet in the southern part of France, 200 miles from Barcelona, one of a family of 24 children. His own mother had died after she had born her fifth child, and his stepmother had had 19 and was still alive, he said. "I did not like the idea of revolution," he once told me. "I did not like the French revolution, nor the English revolution. I did not wish to work to perpetuate the proletariat. I never became a member of a union, even though here in America I did all kinds of hard labor. I was always interested in the land and man's life on the land. That is why I went homesteading in Canada, but after two years, after my partner was killed in a hunting accident, I went around Canada with work gangs and entered this country in 1911, where I have been ever since." When I first knew Peter I was busy at a research job which kept me at the library until three in the afternoon. When I got home to my little apartment on East Fifteenth Street, I'd find him there waiting for me, ready to indoctrinate, to give me a lesson in history from the Catholic point of view. He had been sent to me, he said, by George Shuster, later president of Hunter College, who at that time was editor of The Commonweal. George thought that we were alike in point of view, both interested in changing the social order and in reaching the masses with the social teachings of the Church. I had been a Catholic only about four years, and Peter, having suggested that I get out a paper to reach the man in the street, started right in on my education; he was a born teacher, and any park bench, coffee shop counter, bus or lodging house was a place to teach. He believed in starting on a program at once, without waiting to acquire classroom or office or meeting hall. To reach the man in the street, you went to the street. Peter was literal. I had met Peter in December, 1932, and the first issue of The Catholic Worker came out in time for the May Day celebration in Union Square, 1933. What Peter Maurin was interested in was the publication of his essays, and my journalistic sense led me to report conditions as they were, to paint a picture of poverty and destitution, homelessness and unemployment, in short, to so arouse the conscience that the reader would be willing and ready to listen to Peter when he talked about things as they should be. Peter was very much afraid of class war, and after his first essays were published he could not quite understand why I wrote so much about interracial injustice, hard conditions of labor, inadequate housing. He much preferred to write about how things should be--Houses of Hospitality for the needy, charity exercised in every home, voluntary poverty and the works of mercy, farming communes and agronomic universities that would teach people to earn a living by the sweat of their own brows instead of someone else's. The Catholic Worker was financed like the publications of any radical "splinter group." If we had had a mimeograph machine, it would have been a mimeographed paper. But we had nothing but my typewriter, so we took our writing to a printer, found out it would cost $57 to get out 2,500 copies of a small, eight-page sheet the size of The Nation, and boldly had it set up. There were no office, no staff, no mailing list. I had a small pay-check coming in for the research job which was just finishing; two checks were due for articles I had written, but these were needed to pay overdue rent and light bills. Father Joseph McSorley, the Paulist, paid me generously for a small job of bibliography which I did for him; the late Father Ahearn, pastor of a Negro church in Newark, gave me ten dollars; Sister Peter Claver gave me one dollar which somoone had just given her. Those were our finances. We took that first issue of the paper into Union Square that May Day and sold it for one penny a copy to Communists and trade-unionists. Peter slept in the back of The Catholic Worker office, and he soon brought in an Armenian anarchist poet and a German agnostic to share his quarters with him and to provide sparring partners for round-table discussions. He never took part in any of the work of the paper, except to turn in each month half a dozen "easy essays," many of which he insisted that we repeat over and over again. He was the kind of teacher who believed in repetition, restatement, and the continual return to first principles. He loved, however, to see visitors, and, if none came into the office, he went out into the highways and byways and found them. He ranged the island of Manhattan from end to end, visiting brokers on Wall Street and Negroes on the street-corners in Harlem. The only time Peter got excited was when he found others agreeing with him, approving his ideas. Then his voice would rise, his eyes would shine and he would shout out exultingly. He always expected so much in the way of results that I often felt called upon to put a damper on him, to tone down his optimistic enthusiasms. But I soon noticed that he was never depressed or discouraged by disappointments or failures. A failure such as that of the first round-table discussion was an example. Peter had hoped for great results from a series of Sunday afternoon discussions he had planned. Optimistically, for the first one he rented the ballroom of the Manhattan Lyceum, where trade union conventions as well as balls were often held. Only twenty people showed up; they gathered around the speaker's table and had an uproarious discussion on political action versus Catholic Action. After that, Peter rented a small meeting room. The waste of money, laboriously collected, did not bother him. There was plenty of money in the world, he believed. What was needed was men absorbed by the right ideas. Given the men, the money would follow. All one needed to do was to pray. When bills piled up and creditors came, we used to go to church and pray, all of us taking turns, and we called this "the picketing of St. Joseph." Once when I asked an unemployed chambermaid if she would take a half-hour of "picketing Saint Joseph" over at Precious Blood Church, she asked me if she was to carry a sign. Once the printer sent us his bill with the notation, "Pray and pay!" I asked Peter several times if he were not disappointed at the lack of success in indoctrinating the man on the street. I pointed to various examples of those who came to stay with us and whose condition seemed to get worse instead of better. "People are just beginning to realize how deep-seated the evil is," he said soberly. "That is why we must be Catholic Radicals, we must get down to the roots. That is what radicalism is--the word means getting down to the roots." Peter, even in his practicality, tried to deal with problems in the spirit of "the Prophets of Israel and the Fathers of the Church." He saw what the Industrial Revolution had done to the common man, and he did not think that unions and organizations, strikes for higher wages and shorter hours, were going to be the solution. "Strikes don't strike me," he used to say when we went out to a picket line to distribute literature during a strike. But he came with us to hand out the literature--leaflets which dealt with man's dignity and his need and right to associate himself with his fellows in trade unions, in credit unions, cooperatives, maternity guilds, etc. He was interested in far more fundamental approaches. He liked the name "radical" and he had wanted the paper to be called the The Catholic Radical. To him, Worker smacked of class war. What he wanted was to instill in all, worker or scholar, a philosophy of poverty and a philosophy of work. He was the layman always. I mean that he never preached, he taught. While decrying secularism, the separation of the material from the spiritual, his emphasis, as a layman, was on man's material needs, his need for work, food, clothing and shelter. Though Peter went weekly to confession and daily to Communion and spent an hour a day in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament, his study was of the material order around him. Though he lived in the city, he urged a return to the village economy, the study of the crafts and of agriculture. He was dealing with this world, in which God has placed us to work for a new heaven and a new earth wherein justice dwelleth. Peter's idea of justice was that of Saint Thomas--to give each man what is his due.

He constantly urged individuals to practice the corporal and spiritual works of mercy; he urged Bishops to establish Houses of Hospitality. Somehow the two planks of the program got mixed up. I can remember well enough how it happened. He had written a series of essays addressed to the Bishops, pointing out to them that canon law called for the establishment of hospices in every bishopric. When a reader who had been sleeping in the subway came into The Catholic Worker office one day and disclosed her need (the apartment and the office were already full), Peter’s literal acceptance of “If thy brother needs food or drink, feed him, and if he needs shelter, shelter him” meant that we rented a large apartment a block away which became the first House of Hospitality for women. This apartment expanded into three apartments and a store, then into a house, and finally into a twenty-room tenement house at 115 Mott Street. Eventually it included four additional apartments and two stores; then to become a double house at 223 Chrystie Street, New York City. Now we are in a loft on Spring Street, with eight apartments in the neighborhood. Here the works of mercy are still being practiced by the group who get out The Catholic Worker, living without salaries, in voluntary poverty. “Feeding thy brother” started with feeding a few poor men. It became a daily breadline in 1936, and the line still forms every day outside the door.

Round-table Discussions, Houses of Hospitality and Farming Communes–those were the three planks in Peter Maurin’s platform. Despite war and re-employment which took many of our workers from us, there are still Houses of Hospitality, each autonomous but inspired by Peter, each trying to follow Peter’s principles. And there are farms, all different but all starting with the idea of the personalist and communitarian revolution–to use Emmanuel Mounier’s phrase. Peter was not disappointed in his life’s work. He had given everything he had and he asked for nothing, least of all for success. He gave himself, and–at the end–God took from him the power to think.

He was docile and accepted his condition, though one could see the pain and struggle in his eyes. He, who had talked so much, became completely silent. For the last five years of his life he had to be served like a child, told when to go to bed, when to arise, what to eat, what to put on. He was the one led, rather than the leader.

He was anointed at Easton, Pennsylvania, for a bad heart condition, and a few years later, on May 15, 1949, he died at Maryfarm in Newburgh, New York. When his requiem was sung all the congregation who attended sang the Mass gloriously, triumphantly, joyously. Garbed in a donated suit of clothes, he was buried in a donated grave in St. John’s Cemetery, Brooklyn.

Obituaries were found not only in The Industrial Worker, a Chicago I.W.W. paper which is on the subversive list, but also in Osservatore Romano in Vatican City, which carried its notice on the front page.

God has taken him into Paradise, with Lazarus who once was poor. May He bring us, too, to a place of refreshment, light and peace.

*Much of this material appeared in Jubilee, March, 1960. (Copyright 1960 by the A.M.D.G. Publishing Co.) as “I Remember Peter Maurin.” We gratefully acknowledge permission to use it.

On May Day, 1983 The Catholic Worker movement marked its 50th anniversary. A mass of thanksgiving filled Nativity Church on New York’s Lower East Side. Celebrations followed at Maryhouse, on East Third Street, the home for homeless women among whom Dorothy Day died in November 1980, and at St. Joseph House at 36 East First Street.

It was on May 1st, 1933 that Dorothy Day, accompanied by Joseph Bennett, first distributed The Catholic Worker in Union Square where 50,000 people gathered shoulder to shoulder to announce the coming revolution and denounce the economic system they blamed for a savage depression. Peter Maurin, the man who had stimulated Dorothy Day to start “a paper for the man in the street,” was not with her. His ideas were. Dorothy passed them out, along with her own vivid reporting of conditions, to the angry, the workless, the poor, to those who saw the Catholic Church as having nothing to say to their plight–or to the social evils in which they were trapped.

The front page of the tabloid’s initial issue carried the first of the “easy essays” in this collection, “Blowing the Dynamite.” Maurin’s program was to “blow the lid off” the social program of the Church, a program hidden by Catholic scholars who had

“wrapped it up in nice phraseology, placed it in a hermetic container and sat on the lid.”

On May 1st, 1983, two of us walked in Dorothy Day’s footsteps in Union Square at Fourteenth Street to distribute the twelve-page anniversary issue of The Catholic Worker. Joseph Zarella had been a full-time volunteer at the Catholic Worker when Peter Maurin was in his prime, in the years from 1935 to 1942. Zarella had travelled with Peter Maurin in 1936 to visit the newly founded houses of the Catholic Worker movement. He remembered the talks that Maurin had given to the struggling groups, as well as to monasteries, seminaries and parishes throughout the country. I had encountered Maurin in the early nineteen forties on visits to the Catholic Worker. What we most remembered about Maurin was his utter selflessness, his total absorption in the message he was impelled to share. We cherish the memory of that craggy face, illuminated from within, as he delivered the carefully phrased concepts. We recall what it was like to have the index finger of that broad peasant hand brandished before our faces as Maurin “made his points.” It was these “points,” lived out dramatically by Dorothy Day, and enfleshed not only in her memorable writing but in the C. W. movement, that captured the minds of young people and set them on fire with zeal to remake the world.

The Union Square of 1983 was no longer the hot-bed of revolution, packed with people “impatient to assume the world.” It was a haven for a few people who claimed the benches to pass a sunlit afternoon, most of them bedraggled and many stretched out, sodden with drink or drugs. The Square had become a center of drug-trafficking, and the only sign of the old militancy was a slogan painted in black letters on the monument to the Union dead, “Overthrow capitalism source of 98% of crime.” Not only Union Square had changed as to almost unrecognizable in the intervening half-century, but so had the state of society and of the world at large.

A World War had swept millions through the doors of death, some killed by indiscriminate weaponry, others done to death in unspeakably discriminate destruction on the basis of their race. Violent revolutions had maintained themselves in power through continued violence against untold millions in the Eurasian heartland. Stockpiles of nuclear weaponry, to say nothing of nuclear energy plants, have given us a world pulsating with death. National leaders justify the possession of weapons capable of incinerating the populations of cities by a policy known as “deterrence,” namely, the policy of “dissuading” the other side through terror. Many are reminded of the principle of Noah, in which the Creator made known, by the rainbow sign after the flood, that He would not again interfere with the operation of the cosmos. Humankind, possessing the power wrenched from the heart of the atom, can now threaten the planet itself. In the economic order, the national debt of the United States has risen to unthinkable billions, with a third of the annual budget going into debt servicing. The combined debt of Third World countries has reached astronomic proportions, threatening to bring down the banking systems of First World countries which had been eager to lend at high interest in what they considered secured loans.

Does Peter Maurin’s message speak to generations facing the Third Millennium? Dorothy Day grasped the crucial fact that Maurin was propounding perennial values, values that he had synthesized from the Gospel and the wisdom of the Church and its saints–as well as from thinkers, philosophers and economists studied in the course of a lifetime. In these pages is the distillation of a lifetime of study and prayer. Aside from such general concepts as “the common good” whose implications are so little understood, Maurin presented in the briefest manner possible, the specifics for example, of economic history. Where else could one find an outline of economics comparable to that contained in “In the Light of History,” that begins on page 78.

Here are contained the values that the Catholic Worker, now counting over eighty houses and communities in the United States, has tried to incarnate, and which are discussed in the paper which goes around the world in over 100,000 copies.

As readers dip into these phrased essays, they will find values so old they seem new, that “blow the lid off” many false values by which too many professed Christians order their lives.

I will limit myself to two of Maurin’s bedrock concepts that indicate clearly that the “established order” which so many Christians accept, is, in fact, in Emmanuel Mounier’s phrase, an “established disorder.” The two concepts are Maurin’s emphasis on the necessity of the “daily practice of the works of mercy,” and his resurrection of the ban on usury, the taking or charging of interest.

The “daily practice of the works of mercy,” Maurin insisted, was the distinguishing mark of the followers of Jesus. Performing them without interruption would demand a rejection of war, since in war, all the works of mercy, from feeding the hungry to sheltering the shelterless, are interrupted or obscenely reversed. If there are hungry and homeless people around us, they must be fed and sheltered, not by impersonal state systems, but at personal sacrifices by individuals and communities. Thus there is need for Houses of Hospitality. Maurin thought that every parish should have such a house of refuge. He would have approved of a development in the eighties, when Catholic parishes in New York City provided shelter for the homeless, with parishioners taking turns as volunteers.

The spiritual works of mercy, Maurin stressed, make it incumbent on scholars to share their knowledge with workers. Workers, in their turn, could help scholars with their skills and acquaint them with the realities of their situation. Only in this way could workers become scholars and scholars workers. The ramifications of mercy, which is only love under the aspect of need, are endless. Works of mercy can only be performed for a person, and the heart of Maurin’s message was the inviolable dignity of the person as image of his Creator. He introduced a term from the works of the French writer and philosopher, Emmanuel Mounier, personalism.

Even more controversial than its rejection of the violence of war and revolution was the Catholic Worker’s rejection of interest. The ancient ban on usury (meaning simply interest) by the Church Fathers and the Prophets of Israel has fallen into disuse. Money was not supposed to breed money. Here the ethos of the profit system and the ethos of the Gospel collide. The Gospel has a clear injunction regarding our surplus possessions and funds. They are to be used to meet the needs of those who lack necessities. The ethos of a profit economy calls for surplus funds to be banked or invested so that they may increase by means of interest. The source of the increase in riches becomes a matter of indifference rather than of moral concern.

Where only an increase of riches or profit matters, then economic activity has at its heart an ethical void. All manner of unjust economic structures may grow and flourish and all manner of exploitation may abound. Work is taken to the places where labor is cheapest and workers have fewest rights.

If surpluses are used in charity, or in cooperatives for human purposes such as home-building for the less affluent, life necessarily becomes simpler and the ideal of voluntary poverty cannot be far behind. The Christian doctrine of property becomes a reality, namely the retaining of a sufficiency of goods for an adequate life and the sharing of the remainder with the needy. In point of fact, millions of Christians, working for wages, actually live out this teaching on property. How else do we explain the world-wide network of the works of mercy supported by the small gifts of the many, Though there are Catholic millionaires, the masses of Catholics are rather the victims than the beneficiaries of corporations as they roam about the world seeking profits.

Maurin found “concordances” even with the radical IWW (the International Workers of the World), and he often quoted their slogan on “building the new society within the shell of the old.” Maurin’s revolution was personalist and communitarian, to be achieved without violence and without recourse to the class struggle or to the rhetoric of class confrontation. He helped people transcend the tyranny of false alternatives.

Peter Maurin attended Mass daily, calling it “the greatest act of love between God and His children.” His prophetic task was to indicate the paths by which this love could be incarnated in daily living. In his “easy essays,” we find the hard sayings of the Gospel and ways to apply them to society. His message calls for changing society through transforming the “old creature” into the “new creature” of the Gospel. Unjust structures will never be replaced unless they are first replaced in the heart.

The riches of Maurin’s prophetic message, more alive than ever in a time of moral and economic crisis, are here for all to plumb, not only Catholics, but all who hunger for a more peaceful and just society, “where it is easier for people to be good.”

EILEEN EGAN

Introduction Foreword Blowing the Dynamite Out of the Temple Ethics and Economics The Money Lenders’ Dole Creating Problems When Civilization Decays Church and State Self-Organization To the Bishops of the U.S.A.–A Plea for Houses of Hospitality An Open Letter to Father Lord, M. Ag. On Marxism Is Inflation Inevitable? A Second Open Letter to Father Lord, S.J. A Rumpus on the Campus Coming to Union Square Scholars and Bourgeois Building Churches A Question and an Answer on Catholic Labor Guilds Peter’s Reply to Michael Gunn Purpose of the Catholic Workers’ School The Case for Utopia The Bishops’ Message–Quotations and Comments Tradition or Catholic Action

Big Shots and Little Shots For Catholic Action Communist Action in Schools a Challenge to Catholics Social Study Schools Needed A Third Open Letter to Father Lord, S.J. When Christ Is King Fighting Communism Essay on Communism A Program for Immediate Needs Five Definitions Why Not Be a Beggar? In the Light of History Teachers, Traders and Tricksters The Canon Law and the Law of the Cannon Bourgeois Colleges Social Workers and Workers

Back to Christ–Back to the Land! Institutions vs. Corporations A New Social Order Yes! I Am a Radical Feeding the Poor Radicals of the Right Go-Getters vs. Go-Givers Communitarian Personalism Superfluous Goods A Fourth Open Letter to Father Lord, S.J. Back to Newmanism Outdoor Universities The Thinking Journalist The Sit-Down Technique The Law of Holiness Utilitarians, Futilitarians, Totalitarians The Way to Fight Communism Against Class War Unpopular Front

War and Peace No Party Line Beyond Marxism Priests and Policemen Non-Catholic Catholics Not Liberals but Radicals A Letter From Peter Looking Backward Turning to the Church Prostitution The Road to Communism The Sixth Column On Specialization Pie in the Sky

Let’s Keep the Jews for Christ’s Sake Logical and Practical For a New Order True Stories Let’s Be Fair to the Negroes for Christ’s Sake The Stuff and the Push On American Traits Christianity and Democracy

On Personalism Five Forms of Capitalism Educational Secularism Irish Culture Catholic Action For God’s Sake Industrialism

Blowing the Dynamite

Writing about the Catholic Church, a radical writer says: “Rome will have to do more than to play a waiting game; she will have to use some of the dynamite inherent in her message.” To blow the dynamite of a message is the only way to make the message dynamic. If the Catholic Church is not today the dominant social dynamic force, it is because Catholic scholars have failed to blow the dynamite of the Church. Catholic scholars have taken the dynamite of the Church, have wrapped it up in nice phraseology, placed it in an hermetic container and sat on the lid. It is about time to blow the lid off so the Catholic Church may again become the dominant social dynamic force.

Out of the Temple

Christ drove the money changers out of the Temple. But today nobody dares to drive the money lenders out of the Temple. And nobody dares to drive the money lenders out of the Temple because the money lenders have taken a mortgage on the Temple.

When church builders build churches with money borrowed from money lenders they increase the prestige of the money lenders. But increasing the prestige of the money lenders does not increase the prestige of the Church.

Which makes Archbishop McNicholas say: “We have been guilty of encouraging tyranny in the financial world until it has become a veritable octopus strangling the life of our people.”

Ethics and Economics

Lincoln Steffens says: “The social problem is not a political problem; it is an economic problem.” Kropotkin says: “The economic problem is not an economic problem; it is an ethical problem.” Thorstein Veblen says: “There are no ethics in modern society.” R. H. Tawney says: “There were high ethics in society when the Canon Law was the law of the land.” The high ethics of the Canon Law are embodied in the encyclicals of Pius XI and Leo XIII on the social problem. To apply the ethics of the encyclicals to the problems of today, such is the purpose of Catholic Action.

The Money Lenders’ Dole

Uncle Sam does not believe in the unemployed dole, but Uncle Sam does believe in the money lenders’ dole. Uncle Sam doles out every year more than a billion dollars to the money lenders. And it is the money lenders’ dole that put Uncle Sam into a hole. The money lenders are first citizens on Uncle Sam’s payroll. There were no money lenders on the payroll in Palestine and Ireland. There were no money lenders on the payroll in Palestine and Ireland because the Prophets of Israel and the Fathers of the Church forbid lending money at interest. But Uncle Sam does not listen to the Prophets of Israel and the Fathers of the Church.

Creating Problems

Business men say that because everybody is selfish, business must therefore be based on selfishness. But when business is based on selfishness everybody is busy becoming more selfish. And when everybody is busy becoming more selfish. we have classes and clashes. Business cannot set its house in order because business men are moved by selfish motives. Business men create problems. they do not solve them.

When Civilization Decays

When the bank account is the standard of values the class on the top sets the standard. When the class on the top cares only for money it does not care for culture. When the class on the top does not care for culture, nobody cares for culture. And when nobody cares for culture civilization decays. When class distinction is not based on the sense of noblesse oblige, it becomes clothes distinction. When class distinction has become clothes distinction everybody tries to put up a front.

Church and State

Modern society believes in separation of Church and State. But the Jews did not believe in it, the Greeks did not believe in it, the Medievalists did not believe in it, the Puritans did not believe in it. Modern society has separated the Church from the State, but it has not separated the State from business. Modern society does not believe in a Church’s State; it believes in a business man’s State. “And it is the first time in the history of the world that the State is controlled by business men,” says James Truslow Adams.

Self-Organization

People go to Washington, asking the Federal Government to solve their economic problems, while the Federal Government was never intended to solve men’s economic problems. Thomas Jefferson says that the less government there is, the better it is. If the less government there is, the better it is, then the best kind of government is self-government. If the best kind of government is self-government, then the best kind of organization is self-organization. When the organizers try to organize the unorganized, then the organizers don’t organize themselves. And when the organizers don’t organize themselves, nobody organizes himself, And when nobody organizes himself, nothing is organized.

To the Bishops of the USA: a Plea for Houses of Hospitality

[An address by Peter Maurin to the unemployed at a meeting held in September, 1933, at Manhattan Lyceum, and published in THE CATHOLIC WORKER, (October, 1933) in order that it might be sent to all the Bishops and Archbishops meeting at the National Conference of Catholic Charities in New York.]

The Duty of Hospitality

People who are in need and are not afraid to beg give to people not in need the occasion to do good for goodness’ sake. Modern society calls the beggar bum and panhandler and gives him the bum’s rush. But the Greeks used to say that people in need are the ambassadors of the gods. Although you may be called bums and panhandlers you are in fact the Ambassadors of God. As God’s Ambassadors you should be given food, clothing and shelter by those who are able to give it. Mahometan teachers tell us that God commands hospitality, and hospitality is still practiced in Mahometan countries. But the duty of hospitality is neither taught nor practiced in Christian countries.

The Municipal Lodgings

That is why you who are in need are not invited to spend the night in the homes of the rich. There are guest rooms today in the homes of the rich but they are not for those who need them. And they are not for those who need them because those who need them are no longer considered as the Ambassadors of God. So people no longer consider hospitality to the poor as a personal duty. And it does not disturb them a bit to send them to the city, where they are given the hospitality of the “Muni” at the expense of the taxpayer. But the hospitality that the “Muni” gives to the down and out is no hospitality because what comes from the taxpayer’s pocketbook does not come from his heart.

Back to Hospitality

The Catholic unemployed should not be sent to the “Muni.” The Catholic unemployed should be given hospitality in Catholic Houses of Hospitality. Catholic Houses of Hospitality are known in Europe under the name of hospices. There have been hospices in Europe since the time of Constantine. Hospices are free guest houses; hotels are paying guest houses. And paying guest houses or hotels are as plentiful as free guest houses or hospices are scarce. So hospitality, like everything else, has been commercialized. So hospitality, like everything else, must now be idealized.

Houses of Hospitality

We need Houses of Hospitality to give to the rich the opportunity to serve the poor. We need Houses of Hospitality to bring the Bishops to the people and the people to the Bishops. We need Houses of Hospitality to bring back to institutions the technique of institutions. We need Houses of Hospitality to show what idealism looks like when it is practiced. We need Houses of Hospitality to bring social justice through Catholic Action exercised in Catholic institutions.

We read in the Catholic Encyclopedia that during the early ages of Christianity the hospice (or the House of Hospitality) was a shelter for the sick, the poor, the orphans, the old, the traveler, and the needy of every kind. Originally the hospices (or Houses of Hospitality) were under the supervision of the Bishops, who designated priests to administer the spiritual and temporal affairs of these charitable institutions. The fourteenth statute of the so-called Council of Carthage, held about 436, enjoins upon the Bishops to have hospices (or Houses of Hospitality) in connection with their churches.

Parish Houses of Hospitality

Today we need Houses of Hospitality as much as they needed them then. if not more so. We have Parish Houses for the priests, Parish Houses for educational purposes, Parish Houses for recreational purposes, but no Parish Houses of Hospitality. Bossuet says that the poor are the first children of the Church. so the poor should come first. People with homes should have a room of hospitality. So as to give shelter to the needy members of the parish. The remaining needy members of the parish should be given shelter in a Parish Home. Furniture, clothing, and food should be sent to the needy members of the parish at the Parish House of Hospitality. We need Parish Homes as well as Parish Domes. In the new Cathedral of Liverpool there will be a Home as well as a dome.

Houses of “Catholic Action”

Catholic Houses of Hospitality should be more than free guest houses for the Catholic unemployed. They could be vocational training schools, including the training for the priesthood, as Father Corbett proposes. They could be Catholic reading rooms, as Father McSorley proposes. They could be Catholic Instruction Schools, as Father Cornelius Hayes proposes. They could be Round-Table Discussion Groups, as Peter Maurin proposes. In a word, they could be Catholic Action Houses, where Catholic Thought is combined with Catholic Action.

An Open Letter to Father Lord, M.Ag. (Master Agitator)

Dear Father:

In your instruction about writing you told us that the best way to learn to write is to write letters because a letter is a message from someone to somebody about something. So this is a message from an agitator to another agitator about a discontented world which begins to realize that things are not good enough to be left alone. The Catholic Worker thinks that you are a wonder. We know what good work you are doing among Catholic college youth. But Catho1ic college youth is a small proportion of Catholic youth and all Catholic youth needs you. Not only all Catholic youth needs you but all youth needs you. And not only all those who are in their first youth but all those who are getting in their second youth and also all those who have reached the age of maturity without having reached the state of maturity. That is to say, we all need you. We all need you because you have the knack of getting at the core of things and of presenting your findings in a vivid and dynamic form.

In one of his editorials Father Gillis says that this age is very much like the age of the fall of Rome and that we could use one another St. Augustine. Father Gillis adds that we need men to stir things up and that we have too many who try to smother them down. You certainly can stir things up and you can do that with much ease.

It is said that Abbe Chardonnel, who was a poet, became a priest so he could be more of a poet. You, who are a born agitator, have become a priest, which makes you more of an agitator. In St. Louis University you turn out Masters of Arts, but as Diego Rivera says: “All art is propaganda.” And as all propaganda is agitation, it behooves St. Louis University, one of the best American universities, to turn out Masters of Agitation. So The Catholic Worker suggests that you, our Master Catholic Agitator, start in St. Louis University a School of Catholic Agitation for the popularization of Catholic Action. Yours for Catholic Action, For The Catholic Worker,

PETER MAURIN

To Be a Marxian

Before he died, Karl Marx told one of his friends, “I have lived long enough to be able to say that I am not a Marxian.” To be a Marxian, according to the logic of Das Kapital, is to maintain that the best thing to do is to wait patiently till capitalism has fulfilled its historic mission. To be a Marxian, according to the logic of Das Kapital, is to step back, take an academic view of things and watch the self-satisfied capitalists dig their own graves. To be a Marxian, according to the logic of Das Kapital, is to have faith in the forces of materialism– forces so powerful, according to materialists, that they will bring the millennium whether man wants it or not. To be a Marxian, according to the logic of Das Kapital, is to let economic evolution do its work without ever attempting to give it a push.

What Karl Marx Realized

Karl Marx soon realized that his own analysis of bourgeois society could not be the basis of a dynamic revolutionary movement. Karl Marx soon realized that a forceful Communist Manifesto was the necessary foundation of a dynamic Communist Movement. Karl Marx soon realized. as Lenin realized, that there is no revolution without revolutionary action, that there is no revolutionary action without a revolutionary movement. that there is no revolutionary movement without a vanguard of revolution, and that there is no vanguard of revolution without a theory of revolution.

The Communist Manifesto

Having realized that a Communist Manifesto was the basis of a Communist Movement, Karl Marx decided to write a Communist Manifesto. To write the Communist Manifesto Karl Marx did not use his analysis of capitalism. He took the definition of Communism of Proudhon and made it his own. He borrowed Utopian criticism and Utopian aims and decided to advocate class-struggle, that is to say, materialist aims. As some people used to think that we need a good honest war to end all wars, Karl Marx used to think that we need a gigantic class-struggle to bring about a classless society.

For Catholic Action

We Catholics have a better criticism of bourgeois society than Victor Considerant’s criticism. used by Karl Marx. Our criticism of bourgeois society is the criticism of St. Thomas More. We Catholics have a better conception of Communism than the conception of Proudhon. Our conception of Communism is the conception of St. Thomas Aquinas in his doctrine of the “Common Good.” We Catholics have better means than the means proposed by Karl Marx. Our means to realize the “Common Good” are embodied in Catholic Action. Catholic Action is action by Catholics for Catholics and non-Catholics. We don’t want to take over the control of political and economic life. We want to reconstruct the social order through Catholic Action exercised in Catholic institutions.

The Bishops’ Program

Shortly after the war Bishops of America formulated a Program of Social Reconstruction largely based on co-operation. But the Bishops’ Program failed to materialize for lack of co-operators. Catholic laymen and women were more interested in a laissez-faire economy. So Catholic laymen and women went back to Normalcy with Harding; they tried to Keep Cool with Coolidge, and then to See Rosy with Roosevelt. Catholic laymen and women are more interested in political action than they are interested in Catholic Action. Catholic laymen and women are more ready to follow the leadership of the politicians than they are ready to follow the leadership of the Bishops.

Reconstructing the Social Order

The Holy Father and the Bishops ask us to reconstruct the social order. The social order was once constructed through dynamic Catholic Action. When the barbarians invaded the decaying Roman Empire Irish missionaries went all over Europe and laid the foundations of medieval Europe. Through the establishment of cultural centers, that is to say, Round-Table Discussions, they brought thought to the people. Through free guest houses, that is to say, Houses of Hospitality, they popularized the divine virtue of charity. Through farming colonies, that is to say, Agronomic Universities, they emphasized voluntary poverty. It was on the basis of personal charity and voluntary poverty that Irish missionaries laid the foundations of the social order.

Is Inflation Inevitable?

Usurers not gentlemen.

The Prophets of Israel and the Fathers of the Church forbid lending money at interest. Lending money at interest is called usury by the Prophets of Israel and the Fathers of the Church. Usurers were not considered to be Gentlemen when people used to listen to the Prophets of Israel and the Fathers of the Church. When people used to listen to the Prophets of Israel and the Fathers of the Church They could not see anything gentle in trying to live on the sweat of somebody else’s brow by lending money at interest.

Wealth-Producing Maniacs

When John Calvin legalized moneylending at interest he made the bank account the standard of values. When the bank account became the standard of values, people ceased to produce for use and began to produce for profits. When people began to produce for profits they became wealth-producing maniacs. When people became wealth-producing maniacs they produced too much wealth. When people found out that they had produced too much wealth they went on an orgy of wealth destruction and destroyed ten million lives besides. And fifteen years after a world-wide orgy of wealth and life destruction millions of people find themselves victims of a world-wide depression brought about by a world gone mad on mass-production and mass-distribution.

Legalized Usury

Because John Calvin legalized money-lending at interest, the State has legalized money-lending at interest. Because the State has legalized money-lending at interest, home-owners have mortgaged their homes. Because the State has legalized money-lending at interest, farmers have mortgaged their farms. Because the State has legalized money-lending at interest, institutions have mortgaged their buildings. Because the State has legalized money-lending at interest, congregations have mortgaged their churches. Because the State has legalized money-lending at interest, cities, counties, States, and the Federal Government have mortgaged their budgets. So people find themselves in all kinds of financial difficulties because the State has legalized money-lending at interest.

The Fallacy of Saving

When people save money, they invest that money. Money invested increases production. Increased production brings a surplus in production. A surplus in production brings unemployment. Unemployment brings a slump in business. A slump in business brings more unemployment. More unemployment brings a depression. A depression brings more depression. More depression brings red agitation. Red agitation brings red revolution.

Avoiding Inflation

Some say that inflation is desirable. Some say that inflation is deplorable. Some say that inflation is deplorable but inevitable. The way to avoid inflation is to lighten the burden of the money borrowers without robbing the money lenders. And the way to lighten the burden of the money borrowers without robbing the money lenders is to pass two laws, one law making immediately illegal all interest on money lent and another law obliging the money borrowers to pay one per cent of their debt every year during a period of a hundred years.

A Second Open Letter to Father Lord, SJ

There is a lot of talk today about the social value of Fascism. But Fascism is only a stopgap between capitalism and Bolshevism. Fascist dictatorship is a halfway house between the rugged individualism of capitalism and the rugged collectivism of Bolshevism. There is no essential difference between Fascist dictatorship and Bolshevik dictatorship. The trouble with the world today is too much dictatorship and too little leadership.

Leadership cannot he found among politicians, business men and college professors. The appointed leaders of mankind are the Catholic Bishops. Catholic Bishops have ceased to lead because Catholic laymen and women do not consider the Bishops as their leaders in political and economic matters. Catholic laymen and women look up to the Bishops in spiritual matters and look up to politicians and business men in political and economic matters. Catholic laymen and women commit the great modern error of separating the spiritual from the material. This great modem error, known under the name of secularism, is called a “modern plague” by Pope Pius XI. You, who are a born agitator and a theologian, hould bring a thorough understanding between Bishops, clergy, and lay people. From that understanding would spring a form of Catholic Action that would be dynamic in character. We are threatened with dynamic Bolshevik action because we are sorely lacking in dynamic Catholic Action.

A Rumpus on the Campus

Two years ago I went to see Professor Moley, former head of President Roosevelt’s Brain Trust, and said to him: “I came here to find out if I could make an impression on the depression by starting a rumpus on the campus. But I found out that agitation is not rampant on the campus. Only business is rampant on the campus, although business is the bunk. “May be,” said I “history cannot be made on the campus.”

And turning toward his secretary, Professor Moley said: “That’s right, we don’t make history on the campus, we only teach it.” And because history is taught but not made on the campus of our universities. the Catholic Worker is trying to make history on Union Square, where people have nothing to lose. A battle royal is raging between East and West, between stock speculators and land speculators, between money lenders and money borrowers. To go back to the gold standard, as the so-called “sound money” people propose, is to favor the money lenders at the expense of the money borrowers. To increase the amount of currency, as the mild inflationists propose, is to favor the money borrowers at the expense of the money lenders. To devise schemes so as to bring about a rise in prices is to favor both money lenders and money borrowers at the expense of the consuming public.

We made the mistake of running business on credit and credit has run into debts and debts are leading us toward bankruptcy. The Jews had a way of wiping off the slate. Every fifty years, the year of the Jewish Jubilee, all debts were liquidated. But nobody, not even the Jews. proposes this old-time solution. John Maynard Keynes, the well-known English economist, says that we ought to ask ourselves if the medieval economists were not sound in condemning money-lending at interest.

In his book on Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, R. H. Tawney, another English economist, points out that at the base of our acquisitive society we find legalized usury, or lending money at interest. Because the State has legalized money-lending at interest, in spite of the teachings of the Prophets of Israel and the Fathers of the Church, home owners have mortgaged their homes, farm owners have mortgaged their farms, institutions have mortgaged their buildings, governments have mortgaged their budgets. So we are where we are because the State has legalized money-lending at interest in spite of the teachings of the Prophets of Israel and the Fathers of the Church. To go back to the teachings of the Prophets of Israel and the Fathers of the Church, as I propose in my Easy Essays in the current number of The Catholic Worker, would not do any injustice to the money lenders or the money borrowers or the consuming public. Money lenders would get their money back, money borrowers would find their burdens lightened, and the consuming public would not have to pay the bill. We would go back to the point from which we should never have gone. We would go back to the time when no one was called a gentleman who indulged in money-lending at interest. We would go back to the time when people could not see anything gentle in trying to live on the sweat of somebody else’s brow by lending money at interest. Many people say that we cannot go back, but I say neither can we go ahead, for we are parked in a blind alley. And when people are parked in a blind alley the only thing to do is to go back. For when people lend money at interest that money is invested. Money invested increases production. Increased production brings a surplus in production. A surplus in production brings unemployment. Unemployment brings a slump in business. A slump in business brings more unemployment. More unemployment brings more depression, A depression brings more depression, More depression brings red agitation. Red agitation brings red revolution.

Coming to Union Square

Two years ago I went to see college professors and asked them to give me the formulation of those universal concepts embodied in the universal message of universal universities that will enable the common man to create a universal economy. But college professors were too busy teaching subjects to be interested in mastering situations. College professors were too interested in academic matters to be interested in dynamic matters. But now college professors realize that they must be men of action as well as men of thought– that they must be dynamic as well as academic, and that Union Square can teach something to college professors as well as learning from college professors.

Scholars and Bourgeois

The scholar has told the bourgeois that a worker is a man for all that. But the bourgeois has told the scholar that a worker is a commodity for all that. Because the scholar has vision, the bourgeois calls him a visionary. So the bourgeois laughs at the scholar’s vision and the worker is left without vision. And the worker left by the scholar without vision talks about liquidating both the bourgeois and the scholar. The scholars must tell the workers what is wrong with the things as they are. The scholars must tell the workers how a path can be made from the things as they are to the things as they should be. The scholars must collaborate with the workers in making a path from the things as they are to the things as they should be. The scholars must become workers so the workers may be scholars.

Building Churches

Henry Adams tells us in his autobiography that he could not get an education in America, because education implies unity of thought and there is no unity of thought in America. So he went to England and found that England was too much like America. So he went to France and found that France was too much like England and America. But in France he found the Cathedral of Chartres and from the Cathedral of Chartres he learned that there was unity of thought in thirteenth-century France.

People who built the Cathedral of Chartres knew how to combine cult, that is to say liturgy, with culture, that is to say philosophy, and cultivation, that is to say agriculture.

The Cathedral of Chartres is a real work of art because it is the real expression of the spirit of a united people. Churches that are built today do not express the spirit of the people. “When a church is built,” a Catholic editor said to me, “the only thing that has news value is: How much did it cost?” The Cathedral of Chartres was not built to increase the value of real estate. The Cathedral of Chartres was not built with money borrowed from money lenders.

The Cathedral of Chartres was not built by workers working for wages.

Maurice Barres used to worry about the preservation of French Cathedrals, but Charles Peguy thought that the faith that builds Cathedrals is after all the thing that matters. Moscow had a thousand churches and people lost the faith. Churches ought to be built with donated money, donated material, donated labor.

The motto of St. Benedict was Laborare et Orare, Labor and Pray. Labor and prayer ought to be combined; labor ought to be a prayer. The liturgy of the Church is the prayer of the Church. People ought to pray with the Church and to work with the Church. The religious life of the people and the economic life of the people ought to be one. I heard that in Germany a group of Benedictines is trying to combine liturgy with sociology. We don’t need to wait for Germany to point the way, Architects, artists and artisans ought to exchange ideas on Catholic liturgy and Catholic sociology.

A Question and an Answer on Catholic Labor Guilds

[A reader in Bellingham, Wash., wrote to Peter Maurin urging the Organization of Catholic Labor Guilds throughout the country. Members would be assessed a dollar a year, and the money so raised would be used to start Houses of Hospitality. Peter’s reply follows. (February, 1934.)]

Most organizations exist, not for the benefit of the organized, but for the benefit of the organizers. When the organizers try to organize the unorganized they do not organize themselves. If everybody organized himself, everybody would be organized. There is no better way to be than to be what we want the other fellow to be. The money that comes from assessments is not worth getting. The money that is worth getting is the money that is given for charity’s sake. Parish Houses of Hospitality must be built on Christian charity. But Parish Houses of Hospitality are only half-way houses. Parish Subsistence Camps are the most efficient way to make an impression on the depression. The basis for a Christian economy Is genuine charity and voluntary poverty. To give money to the poor is to increase the buying power of the poor.

Money is by definition a means of exchange and not a means to make money. When money is used as a means of exchange, it helps to consume the goods that have been produced. When money is used as an investment, it does not help to consume the goods that have been produced, it helps to produce more goods, to bring over-production and therefore increase unemployment. So much money has been put into business that it has put business out of business.

Money given to the poor is functional money. money that fulfills its function. Money used as an investment is prostituted money, money that does not fulfill its function. Poverty and charity are no longer looked up to, they are looked down upon. The poor have ceased to accept poverty and the rich have ceased to practice charity. When the poor are satisfied to be poor, the rich become charitable toward the poor.

Because Christianity presents poverty as an ideal Bolshevik Communists try to make us believe that religion is the opium of the people. Karl Marx says that the worker is exploited at the point of production. But the worker would not be exploited at the point of production if the worker did not sell his labor to the exploiter of his labor.

When the worker sells his labor to a capitalist or accumulator of labor he allows the capitalist or accumulator of labor to accumulate his labor. And when the capitalist or accumulator of the worker’s labor has accumulated so much of the worker’s labor that he no longer finds it profitab1e to buy the worker’s labor then the worker can no longer sell his labor to the capitalist or accumulator of labor. And when the worker can no longer sell his labor to the capitalist or accumulator of labor he can no longer buy the products of his labor. And that is what the worker gets for selling his labor to the capitalist or accumu1ator of labor. He just gets left and he gets what is coming to him. Labor is not a commodity to be bought and sold– Labor is a means of self-expression, the worker’s gift to the common good.

There is so much depression because there is so little expression. I am fostering Parish Subsistence Camps or Agronomic Universities as a means to bring about a state of society where scholars are workers and where workers are scholars. In a Parish Subsistence Camp or Agronomic University the worker does not work for wages, he leaves that to the University. In a Parish Subsistence Camp or Agronomic University the worker does not look for a bank account he leaves that to the University. In a Parish Subsistence Camp or Agronomic University the worker does not look for an insurance policy, he leaves that to the University. In a Parish Subsistence Camp or Agronomic University the worker does not look for an old-age pension, he leaves that to the University. In a Parish Subsistence Camp or Agronomic University the worker does not look for a rainy day, he leaves that to the University. Modern industry has no work for everybody but work can be found for everybody in Parish Subsistence Camps or Agronomic Universities.

I may later on publish a magazine entitled The Agronomist for the fostering of the idea of Parish Subsistence Camps or Agronomic Universities. Edward Koch, of Germantown, Illinois, publishes a magazine entitled The Guildsman; you ought to get in touch with him.

Your co-worker in Christ’s Kingdom.

Peter’s Reply to Michael Gunn

[Taking exception to Peter’s answer to the Bellingham reader, Michael Gunn, organizer of the Catholic Labor Guild in Brooklyn, wrote a critical letter, which drew the following reply. (March, 1934.)]

In my answer to a reader from Bellingham, Washington, I said most organizations exist, not for the benefit of the organized but for the benefit of the organizers. I added that when the organizers try to organize the unorganized they do not organize themselves. When I wrote that I did not have in mind the Catholic Labor Guild in Brooklyn. I had in mind some selfish exploiters of the exploitation of the exploited who like to be called labor leaders. I had in mind some exalted rulers of secret societies who, while they call themselves Masons, have not yet learned to create order out of chaos. I had in mind some dignified regulators of societies which have some secrets without being called secret societies. While I don’t like some of your ideas, I like you personally. I think that you are much better than some of your ideas.

I think that you are inclined to lead a life of sacrifice. During the World War you placed your life at the service of the British Empire. After the war, you placed your life at the service of the Irish Republic. And now you have placed your life at the service of the Church. You and your fellow workers of the Catholic Labor Guild are trying to combine prayer, action, and sacrifice, as the Holy Father suggests. You and your fellow workers want to be go-givers, you don’t want to be go-getters. Since you and your fellow workers want to be go-givers, you ought to give to those who are in need of giving. To give to people who have money to lend is to give to people who are not in need. People who have money should do good with their money, either give it away. as our Saviour advises, or lend it without interest. To pay interest on money loaned is to place an enterprise under a too heavy burden. Everyone must live on the sweat of his brow and not on money loaned. Nobody could lend money at interest If nobody would borrow money at interest. People who live on money loaned at interest reap some of the profits of property without the responsibility of property. To pay double wages to managers is to make the workers envious of the managers. Managers should receive what they need and no more than they need. Knowledge obliges as well as “noblesse oblige.” We cannot have a Catholic democracy without a Catholic aristocracy. Paying double wages to managers is not the way to make aristocrats out of efficient managers. “The most important of all are Workmen’s Associations and it is greatly to be desired that they should multiply and become more effective,” says Pope Leo XIII. To borrow money at interest and to pay double wages to managers is not absolutely necessary to the good functioning of Workmen’s Associations. You say that the Catholic Labor Guild does not lend money at interest I hope that it will see the way not to borrow money at interest. You say that the Catholic Labor Guild stands for profit-sharing. I hope that your self-sacrificing example will lead the members of the Guild to stand for loss-sharing. When the members of the Guild decide to allow the Guild to accumulate the profits they will not need to worry about their economic security. Let the members of the Guild give all they can to the Guild; the Guild will not leave them in want. Let the Labor Guild help all those it can help and the Farming Communes will help all those that the Guild cannot help.

Yours for Catholic Action.

Purpose of the Catholic Workers’ School

The purpose of the Catholic Workers’ School is to bring Catholic thought to Catholic workers so as to prepare them for Catholic Action. Besides presenting Catholic thought to Catholic workers the Catholic Workers’ School presents a program of Catholic Action based on Catholic thought. The program of the Catholic Workers’ School is a three-point program: 1. Round-table Discussions 2. Houses of Hospitality 3. Farming Communes.

Round-Table Discussions

We need Round-Table Discussions to keep trained minds from being academic. We need Round-Table Discussions to keep untrained minds from being superficial. We need Round-Table Discussions to learn from scholars how things would be, if they were as they should be. We need Round-Table Discussions to learn from scholars how a path can be made from things as they are to things as they should be.

We need Communes to help the unemployed to help themselves. We need Communes to make scholars out of workers and workers out of scholars, to substitute a technique of ideals for our technique of deals. We need Communes to create a new society within the shell of the old with the philosophy of the new, which is not a new philosophy but a very old philosophy, a philosophy so old that it looks like new.

Catholic Social Philosophy

The Catholic social philosophy, is the philosophy of the Common Good of St. Thomas Aquinas. Three books where this philosophy is expressed are: The Thomistic Doctrine of the Common Good, by Seraphine Michel; The Social Principles of the Gospel, by Alphonse Lugan; Progress and Religion, by Christopher Dawson.

The Case for Utopia

Better and better off.

The world would be better off if people tried to become better. And people would become better if they stopped trying to become better off. For when everybody tries to become better off, nobody is better off. But when everybody tries to become better, everybody is better off. Everybody would be rich if nobody tried to become richer. And nobody would be poor if everybody tried to be the poorest. And everybody would be what he ought to be if everybody tried to be what be wants the other fellow to be.

Christianity has nothing to do with either modern capitalism or modern Communism, for Christianity has a capitalism of its own and a communism of its own. Modern capitalism is based on property without responsibility, while Christian capitalism is based on property with responsibility. Modern Communism is based on poverty through force while Christian communism is based on poverty through choice. For a Christian, voluntary poverty is the ideal as exemplified by St. Francis of Assisi, while private property is not an absolute right, but a gift which as such can not be wasted, but must be administered for the benefit of God’s chi1dren.

According to Johannes Jorgensen, a Danish convert living in Assisi, St. Francis desired that men should give up superfluous possessions. St. Francis desired that men should work with their hands. St. Francis desired that men should offer their services as a gift. St. Francis desired that men should ask other people for help when work failed them. St. Francis desired that men should live as free as birds. St. Francis desired that men should go through life giving thanks to God for His gifts.

Three Ways to Make a Living

Mirabeau says “There are three ways to make a living: Stealing, begging, and working.” Stealing is against the law of God and against the law of men. Begging is against the law of men but not against the law of God. Working is neither against the law of God nor against the law of men. But they say that there is no work to do. There is plenty of work to do, but no wages. But people do not need to work for wages, they can offer their services as a gift.

Capital and Labor

“Capita1,” says Karl Marx, “is accumulated labor, not for the benefit of the laborers, but for the benefit of the accumulators.” And capitalists succeed in accumulating labor, by treating labor, not as a gift, but as a commodity, buying it as any other commodity at the lowest possible price. And organized labor plays into the hands of the capitalists, or accumulators of labor, by treating its own labor not as a gift, but as a commodity, selling it as any other commodity at the highest possible price. And the class struggle is a struggle between the buyers of labor at the lowest possible price and the sellers of labor at the highest possible price. But the buyers of labor at the lowest possible price and the sellers of labor at the highest possible price are nothing but commercializers of labor.

Selling Their Labor

When the workers sell their labor to the capitalists or accumulators of labor they allow the capitalists or accumulators of labor to accumulate their labor. And when the capitalists or accumulators of labor have accumulated so much of the workers’ labor that they do no longer find it profitable to buy the workers’ labor then the workers can no longer sell their labor to the capitalists or accumulators of labor. And when the workers can no longer sell their labor to the capitalists or accumulators of labor they can no longer buy the products of their labor. And that is what the workers get for selling their labor.

The Bishops’ Message–Quotations and Comments

[These excerpts from the Bishops’ Message of 1934, with Peter Maurin’s comments, were published in the Catholic Worker of May, 1934. The quotations are printed here In Roman type and Peter’s comments in italics.]

In tracing the remote causes of the present misery of mankind we must listen to him who as a loving father views from an eminence all the nations of the world. Quoting St. Paul, our Holy Father says: “The desire for money is the root of all evil.” From greed arises mutual distrust that casts a blight on all human beings. From greed arises envy which makes a man consider the advantages of another as losses to himself. From greed arises narrow individua1ism which orders and subordinates everything to its own advantage.

People looking for a rainy day have put so much money into business that they have brought about an increase in producing power and a decrease in purchasing power. So there is a rub between the rich who like to get richer and the poor who don’t like to get poorer.

In common with other nations we have brought about our present unhappy conditions by divorcing education, industry, politics, business, and economics from morality and religion and by ignoring for long decades the innate dignity of man and trampling on his human rights.

We have taken religion out of everything and have put commercialism into everything.

That we are an industrial nation is our public boast. Industry is considered to be of more importance than the moral welfare of man. The lord of all is Industry. “Save Industry!” is the cry. “Put business on its feet and all will be well as it was in the past.”

We are beginning to learn that to put big business on its feet does not necessarily put the forgotten man on his feet.

The philosophy which has ruled govern- ments, groups, and individuals for the past three hundred years has not taken as its guide the moral law, has not considered the rights of men. Money, not men, bas been the supreme consideration and the justifying end.

When people care for money they do not care for culture. And when people do not care for culture they return to barbarism.

That philosophy permits individuals to accumulate as much wealth as they can according to unfair methods of modern business and to use such accumulated wealth as they see fit. This extreme of individualism has led to the extreme of Communism. We rightly fear its spread in our country and see an especial menace in its insidious presentation of fundamental troubles for its own destructive ends.

When modern society made the bank account the standard of values people ceased to produce for use and began to produce for profit. Rugged individualism leads to rugged nationalism, which leads to rugged collectivism.

The brotherhood of man is loudly proclaimed. Energetic protest is made against injustice done to the working class. The abuses of the capitalist system are vigorously condemned. It is insisted that man shall not exploit his fellow man and that all shall be dedicated to a life of service.

In a capitalist society where man is inhuman to man people cannot keep from dreaming about a society where man would be human to man.

A program of social reform couched in such language and with such aims and purposes is unassailable because it is distinctly Christian in origin and purport, but in the hands of the Communists it is merely a snare to allure those who are oppressed by the prevailing economic maladjustment into accepting the iniquitous social and religious tenets of Lenin and Stalin. There is a very grave and subtle danger of infection from Communism.

According to St. Thomas Aquinas man is more than an individual with individual rights; he is a person with personal duties toward God, himself, and his fellow man. As a person man cannot serve God without serving the Common Good.

Special efforts are being made to win Negroes who are the victims of injustice. The Communists have as their objective a world war on God and the complete destruction of all supernatural and even natural religion.

The Negroes are beginning to find out that wage slavery is no improvement on chattel slavery. The Communists say that Christianity is a failure, but it is not a failure for the very good reason that it has not been tried.

Tradition or Catholic Action

The central act of devotional life in the Catholic Church is the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. The Sacrifice of the Mass is the unbloody repetition of the Sacrifice of the Cross. On the Cross of Calvary Christ gave His life to redeem the world. The life of Christ was a life of sacrifice. The life of a Christian must be a life of sacrifice. We cannot imitate the sacrifice of Christ on Calvary by trying to get all we can. We can only imitate the sacrifice of Christ on Calvary by trying to give all we can.

Big Shots and Little Shots

America is all shot to pieces since the little shots are no longer able to become big shots. When the little shots are not satisfied to remain little shots and try to become big shots, then the big shots are not satisfied to remain big shots and try to become bigger shots. And when the big shots become bigger shots then the little shots become littler shots. And when the little shots become littler shots because the big shots become bigger shots then the little shots get mad at the big shots. And when the little shots get mad at the big shots because the big shots by becoming bigger shots make the little shots littler shots they shoot the big shots full of little shots. But by shooting the big shots full of little shots the little shots do not become big shots; they make everything all shot. And I don’t like to see the little shots shoot the big shots full of little shots; that is why I am trying to shoot both the big shots and the little shots full of hot shots.

A Modern Plague

Glenn Frank, president of Wisconsin University, says: “What ails modern society is the separation of the spiritual from the material.” Pope Pius XI calls this separation “a modern plague,” or to speak more plainly “a pest.” This separation of the spiritual from the material is what we call “secularism.” Everything has been secularized, everything has been divorced from religion. We have divorced religion from education, we have divorced religion from politics, we have divorced religion from business.

When religion has nothing to do with education, education is only information, plenty of facts and no understanding. When religion has nothing to do with politics, politics is only factionalism– “Let’s turn the rascals out so our good friends can get in.” When religion has nothing to do with business business is only commercialism. And when religion has nothing to do with either education, politics or business, you have the religion of business taking the place of the business of religion.

Spiritualizing

Our modern educators, our modern politicians, our modern business men have taken religion from everything and have put commercia1ism into everything. And now we have to take commercialism out of everything and to put religion into everything. The way to take commercialism out of everything and to put religion into everything is not through political action. The way to take commercialism out of everything and to put religion into everything is through Catholic Action.

Business-Like

Catholic Action is action by Catholics for Catholics and non-Catholics. Catholic Action is action by Catholic laymen in co-operation with the clergy. Catholic laymen and women have told the clergy, “Mind your own business and don’t butt into our business.” So Catholic clergymen have ceased to mind the layman’s business and the laymen have made a mess of their own business. And Catholic clergymen have tried to mind their business with a business-like technique borrowed from business-minded people.

The Forgotten Man

The forgotten man has been forgotten because clergymen have forgotten to rub shoulders with the forgotten man. And clergymen have forgotten to rub shoulders with the forgotten man because clergymen have forgotten to use logic to find what is practical. And because clergymen have forgotten to use logic to find what is practical they have failed to give us a sociology that has something to do with theology. If there was a sociology that had something to do with theology it was the sociology of St. Francis of Assisi, St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Thomas More. But the sociology of St. Francis of Assisi. St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Thomas More. was an Utopian sociology, and clergymen are not interested in Utopias, not even Christian Utopias.

Rome or Moscow

And because clergymen are not interested in the sociology of St. Francis of Assisi, St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Thomas More, the forgotten man is becoming interested in the sociology of Karl Marx, Lenin and Stalin. And because clergymen are not interested in a technique of leadership the forgotten man is becoming interested in a technique of dictatorship. And because clergymen are not interested in Dynamic Catholic Action the forgotten man is becoming interested in Dynamic Bolshevik Action.

Communist Action in Schools A Challenge to Catholics

I was told by a young Puerto Rican that the president of his school’s study club was a Communist, and that in the meetings of the school’s study club the Communist president did most of the talking and that the school teacher was an interested listener to the Communist president of the school’s study club. I was told by the dean of a Catholic college that Catholic professors of Catholic colleges have neither the knowledge nor the courage to bring Catholic social thought to the man of the street.

Looking For Light

So while Catholic professors of Catholic colleges do not have enough knowledge or courage to bring Catholic social thought to the man of the street, Communist propagandists yet in their ‘teens find enough knowledge or courage to bring Communist social thought to the men of the school The schools used to teach: “If you want peace prepare for war”; we prepared for war and are still looking for peace. The schools used to teach: “If you want prosperity save your money”; people saved their money, and we are still looking for prosperity. The modern man looks for thought so he can have light, and is unable to find it in our modern schools.

Shouting With Rotarians

According to Glenn Frank, president of the University of Wisconsin. “Schools reflect the environment, , they do not create it.” According to Professor Meiklejohn, of the same university, students go to school not to be educated, but to be business men. Shortly after their graduation school graduates can be heard shouting with Rotarians: “Service for profits, Time is money, Cash and carry, Keep smiling, Business is business, Watch your step, How is the rush? How are you making out? How is the world treating you? The law of supply and demand, Competition is the life of trade, Your dollar is your best friend.”

A Protestant Agitator

Catholic teachers teaching in Catholic or public schools who do not know how to present Catholic social thought either to the men on the street or to the pupils in the schools will be interested to learn that a Protestant agitator well known in Union Square is presenting the Thomistic doctrine of the Common Good to the men of the street in the streets of Harlem. H. Hergenhan, such is his name, does not believe in the rugged individualism of capitalism or in the rugged nationalism of Fascism or in the rugged collectivism of Bolshevism.

The Common Good

He believes in the gentle personalism of gentlemen who are gentle, gentleness that finds its roots in the common doctrine of the Common Good. H. Hergenhan believes that the doctrine of the Common Good is common to humanists who are human, to Jews who are orthodox, to Protestants who are Christian and to Catholics who are Catholic. The Common Good movement is not a movement that divides, it is a movement that unites. The Common Good movement is not a new deal, it is an old game. The Common Good movement is not a revolution to the left, it is a revolution to the right.

Tawney’s Book

When in 1891 Pope Leo XIII wrote his encyclical on the condition of labor he emphasized the lack of ethics in modern society. When in 1899 Thorstein Veblen wrote The Theory of the Leisure Class he emphasized the same thing. R. H. Tawney, then an Oxford student, learned that when the Canon Law, that is to say, the law of the Church, was the law of the land there were high ethics in society. So R. H. Tawney decided to study how society has passed down from the high ethics of the Canon Law to the no ethics of today. What R. H. Tawney found out about the history of ethics of the last five hundred years is embodied in his book, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism.

Social Study Schools Needed

Catholic social research.

“When a system fails to feed the poor it is time to look out for one that does,” says Archbishop Keating of Liverpool. And because Archbishop Keating realized that our modern social order fails to feed the poor he founded in Oxford a Catholic Labor College. And the Catholic Labor College conducted in Oxford has been going on for the last twenty-five years. At its last general meeting Cardinal Bourne declared that we are badly in need of Catholic social research. If there had been more Catholic social research Catholics would not now pass the buck to the politicians.

School of Social Studies

To found a School of Social Studies, such was the aim of Father Patrick Sheely, S.J. In a School of Social Studies we would be able to learn why things are what they are. In a School of Social Studies we would be able to learn how things would be if they were as they should be. In a School of Social Studies we would be able to learn how a path can be made from things as they are to things as they should be. A School of Social Studies would give us Catholic Action based on Catholic Thought realized in Catholic Institutions.

Putting Patches

Having no School of Social Studies, we don’t know how to pass from things as they are to things as they should be. Having no School of Social Studies we have no Catholic social program based on Catholic social thought. Having no School of Social Studies, we try to put patches to the existing social order and call it a New Deal. Having no School of Social Studies. we let college professors carry on costly experiments at the expense of the taxpayers. Having no School of Social Studies, we are not occupied in reconstructing the social order as the Holy Father wants us to be.

I agree with seven Bishops, three of whom are Archbishops, that the Communist criticism of modern rugged individualism is a sound criticism. I agree with seven Bishops, three of whom are Archbishops, that the main social aim of the Communist Party is a sound social aim. I agree with seven Bishops, three of whom are Archbishops, that the Communists are not sound when they advocate class struggle in order to realize their sound social aim. I agree with the Apostolic Delegate when he advocates the practice of the Seven Corporal and Seven Spiritual Works of Mercy as the best practical means of making man human to man.

Personal Sacrifice

To be our brother’s keeper is what God wants us to do. To feed the hungry at a personal sacrifice is what God wants us to do. To clothe the naked at a personal sacrifice is what God wants us to do. To shelter the homeless at a personal sacrifice is what God wants us to do. To instruct the ignorant at a personal sacrifice is what God wants us to do. To serve man for God’s sake is what God wants us to do.

Reconstruction

The Holy Father asks us to reconstruct the social order. The social order was once reconstructed after the fall of the Roman Empire. The Irish scholars were the leaders in the reconstruction of the social order after the fall of the Roman Empire. Through Round-Table Discussions scattered all over Europe as far as Constantinople the Irish scholars brought thought to the people. Through Houses of Hospitality the Irish scholars exemplified Christian charity. Through Fanning Communes the Irish scholars made workers out of scholars and scholars out of workers.

A Third Open Letter to Father Lord, SJ

Dr. C. Roper, Secretary of Commerce, suggested some time ago the establishment in Washington of a “Laboratory for Leadership in Public Affairs.” H. McCall, assistant to Secretary Roper, says that “youth movements have occupied dominant and aggressive positions in the social and governmental changes that have taken place throughout the world since the World War.” H. McCall proposes the establishment in Washington “of a forum for study and training in public affairs.”

Colleges and universities have failed to give their students a technique of leadership based on scholarship.

And because colleges and universities have failed to make leaders out of their students, politicians propose to make bureaucrats out of them. College professors have become so academic that their students refuse to be scholarly minded and consent to be politically minded. College professors have failed to train their students in a technique of leadership, so their students wish to be trained in a technique of dictatorship. In Cuba, Germany, China, Mexico, Italy, Russia, dictators have found their greatest support among college students eager for action. Academic college professors are interested in thought, not in action. So we have on one hand thought without action and on the other hand action without thought.

People go to Washington asking the Federal Government to solve their economic problems, while the Federal Government was never intended to solve men’s economic problems. Catholic Action based on Catholic thought is the Catholic solution of men’s economic problems. To impart Catholic thought and train in Catholic Action, such is the function of Catholic universities. Some way ought to be found to send Catholic workers to Catholic universities or to bring Catholic universities to Catholic workers. When Catholic scholars and Catholic workers become acquainted with each other Catholic workers win cease to be politically minded and begin to be scholarly minded. When Catholic scholars are dynamic and not academic and Catholic workers are scholars and not politicians we will have dynamic Catholic Action. Yours for dynamic Catholic Action.

When Christ is King

Not a liberal.

They say that I am a radical. If I am a radical then I am not a liberal. The future will be different if we make the present different. But to make the present different one must give up old tricks and start to play new tricks. But to give up old tricks and start to play new tricks one must be a fanatic. Liberals are so liberal about everything that they refuse to be fanatical about anything. And not being able to be fanatical about anything, liberals cannot be liberators. They can only be liberals. Liberals refuse to be religious, philosophical or economic fanatics and consent to be the worst kind of fanatics, liberal fanatics.

Not a Conservative

If I am a radical, then I am not a conservative. Conservatives try to believe that things are good enough to be let alone. But things are not good enough to be let alone. Conservatives try to believe that the world is getting better every day in every way. But the world is not getting better every day in every way. The world is getting worse every day in every way and the world is getting worse every day in every way because the world is upside down. And conservatives do not know how to take the upside down and to put it right side up. When conservatives and radicals will come to an understanding they will take the upside down and they will put it right side up.

A Radical Change

The order of the day is to talk about the social order. Conservatives would like to keep it from changing but they don’t know how. Liberals try to patch it and call it a New Deal. Socialists want a change, but a gradual change. Communists want a change, an immediate change, but a Socialist change. Communists in Russia do not build Communism, they build Socialism. Communists want to pass from capitalism to Socialism and from Socialism to Communism. I want a change, and a radical change. I want a change from an acquisitive society to a functional society, from a society of go-getters to a society of go-givers.

When Bankers Rule

Modern society has made the bank account the standard of values. When the bank account becomes the standard of values the banker has the power. When the banker has the power the technician has to supervise the making of profits. When the banker has the power the politician has to assure law and order in the profit-making system. When the banker has the power the educator trains students in the technique of profit making. When the banker has the power the clergyman is expected to bless the profit-making system or to join the unemployed. When the banker has the power the Sermon on the Mount is declared unpractical. When the banker has the power we have an acquisitive, not a functional society.

When Christ Is King

When the Sermon on the Mount is the standard of values then Christ is the Leader. When Christ is the Leader the priest is the mediator. When Christ is the Leader the educator trains the minds of the pupils so that they may understand the message of the priest. When Christ is the Leader the politician assures law and order according to the priest’s teachings. When Christ is the Leader the technician devises ways and means for the economical production and distribution of goods. When Christ is the Leader the administrator administrates according to the directions from the technicians. When Christ is the Leader we have a functional, not an acquisitive society.

Rebellion Is Rebellion

Boloney is boloney, no matter how you slice it, and rebellion is rebellion no matter when it happens, whether it is the religious rebellion of the 16th century or the political rebellion of the 18th century, or the economic rebellion of the 20th century. Someone said that the Catholic Church stands for rum, Romanism and rebellion. But the Catholic Church does not stand for rum, Romanism and rebellion. The Catholic Church stands for Rome, Reunion, and Reconstruction. The Catholic Church stands, as Rome used to stand, for law and order. The Catholic Church stands for the reunion of our separated brothers. The Catholic Church stands for the reconstruction, not the patching up, of the social order.

Constructing the Social Order

The Holy Father asks us to reconstruct the social order. The social order was constructed by the first Christians through the daily practice of the Seven Corporal and Seven Spiritual Works of Mercy. To feed the hungry at a personal sacrifice, to clothe the naked at a personal sacrifice, to shelter the homeless at a personal sacrifice, to instruct the ignorant at a personal sacrifice; such were the works of the first Christians in times of persecution.

Fighting Communism

The Catholic Worker proposes fighting Communism the way the first Christians fought pagan Romanism, through the works of mercy. The Catholic Worker proposes fighting Communism the way the Irish scholars fought pagan feudalism, through Round-Table Discussions, Houses of Hospitality, Farming Communes. The Communists do not build Communism, they build Socia1ism. The Catholic Worker does not build Catholic Socialism, it builds Catholic Communism. The Catholic Worker builds Catholic Communism the way the first Christians and the Irish scholars built Catholic Communism. The Catholic Worker believes that there is no better Communism than Catholic Communism, and that there is no better way to build Catholic Communism than by building Catholic Communes. Catholic Communes are not a new thing, they are an old thing. Catholic Communes are so old that Catholics have forgotten them. Communists have not invented anything, not even the name Commune. The Communist ideal is the Common Good ideal– the ideal of St. Thomas More, the ideal of St. Thomas Aquinas, the ideal of the Irish scholars, the ideal of the first Christians. The doctrine of the Common Good of St. Thomas Aquinas is still a Catholic doctrine. We don’t need a new doctrine, we need an old technique. We need the old technique of the first Christians and the Irish scholars. What was good for the first Christians and the Irish scholars ought to be good enough for us. What was practical for them ought to be practical for us.

Essay on Communism

Not communists.

There is nothing wrong with Communism, but there is something wrong with Bolshevism. The wrong thing with Bolshevism is that Bolshevists are not Communists; they are Socialists. For if the Bolshevists were Communists, they would build Communism. And the Bolshevists do not build Communism; they build Socialism; they build State Socialism. The Bolshevists probably hope that the State “will wither away,” and that they will be able to pass from State Socialism to Communism without State.

Some time ago I was discussing in Harlem with a Russian Red and an Irish Red. And the Russian Red understood me sooner than the Irish Red. Having understood what I was saying, the Russian Red started to explain to his friend, the Irish Red, what I was talking about. When the Russian Red had finished explaining, the Irish Red turned toward me and said that while he agreed with most of what I said he still believed that the Catholic Church was not the friend of the working-men. Many Catholics are much disappointed when Wall Street corporations or political organizations or Catholic associations fail to provide them with economic security.

Looking for a Boss

A Catholic working-man once said to me: “There is only one thing between me and the Reds, and that is a good job.” Everybody is looking for a boss, and nobody wants to be his own boss. And because everybody looks for a boss the Reds want the State to be the boss of everybody. Because everybody consents to play somebody else’s game for the sake of a pay-envelope the Reds try to find the way to assure a pay-envelope to everybody so as to force everybody to act like everybody. But nothing will be changed when the Reds will force everybody to act like everybody, since nobody is nobody when everybody tries to keep up with everybody.

America and Russia

American Republicans want their friends on the public payroll, but only their friends. American Democrats want their friends on the public payroll, but only their friends. But the Reds want everybody on the public payroll, not only their friends. The American idea is to keep the Government out of business and to put everybody into business. The Russian idea is to put the Government into business and to keep everybody out of business. But business is only business, whether it is the State business or private business; and I am trying to make it my business to put all business out of business, including the State business, which is a big business.

Red and Green

Our business managers have made such a mess of things that people are inclined to see Red.

And when people see Red it is useless to present to them the Red, White and Blue, because they can no longer see the White and the Blue of the Red, White and Blue; all they can see is Red. The only way to keep people from seeing Red is to make them see Green. The only way to prevent a Red Revolution is to promote a Green Revolution. The only way to keep people from looking up to Red Russia of the twentieth century is to make them look up to Green Ireland. of the seventh century.

Thousand Years Ago

When Irish were Irish a thousand years ago, the Irish were scholars. And when the Irish were scholars the Irish were Greek scholars. And when the Irish were Greek scholars the Irish spoke Greek as well as Irish. And when the Irish spoke Greek as well as Irish. Greek was Irish to the Irish. Greek was Irish to the Irish and now Irish is Greek to the Irish. Irish is Greek to the Irish now and Hebrew is Chinese to the Jews.

A Program For Immediate Needs

Social missionaries.

A School of Social Studies would be the training ground for Social Missionaries, priests, laymen and women. As Al Smith said: “The social problem is not a problem for politicians, business men, and lawyers.” The social problem is a problem for Social Missionaries. The task of Social Missionaries is not to help people to adjust themselves to the existing environment. The task of Social Missionaries is to teach people the difficult art of creating order out of chaos. To be a Social Missionary requires social-mindedness, historical-mindedness and practical idealism.

Study Clubs

Social Missionaries would be official leaders of Study Clubs. The conduct of a Study Club does not require a fluent speaker. As Bishop O’Hara said: “The purpose of Study Clubs is to make people articulate; and lectures do not help to make people articulate.” Social Missionaries would be able to impart their knowledge through easy conversations. Easy conversations about things that matter would keep people from going to the movies, from talking politics, from cheap wisecracking. Easy conversation about things that matter would enable Catholics to understand Catholicism, to give an account of their faith, and to make non-Catholics curious about Catholicism.

Works of Mercy

The best kind of apologetics is the kind of apologetics people do not have to apologize for. In the first centuries of Christianity pagans said about Christians: “See how they love each other.” The love for God and neighbor was the characteristic of the first Christians. This love was expressed through the daily practice of the Works of Mercy. To feed the hungry, to clothe the naked, to shelter the homeless, to instruct the ignorant at a personal sacrifice was considered by the first Christians as the right thing to do. Surplus goods were considered to be superfluous, and therefore to be used to help the needy members of the Mystical Body.

Self-Employing Centers

The remedy for unemployment is employment, and there is no better employment than self-employment. Self-Employing Centers are small shops where repairs can be made and workers can be found to do work outside. With the Self-Employing Centers could be connected Houses of Hospitality where the self-employing workers could find shelter. This complicated world is too complicated to be dealt with in an efficient manner by specialized technicians. Specialized technicians knowing more and more about less and less do not know how to simplify a complicated world. We need fewer specialists and more encyclopedists, fewer masters of one trade and more jacks-of-all trades.

Five Definitions

[The following is an analysis by Peter Maurin of definitions given by John Strachey (Communist), Lawrence Dennis (Fascist), Norman Thomas (Socialist) and Stanley High (Democrat) of their respective beliefs. (February, 1935)]

What Communists Say They Believe

Communists believe that the capitalist system has reached the point where it does no longer work. Communists believe that when the workers come to the realization of the downfall of capitalism they will no longer tolerate it. Communists believe that the capitalist class will resort to all means that may be in its power to maintain its existence. Communists believe that the Communist Party knows how to assure the production and distribution in an orderly manner according to a predesigned plan.

What Fascists Say They Believe

Fascists believe in a national economy for the protection of national and private interests. Fascists believe in the regulation of industries so as to assure a wage for the worker and a dividend for the investor. Fascists believe in class collaboration under State supervision. Fascists believe in the co-operation of employers’ unions and workers’ unions.

What Socialists Say They Believe

Socialists believe in a gradual realization of a classless society. Socialists believe in the social ownership of natural resources and the means of production and distribution. Socialists believe in a transition period under democratic management between two economic systems, the system of production for use and the one of production for profits. Socialists believe in freedom of the press, freedom of assemblage, freedom of worship.

What Democrats Say They Believe

Democrats believe in universal suffrage, universal education, freedom of opportunity. Democrats believe in the right of the rich to become richer and of the poor to try to become rich. Democrats believe in labor unions and financial corporations. Democrats believe in the law of supply and demand.

What the Catholic Worker Believes

The Catholic Worker believes in the gentle personalism of traditional Catholicism. The Catholic Worker believes in the personal obligation of looking after the needs of our brother. The Catholic Worker believes in the daily practice of the Works of Mercy. The Catholic Worker believes in Houses of Hospitality for the immediate relief of those who are in need. The Catholic Worker believes in the establishment of Farming Communes where each one works according to his ability and gets according to his need. The Catholic Worker believes in creating a new society within the shell of the old with the philosophy of the new, which is not a new philosophy but a very old philosophy, a philosophy so old that it looks like new.

Why Not Be a Beggar?

Share your wealth.

What we give to the poor for Christ’s sake is what we carry with us when we die. As Jean Jacques Rousseau says: “When man dies he carries in his clutched hands only that which he has given away.”

The Wisdom of Giving

To give money to the poor is to enable the poor to buy. To enable the poor to buy is to improve the market. To improve the market is to help business. To help business is to reduce unemployment. To reduce unemployment is to reduce crime. To reduce crime is to reduce taxation. So why not give to the poor for business’ sake. for humanity’s sake, for God’s sake?

In The Light of History

The communist party.

The criticism of bourgeois capitalism by the Communist Party is the criticism of Victor Considerant used by Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto. The definition of Communism of the Communist Manifesto is the definition of Proudhon borrowed by Marx and Engels. The technique of class struggle is the technique advocated by Marx and Engels. The technique of proletarian dictatorship is the technique advocated by Lenin.

The Catholic Worker

The Catholic Worker criticism of bourgeois society is the criticism of St. Thomas More. The Catholic Worker aims are the aims of St. Thomas Aquinas in his doctrine of the Common Good. The Catholic Worker means are the daily practice of the Works of Mercy and the fostering of Farming Communes where scholars become workers and workers become scholars.

1200–Guild System

In 1200 A. D. there was no capitalist system, there was the guild system. The doctrine of the guilds was the doctrine of the Common Good. People used to say, as they do now, “What can I do for you?” but they meant what they said. Now they say one thing and they mean another. They did not look for markets, they let the markets look for them.

1400–Middle Men

Around 1400 A. D. appears the middle man. He offers to buy the goods and to find a market. The guildsman thinks about the money offered for his goods and forgets the Common Good. And the middle man is not interested in selling useful goods but in making money on any kind of goods. And the consumer never meets the producer and the producer ceases to think in terms of service and begins to think in terms of profits.

1600–Banker

Before John Calvin people were not allowed to lend money at interest. John Calvin decided to legalize money lending at interest in spite of the teachings of the Prophets of Israel and the Fathers of the Church. Protestant countries tried to keep up with John Calvin and money-lending at interest became the general practice. And money ceased to be a means of exchange and began to be a means to make money. So people lent money on time and started to think of time in terms of money and said to each other, “Time is money.”

1700–Manufacturer

With the discovery of steam the factory system made its appearance. To take drudgery out of the home was supposed to be the aim of the manufacturer. So the guildsman left his shop and went to the factory. But the profit-making manufacturer found it more profitable to employ women than to employ men. So the women left the home and went to the factory. Soon the children followed the women in the factory. So the men have to stay at home while the women and children work in the factory.

1800–Economist

Since Adam Smith, who published his book in 1776, we have been told that competition is the life of trade and that it is a case of the survival of the fittest. So since 1776 looking for markets has engaged men’s activities. And since trade follows the flag, industrial nations have also become imperialist nations. The fight for markets between two industrial nations, England and Germany, was the main cause of the World War.

1914–World War

As President Wilson said, the World War was a commercial war. But a commercial war had to be idealized, so it was called a War for Democracy. But the War for Democracy did not bring Democracy, it brought Bolshevism in Russia, Fascism in Italy. Nazism in Germany.

1929–World Depression

After the World War people tried to believe that a New Era had dawned upon the world. People thought that they had found a solution to the problem of mass distribution. People thought that the time had come of a two-car garage, a chicken in every pot and a sign “To Let” in front of every poorhouse. And everybody wanted to cash in on the future prosperity. So stock promoters got busy and stocked people with stocks till they got stuck.

1933–New Deal

We were told in 1929 that business would go on as usual. We were told in 1930 that the economic system was fundamentally sound. We were told in 1931 that prosperity was just around the corner. We were told in 1932 that the depression was fought on one hundred fronts. We were told in 1933 that five million men would be employed by Labor Day. And in 1934 people went crazy for the NRA. And in 1935 the NRA is scrapped and economic recovery is a long way off.

1933–The Catholic Worker

The aim of the Catholic Worker is to create order out of chaos. The aim of the Catholic Worker is to help the unemployed to employ themselves. The aim of the Catholic Worker is to make an impression on the depression through expression. The aim of the Catholic Worker is to create a new society within the shell of the old with the philosophy of the new. which is not a new philosophy. but a very old philosophy, a philosophy so old that it looks like new.

Teachers, Traders, and Tricksters

No recourse.

Politicians used to say: “We make prosperity through our wise policies.” Business men used to say: “We make prosperity through our private enterprise.” The workers did not seem to have anything to do about the matter. They were either put to work or thrown out of employment. And when unemployment came the workers had no recourse against the professed makers of prosperity– politicians and business men.

Politics Is Politics

A politician is an artist in the art of following the wind of public opinion. He who follows the wind of public opinion does not follow his own judgment. And he who does not follow his own judgment cannot lead people out of the beaten path. He is like the the tail end of the dog trying to lead the head. When people stand back of politicians and politicians stand back of the people, people and politicians go around in a circle and get nowhere.

Maker of Deals

A business man is a maker of deals. He wants to close a profitable deal in the shortest possible time. To close a profitable deal in the shortest possible time he tells you what a good bargain you are getting. And while he tells you what a good bargain you are getting he is always thinking what a good bargain he is getting. He appeals to the selfishness in you to satisfy the selfishness in him.

Business Is Selfishness

Because everybody is naturally selfish business men say that business must be based on selfishness. But when business is based on selfishness everybody is busy becoming more selfish. And when everybody is busy becoming more selfish we have classes and clashes.

Teaching Subjects

Our business managers don’t know how to manage the things they try to manage because they don’t understand the things they try to manage. So they turn to college professors in the hope of understanding the things they try to manage. But college professors do not profess anything; they only teach subjects. As teachers of subjects college professors may enable people to master subjects. But mastering subjects has never enabled anyone to master situations.

Specialization

A few years ago, I asked a college professor to give me the formulation of those universal concepts embodied in the universal message of universal universities that will enable the common man to create a universal economy. And I was told by the college professor: “That is not my subject.” Colleges and universities give to the students plenty of facts but very little understanding. They turn out specialists knowing more and more about less and less.

Christianity Untried

Chesterton says: “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried.” Christianity has not been tried because people thought it was impractical. And men have tried everything except Christianity. And everything that men have tried has failed.

The Canon Law and the Law of the Cannon

St. thomas more.

St. Thomas More believed in the Common Law. The Common Law that St. Thomas More believed in was rooted in Canon Law. Henry VIII believed that since he was king he was the Law. St. Thomas More did not believe in Henry VIII’s interpretation of Common Law. The Common Law as it exists in today’s England has little relation to Canon Law.

Judge Cardozo

Judge Cardozo said that Common Law as it exists today in the United States does not make sense. Judge Cardozo proposed to discard Common Law and go back to Roman Law. If modem Common Law is bad, modern Roman Law is worse. “To grab and to hold” is the aim of Roman Law. “Divide to rule” is the motto of the Roman Law-minded Lawyers.

Arthur Penty

In a book entitled: A Guildsman’s Interpretation of History Arthur Penty has a chapter on the revival of Roman Law. The revival of Roman Law in the 13th century brought about the disputes between Kings and Popes. The Kings are on the go. The Pope is still on the job. He writes encyclicals, but business men and politicians pay little attention to what he has to say. In the meantime, we are worrying about what Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini will do to us.

Bourgeois Colleges

Catholic bourgeois.

A bourgeois is a man who tries to be somebody, by trying to be like everybody, which makes him a nobody. Catholic bourgeois try to be like non-Catholic bourgeois and think they are just as good as non-Catholic bourgeois. Right after the war Catholic bourgeois tried to believe what non-Catholic bourgeois tried to believe, that the time had come in America for a two-car garage a chicken in every pot and a sign “To Let” in front of every poorhouse. And Catholic colleges as well as non-Catholic colleges turned out stock promoters, stock brokers and stock salesmen who stocked people with stocks till they got stuck.

Modern colleges give you a bit of this, a bit of that, a bit of something else and a degree. The act of giving a degree is called a Commencement. And after the Commencement the student commences to look for a job.

College Graduates

Sociology is not a science, it is an art. The art of sociology is the art of creating order out of chaos. Bourgeois colleges turn out college graduates into a changing world without ever telling them how to keep it from changing or how to change it so as to make it fit for college graduates. College graduates think in terms of jobs, not in terms of work. Since the world is upside down, taking the side down and putting it up should be the task of college graduates. But college graduates would rather play somebody else’s game in a position than to create order out of chaos.

An Unhappy Lot

But the job providers are not on the job and college graduates are disappointed. They have degrees, but their degrees do not give them jobs. They have been told that the road to success is a college education. They have a college education and they do not know what to do, with themselves. The overproduction of college graduates is a fertile ground for social demagogues. The unemployed college graduates are getting sore at their parents for sending them into colleges which have not prepared them for a changing world. And they ask themselves if their educators know what it is to be educated.

In the New Masses a Communist cartoonist represents a line of college graduates receiving their degrees from the Alma Mater and joining a soup line on the other side of the square. Social reconstruction will be the result of social indoctrination. But unemployed college graduates cannot be indoctrinated without first being fed, as well as clothed, as well as sheltered. Houses of Hospitality for unemployed college graduates are a pressing need.

Indoctrination

In Houses of Hospitality unemployed college graduates will be fed, clothed, sheltered, as well as indoctrinated. Unemployed college graduates must be told why the things are what they are, how the things would be if they were as they should be and how a path can be made from the things as they are to the things as they should be. Unemployed college graduates must be told how to create a new society within the shell of the old with the philosophy of the new, which is not a new philosophy, but a very old philosophy, a philosophy so old that it looks like new.

On Farming Communes

When unemployed college graduates will have been indoctrinated they will be moved to Farming Communes. On Farming Communes unemployed college graduates will be taught how to build their houses, how to gather their fuel, how to raise their food, how to make their furniture; that is to say, how to employ themselves. Unemployed college graduates must be taught how to use their hands. Unemployed college graduates have time on their hands. And while time is on the hands of college graduates their heads don’t function as they should function. On Farming Communes unemployed college graduates will learn to use both their hands and their heads.

Social Workers and Workers

The training of social workers enables them to help people to adjust themselves to the existing environment. The training of social workers does not enable them to help people to change the environment. Social workers must become social-minded before they can be critics of the existing environment and free creative agents of the new environment. In Houses of Hospitality social workers can acquire that art of human contacts and that social-mindedness or understanding of social forces which will make them critical of the existing environment and the free creative agents of a new environment.

Back to Christ–Back to the Land!

On the level.

Owen Young says: “We will never have prosperity as long as there is no balance between industry and agriculture.” The farmer sells in an open market and is forced to buy in a restricted market. When the farmer gets a pair of overalls for a bushel of wheat the wheat and the overalls are on the level. When the farmer has to give two bushels of wheat for a pair of overalls the wheat and the overalls are not on the level. Wheat and overalls must be on the level.

Industrialization

Lenin said: “The world cannot be half industrial and half agricultural.” England, Germany, Japan and America have become industrialized. Soviet Russia is trying to keep up with England, Germany, Japan and America. When all the world will be industrialized every country will be looking for foreign markets. But when every country will be industrialized you will not have foreign markets.

Mechanized Labor

Gandhi says: “Industrialism is evil.” Industrialism is evil because it brings idleness both to the capitalist class and the working class. Idleness does no good either to the capitalist class or to the working class. Creative labor is what keeps people out of mischief. Creative labor is craft labor. Mechanized labor is not creative labor.

No Pleasure in Their Work

Carlyle says: “He who has found his work, let him look for no other blessedness.” But workmen cannot find happiness in mechanized work. As Charles Devas says, “The great majority having to perform some mechanized operation which requires little thought and allows no originality and which concerns an object in the transformation of which, whether previous or subsequent, they have no part, cannot take pleasure in their work.” As D. Marshall says, “Previously the workman fashioned every article with his own hands, bringing to bear on it all the skill of the craft which was his; now all of this is done by the machine.”

Industrialism and Art

Eric Gill says: “The notion of work has been separated from the notion of art. The notion of the useful has been separated from the notion of the beautiful The artist, that is to say, the responsible workman, has been separated from all other workmen. The factory hand has no responsibility for what he produces. He has been reduced to a sub-human condition of intellectual irresponsibility. Industrialism has released the artist from the necessity of making anything useful Industrialism has also released the workman from making anything amusing.”

From a Chinese

A Chinese says: “I thought I had become Westernized but now I am becoming repatriated. The material progress of America had dazzled me. I wished while there to transplant what I saw to China. But now that I am home again I see that our two civilizations have irreconcilable differences. Yours is a machine civilization; ours is a handicraft civilization. Your people work in factories; our people work in shops. Your people produce quantity things that are alike; our people produce quality things that are different. What would Western industrialism do to us? Our people would become robots. Our cultural traditions would be destroyed.”

Regard for the Soil

Andrew Nelson Lytle says: “The escape from industrialism is not in Socialism or in Sovietism. The answer lies in a return to a society where agriculture is practiced by most of the people. It is in fact impossible for any culture to be sound and healthy without a proper respect and proper regard for the soil, no matter how many urban dwellers think that their food comes from groceries and delicatessens or their milk from tin cans. This ignorance does not release them from a final dependence upon the farm.”

Up to Catholics

Ralph Adams Cram says: “What I propose is that Catholics should take up this back-to-the-land problem and put it into operation. Why Catholics? Because they realize more clearly than any others the shortcomings of the old capitalist industrial system. They, better than others, see the threat that impends. They alone understand that while the family is the primary social unit, the community comes next. And there is no sound and righteous and enduring community where all its members are not substantially of one mind in matters of the spirit– that is to say, of religion.”

Institutions vs. Corporations

In the first issue of The Catholic Worker appeared this essay:

Institutions and Corporations

Jean Jacques Rousseau says: “Man is naturally good, but institutions make him bad, so let us overthrow institutions,” I say: Man is partly good and partly bad, but corporations, not institutions, make him worse. “An institution,” says Emerson, “is the extension of the soul of a man.” Institutions are founded to foster the welfare of the masses. Corporations are organized to promote wealth for the few. So let us found smaller and better institutions and not promote bigger and better corporations.

Some Institutions

Round-Table Discussions to learn from scholars how the things would be if they were as they should be. Campion Propaganda Committees for the indoctrination of the man of the street. Maternity Guilds for the welfare of needy mothers bringing young children into the world. Houses of Hospitality to give to the rich the opportunity to serve the poor. Farming Communes where the scholars may become workers so the workers may be scholars.

American Institutions

The American Constitution, the American Congress, the American Supreme Court are also considered as institutions. The American Constitution was devised by the American Founders to protect the individual against the majority, whether in Congress or government. The American Supreme Court was established by the Founders to watch over the Constitution so as to prevent its misrepresentation and its misapplication.

Bureaucracy

Bureaucracy has failed, whether in America, in France or Germany. In France we say: “Plus ca change, plus c’est la mime chose.” [The more it changes, the more it remains the same thing.] Governments change but the bureaucracy remains. Political corruption has made the French people disgusted with their politicians. The most efficient bureaucracy was the German bureaucracy. And the faith in bureaucracy was so great that they failed to create a public opinion for democratic reform. So the Nazis beat them to it. And created a public opinion for racial demagogy. The Catholic Worker is trying to create a public opinion for Communitarian reform.

A Bourgeois is a fellow who tries to be somebody by trying to be like everybody, which makes him a nobody. A Dictator is a fellow who does not hesitate to strike you over the head if you refuse to do what he wants you to do. A Leader is a fellow who refuses to be crazy the way everybody else is crazy and tries to be crazy in his own crazy way. A Bolshevist is a fellow who tries to get what the other fellow has and to regulate what you should have. A Communitarian is a fellow who refuses to be what the other fellow is and tries to be what he wants him to be.

They and We

People say: “They don’t do this, they don’t do that, they ought to do this, they ought to do that.” Always “They” and never “I.” People should say: “They are crazy for doing this and not doing that but I don’t need to be crazy the way they are crazy.” The Communitarian Revolution is basically a personal revolution. It starts with I, not with They. One I plus one I makes two I’s and two I’s make We. We is a community, while “they” is a crowd.

A New Movement

The Nazis, the Fascists and the Bolshevists are Totalitarians. The Catholic Worker is Communitarian. The principles of Communitarianism are expounded every month in the French magazine Esprit (the Spirit). Emmanuel Mounier, editor of the magazine, has a book entitled “La Revolution Personnaliste et Communautaire.”

A New Social Order

The hope of the people.

The Marxists say that religion is the dope of the people. Religion is not the dope of the people, it is the hope of the people. Modern society is a materialist society because Christians have failed to translate the spiritual into the material. If Christians knew how to make a lasting impression on the materialist depression through spiritual expression Marxists would not say that religion is the dope of the people. As Raymond de Becker says: “The social task of the laity is the sanctification of secular life, or more exactly, the creation of a Christian secular life.”

The Christian Front

The Christians who consider religion the hope of the people should not unite with the Marxists who consider religion the dope of the people. As the editors of the Christian Front say: “Marxism not only falsifies the origin and the end of man but it seeks to make of him an anonymous animal, a servant of the proletarian State.” The editors of the Christian Front are not liberals, they think that men “must take their choice to stand for Christianity or to stand for what opposes it.” They ask the Christians “to dissociate themselves from an un-Christian social order and prepare the way for a social order compatible with their beliefs.”

The New Apologetics

In his lectures on the New Christendom Jacques Maritain emphasizes the necessity of laying the foundations of a new social order. Laying the foundations of a new social order is the task of the laity. The task of the laity is to do the pioneer work of creating order out of chaos. The clergy teach the principles; the task of the laity is to apply them without involving the clergy in the application. The application to the social problems by the Catholic laity of the Catholic principles taught by the Catholic clergy is a new kind of apologetics, a kind of apologetics Catholics will not have to apologize for.

Yes! I am a Radical

Down to the roots.

I was once thrown out of a Knights of Columbus meeting because, as the K. of C. official said, I was radical. I was introduced as a radical before the college students of a Franciscan college, And the Franciscan Father added “I am as radical as Peter Maurin.” Speaking in a girls’ college near St. Cloud, Minnesota, I was told by Bishop Busch, “Conservatives are up in a tree and you are trying to go down to the roots.”

Poor Conservatives

After another meeting I was told by a sociologist “I still think that you are a radical.” And I told the sociologist “We have to pity those poor conservatives who don’t know what to conserve; who find themselves living in a changing world while they do not know how to keep it from changing or how to change it to suit themselves.”

Radically Wrong

Monsignor Fulton Sheen says: “Modern society is based on greed.” Father McGowan says: “Modern society is based on systematic selfishness.” Professor John Dewey says: “Modern society is based on rugged individualism.” When conservatives try to conserve a society based on greed, systematic selfishness and rugged individualism they try to conserve something that is radically wrong, for it is built on a wrong basis. And when conservatives try to conserve what is radically wrong they are also radically wrong.

A New Society

To be radically right is to go to the roots by fostering a society based on creed, systematic unselfishness and gentle personalism. To foster a society based on creed instead of greed, on systematic unselfishness instead of systematic selfishness, on gent1e personalism instead of rugged individualism, is to create a new society within the shell of the old. Modern society is in a state of chaos. And what is chaos if not lack of order? Sociology is not a science, it is an art, the art of creating order out of chaos. All founders of orders made it their personal business to try to solve the problems of their own day. If religious orders made it their business to try to solve the problems of our own day by creating order out of chaos, the Catholic Church would be the dominant social dynamic force in our day and age.

Feeding the Poor

At a sacrifice.

In the first centuries of Christianity the hungry were fed at a personal sacrifice, the naked were clothed at a personal sacrifice, the homeless were sheltered at personal sacrifice. And because the poor were fed, clothed and sheltered at a personal sacrifice, the pagans used to say about the Christians “See how they love each other.” In our own day the poor are no longer fed, clothed and sheltered at a personal sacrifice, but at the expense of the taxpayers. And because the poor are no longer fed, clothed and sheltered the pagans say about the Christians “See how they pass the buck.”

Radicals of the Right

Shouting a word.

Father Parsons says: “There is confusion of mind.” When there is confusion of mind someone has only to shout a word and people flock. When Mussolini shouted discipline people flocked. When Hitler shouted restoration people flocked.

The Right Word

Mussolini’s word is discipline. Hitler’s word is restoration, My word is tradition. I am a radical of the right. I go right to the right because I know it is the only way not to get left. Sound principles are not new, they’re very old; they are as old as eternity. The thing to do is to restate the never new and never old principles in the vernacular of the man of the street. Then the man of the street will do what the intellectual has failed to do; that is to say, “do something about it.”

Philosophy and Sophistry

Mortimer Adler says: “Modern philosophers have not found anything new since Aristotle,” Modern philosophers are not philosophers; they are sophists. Aristotle had to deal with sophists in his day and age. What Aristotle said to the sophists of his own day could be read with profit by modern philosophers.

The City of God

Jacques Maritain says: “There is more in man than man.” Man was created in the image of God; therefore there is the image of God in man. There is more to life than life this side of the grave; there is life the other side of the grave. Science leads to biology, biology to psychology, psychology to philosophy, philosophy to theology. Philosophy is the handmaid of theology. To build up the City of God, that is to say, to express the spiritual in the material through the use of pure means, such is the task of professing Christians in this day and age.

Integral Humanism

Through the influence of Maxim Gorki the Marxists have come to the conclusion that Marxist writers should be more than proletarian writers; that they should he cultural writers. Waldo Frank thinks that the cultural tradition must be brought to the proletarian masses, who will appreciate it much more than the acquisitive classes. What the Marxists call culture Maritain calls Socialist Humanism. But Socialist Humanism is not all Humanism, according to Maritain. In a book entitled “L’Humanisme integral” Jacques Maritain points out what differentiates Integral Humanism from Social Humanism.

Thought and Action

Integral Humanism is the Humanism of the Radicals of the Right. The Radicals of the Left are now talking about Cultural Tradition. The bourgeois idea is that culture is related to leisure. Eric Gill maintains that culture is related to work, not to leisure. Man is saved through faith and through works, and what one does has a lot to do with what one is. Thought and action must be combined. When thought is separated from action, it becomes academic. When thought is related to action it becomes dynamic.

Go-Getters vs. Go-Givers

Two bourgeois.

The bourgeois capitalist believes in rugged individualism; The Bolshevist Socialist believes in rugged collectivism. There is no difference between the rugged individualism of bourgeois capitalism and the rugged collectivism of Bolshevist Socialism. The bourgeois capitalist tries to keep what he has, and tries to get what the other fellow has. The Bolshevist Socialist tries to get what the bourgeois capitalist has. The Bolshevist Socialist is the son of the bourgeois capitalist, and the son is too much like his father. All the sins of the father are found in the son.

Bourgeois Capitalist

The bourgeois capitalist calls himself conservative but has failed to conserve our cultural tradition. He thinks that culture is related to leisure. He does not think that culture is related to cult and to cultivation. He believes in power, and that money is the way to power. He believes that money can buy everything, whether it be labor or brains. But as the poet Emerson says, “People have only the power we give them.” When people will cease selling their labor power or their brain power to the bourgeois capitalist, the bourgeois capitalist will cease being a gentleman of leisure and begin being a cultured gentleman.

Bolshevist Socialist

The Bolshevist Socialist is the spiritual son of the bourgeois capitalist; he credits bourgeois capitalism with an historic mission and fails to condemn it on general principles. The bourgeois Socialist does not believe in the profit system, but he does believe in the wage system. The bourgeois capitalist and his spiritual son, the Bolshevist Socialist, believe in getting all they can get and not in giving all they can give. The bourgeois capitalist and his spiritual son, the Bolshevist Socialist, are go-getters, not go-givers.

The Personalist Communitarian

A personalist is a go-giver, not a go-getter. He tries to give what he has, and does not try to get what the other fellow has. He tries to be good by doing good to the other fellow. He is altro-centered, not self-centered. He has a social doctrine of the common good. He spreads the social doctrine of the common good through words and deeds. He speaks through deeds as well as words, for he knows that deeds speak louder than words. Through words and deeds he brings into existence a common unity, the common unity of a community.

Community Spirit

Communitarianism is the rediscovery and the exemplification of what the Kiwanis and Rotarians used to talk about, namely, the community spirit. The community spirit is no more common than common sense is common. Everybody knows that common sense is not common, but nobody believes that common sense should not be common. The community spirit should be common. as well as common sense should be common. If common sense was common, Bolshevist Socialists would not be rugged collectivists; they would be Communitarian personalists.

Franciscans and Jesuits

Franciscans and Jesuits believe in the community spirit just as much as Kiwanis and Rotarians. While Kiwanis and Rotarians used to talk about the common spirit, Franciscans and Jesuits did something about it. Kiwanis and Rotarians used to talk about service but never forgot profitable service. Franciscans and Jesuits may not say much about service, but continue to render unprofitable service. Franciscans and Jesuits believe in the responsibility of private property but they believe also in the practicality of voluntary poverty.

Counsels of the Gospel

Someone said that The Catholic Worker is taking monasticism out of the monasteries. The Counsels of the Gospel are for everybody, not only for monks. Franciscans and Jesuits are not monks. Franciscans are Friars, and the world is their monastery. Jesuits are the storm troops of the Catholic Church, and ready to be sent where the Holy Father wishes to send them. The Counsels of the Gospel are for everybody, and if everybody tried to live up to it we would bring order out of chaos, and Chesterton would not have said that the Christian ideal has been left untried.

Communitarian Personalism

Basic power.

Bourgeois capitalism is based on the power of hiring and firing. Fascist Corporatism and Bolshevist Socialism are based on the power of life and death. Communitarian Personalism is based on the power of thought and example.

Thinking Is Individual

Thinking is individual, not collective. Fifty million Frenchmen may be wrong, while one Frenchman may be right. One thinks better than two, and two better than two hundred. The national thinking of Benito Mussolini, the racial thinking of Adolph Hitler and the mass thinking of Joseph Stalin are not what I mean by thinking. Read The Crowd, by Gustave LeBon.

Social Power

Social power is more important than politica1 power. And political power is not the road to social power. The road to social power is the right use of liberty. Read Our Enemy the State. by Albert Jay Nock.

Give Me Liberty

Patrick Henry said. “Give me liberty, or give me death!” What makes man a man is the right use of liberty.

The rugged individualists of the Liberty League, the strong-arm men of the Fascist State and the rugged collectivists of the Communist Party have not yet learned the right use of liberty. Read Freedom in the Modern World, by Jacques Maritain.

Everybody looks for a leader and nobody likes to be dictated to. Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin try to be at the same time leaders and dictators. A leader is a fellow who follows a cause in words and deeds. A follower is a fellow who follows the leader because he sponsors the cause that the leader follows. Read Leadership or Domination, by Paul Piggors. Paul Piggors makes a case for domination in times of crisis, and in this he is wrong. Domination is not the way to create order out of chaos. Leadership is always the way to create order out of chaos.

“A man is a man for all that,” says Robert Burns. To bring out the man in man, such is the purpose of the Communitarian Movement. A Communitarian is a fellow who refuses to be what the other fellow is, and chooses to be what he wants the other fellow to be. Read Easy Essays, by Peter Maurin.

Superfluous Goods

The problem of today.

General Johnson says that the problem of today is not to increase producing power, but to increase the consuming power. Saving to invest is considered a bourgeois virtue. while spending to consume is considered a bourgeois vice. While the thrifty bourgeois increases the producing power the bourgeois spendthrift increases the consuming power.

With Our Superfluous Goods

Bishop von Ketteler says that we are bound under pain of mortal sin to relieve the extreme needs of our needy brother with our superfluous goods. With our superfluous goods we build white elephants like the Empire State Building. With our superfluous goods we build power houses which increase the producing power and therefore increase unemployment. With our superfluous goods we build colleges which turn out students into a changing world without telling them how to keep it from changing or how to change it to suit college graduates.

Ambassadors of God

What we give to the poor for Christ’s sake is what we carry with us when we die. We are afraid to pauperize the poor because we are afraid to be poor. Pagan Greeks used to say that the poor “are the ambassadors of the gods.” To become poor is to become an Ambassador of God.

We Seem to Think

St. Francis thought that to choose to be poor is just as good as if one should marry the most beautiful girl in the world. We seem to think that poor people are social nuisances and not the Ambassadors of God. We seem to think that Lady Poverty is an ugly girl and not the beautiful girl that St. Francis of Assisi says she is. And because we think so, we refuse to feed the poor with our superfluous goods and let the politicians feed the poor by going around like pickpockets, robbing Peter to pay Paul, and feeding the poor by soaking the rich.

A Fourth Open Letter to Father Lord, SJ

We are living in a period of chaos. Our task must be to create order out of chaos. Creating order out of chaos ought to be the task of religious orders. The Jesuit Order would do well to open up Houses of Hospitality for the benefit of all college graduates. non-Catholics as well as Catholics. In those Houses of Hospitality unemployed college graduates would be given an historical background. Professor Carlton Hayes says that our religion is the only historical religion. A Catholic historical background given the unemployed college graduates in Houses of Hospitality would be the best antidote to Marxist materialism. It ought also to be that kind of historical background that would make them Co-operators or Guildists or Distributists or Communitarians. It would make them look up to the individual, not to the State, for the solution of social problems. Yours for the Green Revolution,

Back to Newmanism

President Hutchins, of the University of Chicago, says: “How can we call a man educated who has not read any of the great books of the Western World? Yet today, it is entirely possible for a student to graduate from the finest American colleges without having read any of them, except perhaps Shakespeare. Of course the student may have read of those books, or at least of their authors. But this knowledge is gained in general through textbooks. And the textbooks have probably done as much to degrade American intelligence as any single force.”

Cardinal Newman says: “If the intellect is a good thing, then its cultivation is an excellent thing. It must be cultivated not only as a good thing, but as a useful thing. It must not be useful in any low, mechanical, material sense. It must be useful in the spreading of goodness. It must be used by the owner for the good of himself and for the good of the world.”

Outdoor Universities

Father Bede Jarrett says: “The truths of a generation become the platitudes of the next generation.” Henrik Ibsen says: “Thought must be rewritten every twenty years.” That is to say eternal principles must at all times be presented in the vernacular of the man on the street. Emerson says that the way to acquire the vernacular of the man of the street is to go to the street and listen to the man of the street. The way to become dynamic and cease to be academic is to rub shoulders with the men on the street.

Some one said that the Catholic Worker is a movement for down-and-outs. And it is a movement for down-and-outs, including down-and-out business men, down-and-out college graduates and down-and-out college professors. In the Catholic Worker, besides being fed, clothed and sheltered, people learn to use their hands as well as their heads. And while they learn to use their heads to guide their hands, the use of their hands, improves a great deal the working of their heads.

In Silver Springs, a few miles from Washington, D. C., the Missionaries of the Holy Trinity combine manual labor with intellectual pursuits. They go to the Catholic University in the morning, build their own campus or cultivate their land in the afternoon and do their homework in the evening. While they do manual labor their mind is taken off their studies, which is to the benefit both of their health and their studies. In Silver Springs scholars try to be workers and workers try to be scholars.

The machine is not an improvement on man’s skill; it is an imitation of man’s skill. Read Post-Industrialism by Arthur Penty. The best means are the pure means and the pure means are the heroic means. Read Freedom in the Modern World by Jacques Maritain. The future of the Church is on the land, not in the city; for a child is an asset on the land and a liability in the city. Read The Church and the Land by Father Vincent McNabb, O.P.

The Thinking Journalist

Mark Hanna used to say: “When a dog bites a man, it is not news; but when a man bites a dog, it is news.” To let everybody know that a man has bitten a dog is not good news; it is bad news.

To tell everybody that a man died leaving two million dollars, may be journalism, but it is not good journalism. But to tell everybody that the man died leaving two million dollars because he did not know how to take them with him by giving them to the poor for Christ’s sake during his lifetime is good journalism. Good journalism is to give the news and the right comment on the news. The value of journalism is the value of the comment given with the news.

To be a good journalist is to say something interesting about interesting things or interesting people. The news is the occasion for the journalist to convey his thinking to unthinking people. Nothing can be done without public opinion, and the opinion of thinking people who know how to transmit their thinking to unthinking people.

A diary is a journal where a thinking man records his thinking. The Journal Intime of Frederic Amiel is the record of the thinking of Frederic Amiel. The thinking journalist imparts his thinking through a newspaper by relating his thinking to the news of the day. By relating his thinking to the news of the day. the thinking journalist affects public opinion.

By affecting public opinion, the thinking journalist is a creative agent in the making of news that is fit to print. The thinking journalist is not satisfied to be just a recorder of modern history. The thinking journalist aims to be a maker of that kind of history that is worth recording.

The Sit-Down Technique

On gandhi lines.

Strike news doesn’t strike me, but the sit-down strike is a different strike from the ordinary strike. In the sit-down strike you don’t strike anybody either on the jaw or under the belt, you just sit down. The sit-down strike is essentially a peaceful strike. If the sit-down strike remains a sit-down strike, that is to say, a strike in which you strike by just sitting down, it may be a means of bringing about desirable results. The sit-down strike must be conducted on Gandhi lines, that is to say, according to the doctrine of pure means as expressed by Jacques Maritain.

In the Middle Ages

The capitalist system is a racketeering system. It is a racketeering system because it is a profiteering system. It is a profiteering system because it is a profit system. And nobody has found the way to keep the profit system from becoming a profiteering system. Harold Laski says: “In the Middle Ages the idea of acquiring wealth was limited by a body of moral rules imposed under the sanction of religious authority.” But modern business men tell the clergy: “Mind your own business and don’t butt into our business.”

Economic Economy

In the Middle Ages they had a doctrine, the doctrine of the Common Good. In the Middle Ages they had an economy which was economical. Their economy was based on the idea that God wants us to be our brothers’ keepers. They believed in the right to work for the worker. They believed in being fair to the worker as well as the consumer. They believed in doing their work the best they knew how for the service of God and men.

Proper Property

Leon Harmel, who was an employer, not a labor leader, says: “We have lost the right concept of authority since the Renaissance.” We have not only lost the right concept of authority, we have also lost the right concept of property. The use of property to acquire more property is not the proper use of property. The right use of property is to enable the worker to do his work more effectively. The right use of property is not to compel the worker, under threat of unemployment, to be a cog in the wheel of mass production.

Speed-up System

Bourgeois capitalists believe in the law of supply and demand. Through mass production, bourgeois capitalists increase the supply and decrease the demand. The speed-up system and the extensive use of improved machinery has given us technological unemployment. As a Catholic worker said to me: “Ford speeds us up, making us do in one day three times as much work as before, then he lays us off.” To speed up the workers and then lay them off is to deny the worker the right to work.

Makers of Depressions

Business men used to say: “We make prosperity through our private enterprise.” According to business men, the workers have nothing to do with the making of prosperity. If the workers have nothing to do with the making of prosperity, they have nothing to do with the making of business depressions. The refusal of business men to accept the responsibility for business depressions is what makes the workers resort to sit-down strikes. If business men understood business they would find the way to increase the demand for manufactured products, instead of increasing the supply through the speed-up system and the extensive use of improved machinery.

Collective Bargaining

Business men have made such a mess of things without workers’ co-operation that they could do no worse with workers’ co-operation. Because the workers want to co-operate with the business men in the running of business is the reason why they sit down. The sit-down strike is for the worker the means of bringing about collective bargaining. Collective bargaining should lead to compulsory arbitration. Collective bargaining and compulsory arbitration will assure the worker the right to work.

The Modern Mind

Organized labor, whether it be the A.F. of L. or the C.I.O., is far from knowing what to do with the economic setup. Organized labor, as well as organized capital, is the product of the modern mind. The modern mind is in such a fog that it cannot see the forest for the trees. The modern mind has been led astray by the liberal mind. The endorsement of liberal economics by the liberal mind has given us this separation of the spiritual from the material, which we call secularism.

Paul Chanson

Organized labor, organized capital organized politics are essentially secularist minded. We need leaders to lead us in the making of a path from the things as they are to the things as they should be. I propose the formation of associations of Catholic employers as well as associations of Catholic union men. Employers and employees must be indoctrinated with the same doctrine. What is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. Paul Chanson, President of the Employers’ Association of the Port of Calais, France, has written a book expounding this doctrine, Workers’ Rights and the Guildist Order.

The Law of Holiness

“No man can serve two masters, God and Mammon.” “Be perfect as your Heavenly Father is perfect.” “If you want to be perfect sell all you have, give it to the poor and follow Me.” –New Testament. “These are hard words,” says Robert Louis Stevenson. “but the hard words of a book were the only reason why the book was written.”

In his encyclical on St. Francis of Sales the Holy Father says: “We cannot accept the belief that this command of Christ concerns only a select and privileged group. and that all others may consider themselves pleasing to Him if they have attained a lesser degree of holiness. Quite the contrary is true, as appears from the generality of His words. The law of holiness embraces all men and admits of no exception.”

There is a rub between the rich who like to get richer and the poor who don’t like to get poorer. The rich, who like to get richer, turn to the Church to save them from the poor who don’t like to get poorer. But the Church can only tell the rich who like to get richer, “Woe to you rich, who like to get richer, if you don’t help the poor who don’t like to get poorer.”

Utilitarians, Futilitarians, Totalitarians

Utilitarian philosophers.

After a century of Protestantism, England and Scotland saw the coming out of a philosophical thought known in history as Utilitarian Philosophy. While Luther and Calvin discarded the authority of the Church the Utilitarian Philosophers discarded the authority of Divine Revelation. They tried to convince themselves and convince other people that the Church and the Bible were a handicap, rather than a help, in man’s striving towards the good life.

Futilitarian Economists

The Utilitarian Philosophers, Hobbes, Locke, Hume, were followed by the Futilitarian Economists, Adam Smith, Ricardo. The Futilitarian Economists thought that religion had nothing to do with business. They thought that everything would be lovely if everybody took in each other’s washing. They thought that everybody should try to sell what he has to sell to the highest bidder. So people started to think of time in terms of money, and ended by shouting: “Time is money!”

Fascism and Marxism

Now that economic liberalism is dying out, modern liberals find themselves on the spot. They try to escape, from what they consider to be an untenable position. In their attempt to escape the shifting sands of liberalism, they look for authority; not the authority of the teaching Church but the authority of the political State, whether it be the Marxist State or the Fascist State. Fascism is a stop-gap between the dictatorship of bourgeois capitalism and the dictatorship of Marxian Socialism.

Capitalism, Fascism, Communism

In an article published in the Christian Front, Charles P. Bruehl says: “Those who fondly believe that Fascism will save the world from Communism are laboring under a fatal delusion. The ideologies of those two are closely allied. They have too much in common and their differences can be readily effaced. The three, capitalism, Fascism, Communism are three in a chain. Imperceptibly one passes into the other. All three are fundamentally materialistic, secularistic, totalitarian.”

The Way to Fight Communism

Twenty and forty.

A Dutch convert used to say: “When one is not a Socialist at twenty, there is something wrong with his heart; but if one is a Socialist at forty there is something wrong with his head.”

The order of the day in Catholic circles is to fight Communism. To denounce Communism in Catholic halls is not an efficient way to fight Communism. The daily practice of the Works of Mercy is a more efficient way to fight Communism. The daily practice of the Works of Mercy by the first Christians made the pagans say about the Christians “See how they love each other.”

Irish Scholars

When the Irish scholars decided to lay the foundations of medieval Europe, they established: Centers of Thought in all the cities of Europe as far as Constantinople, where people could look for thought so they could have light. Houses of Hospitality where Christian charity was exemplified. Agricultural Centers where they combined (a) Cult– that is to say Liturgy (b) with Culture– that is to say Literature (c) with Cultivation– that is to say Agriculture.

Chinese Catholics

Chinese Catholics are showing us the way to fight Communism. Non-Catholic writers are writing about the mode of living of the Brothers of St. John Baptist. Chinese Communists went to visit the Brothers and told them that their mode of living is more perfect than the mode of living of the Communist Party. The Brothers of St. John Baptist try to exemplify the Sermon on the Mount. The Sermon on the Mount is considered practical by the Brothers of St. John Baptist.

If you want to know what industrialism has done to man, read Man the Unknown, by Dr. Alexis Carrel. If you want to know how we got that way, read A Guildsman’s Interpretation of History, by Arthur Penty. If you want to know what it is to be a bourgeois, read The Bourgeois Mind, by Nicholas Berdyaev. If you want to know what religion has to do with culture, read Enquiries Into Religion and Culture, by Christopher Dawson. If you want to know what to do with freedom, read Freedom in the Modern World, by Jacques Maritain.

Against Class War

The trouble has been.

Hilaire Belloc says the modern proletarian works less hours and does far less than his father. He is not even primarily in revolt against insecurity. The trouble has been that the masses of our towns lived under unbearable conditions. The contracts they were asked to fulfill were not contracts that were suitable to the dignity of man. There was no personal relation between the man who was exploited and the man who exploited him. Wealth had lost its sense of responsibility.

Twin Cities

In St. Paul there are few strikers and few Reds. In Minneapolis there are plenty of strikes and plenty of Reds. In St. Paul the employers try to play fair with the workers and the workers with the employers. In Minneapolis the employers choose to be rugged individualists and the workers consent to be rugged col1ectivists. Rugged individualists and rugged collectivists are spiritually related.

Class-Consciousness

Georges Sorel thought that violence is the midwife of existing societies. When the employers believe in violence the workers also believe in it. Class-consciousness among employers brings class-consciousness among the workers. To do away with class struggle we must first of all do away with class-consciousness among employers. The workers are what the employers make them. When employers are moved by greed the workers are inclined to carry a grudge.

Paul Chanson Says:

Whether we like it or not the economic system is necessarily related to the regime of appropriation of the tools of production. If Bourgeois Capitalism appropriates the ownership the worker becomes a serf. If Bolshevik Socialism monopolizes the ownership the worker’s condition is not better. He is reduced to a state of slavery. Only a Guildist and Communitarian economy will bring about the worker’s emancipation. Paul Chanson, who says those things, is not a labor leader. He is the President of the Employers Association of the Port of Calais in France.

Unpopular Front

The Unpopular Front is a front composed of: Humanists, who try to be human to man; Theists, who believe that God wants us to be our brother’s keeper; Christians, who believe in the Sermon on the Mount as well as the Ten Commandments; Catholics, who believe in the Thomistic Doctrine of the Common Good.

War and Peace

Barbarians and civilized.

We call barbarians people living on the other side of the border. We call civilized people living on this side of the border. We civilized, living on this side of the border, are not ashamed to arm ourselves to the teeth so as to protect ourselves against the barbarians living on the other side. And when the barbarians born on the other side of the border invade us, we do not hesitate to kill them before we have tried to civilize them. So we civilized exterminate barbarians without civilizing them. And we persist in calling ourselves civilized.

German and French

After the fall of the Roman Empire German barbarians invaded Gaul, now called France. The German barbarians came as invaders and were civilized by the invaded. The Gallo-Germans living in Gaul, now called France, were Christians. Through a Christian technique the Gallo-Romans made Christians out of the German invaders. So the German invaders gave up their religion as well as their language and took up the religion as well as the language of the invaded.

Italians and Ethiopians

Italian soldiers went to Ethiopia to civilize the Ethiopians. The Italian soldiers still think that invaders can civilize the invaded. But the Ethiopians do not like the way the Italian soldiers try to civilize them. The best way to civilize the Ethiopians is to prepare Ethiopian young men for the priesthood. As Christopher Dawson says, culture has a lot to do with religion.

Spaniards and Moors

Moors from Morocco ruled part of Spain for eight hundred years. They imposed Mohammedanism on the Spaniards through the power of the sword. After eight hundred years, the Spanish Christians decided to give the Moors a dose of their own medicine. So the Spanish Christians drove the Moors out of Spain through the power of the sword. Before the war, Spanish Christians failed to make use of the power of the word. Spanish Christians seem to have more faith in the power of the sword than the power of the word. So had the Moors when ruling part of Spain for eight hundred years.

Stalinites and Trotskyites

Eugene Lyons says that Lenin and Trotsky accepted the idea that the end justifies the means. They thought that an idealistic end could be reached by bloody means. Because they resorted to bloody means, Stalin resorts to bloody means. The State has not yet withered away and the Communist ideal is still out of sight.

No Party Line

The Catholic Worker is free-lance movement not a partisan movement. Some of the Bishops agree with our policies and some don’t. We are criticized by many Catholics for some of our policies and especially our Spanish policy. The Communist Party has a party line. The Catholic Worker has no party line. There is no party line in the Catholic Church.

Beyond Marxism

The U.S.S.R means the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics. There is no Communism in Soviet Russia. According to Karl Marx, “Communism is a society wherein one works according to his ability and gets according to his needs,” Such a society is found in Catholic monasteries but not in Soviet Russia. That is why Strachey was told by Father McNabb, an English Dominican, “I am a Communist; you are only an amateur.” In the beginning of Christianity the hungry were fed, the naked were clothed, the homeless were sheltered, the ignorant were instructed at a personal sacrifice. And the pagans used to say about the Christians, “See how they love each other.” Father Arthur Ryan, born in Tipperary, used to call this period of history “Christian Communism.” But it is a long, long way to Tipperary.

Priests and Policemen

Jean Jacques Rousseau said: “Man is naturally good.” Business men say: “Man is naturally bad; you can do nothing with human nature.” If it is true, as business men say, that you can do nothing with human nature, then we need fewer priests and more policemen. But if God the Father sent His own begotten Son to redeem men, then we need more priests and fewer policemen.

Non-Catholic Catholics

Apologetic catholics.

Some Catholics like to apologize for being Catholics. Since Catholicism is the truth, it is foolish to apologize for being Catholics. Since Catholicism is the truth then Catholics ought to let non-Catholics apologize for not being Catholics. To let non-Catholics apologize for not being Catholics is good apologetics. To apologize for being Catholics is bad apologetics.

Led by the Nose

Non-Catholics say that Catholics are led by the nose by the clergy. Real Catholics follow their consciences. I must admit that some Catholics are led by the nose. These Catholics who are led by the nose are not led by the nose by the clergy. They are led by the nose by non-Catholics. These Catholics who allow themselves to be led by the nose by non-Catholics ought to be called non-Catholic Catholics.

A Wrong Way

Non-Catholic Catholics tell us that one cannot lead a Catholic life in a Protestant country.

The protestation of Protestants is not a protestation against the Catholicism of non-Catholic Catholics. It is a protestation against the lack of Catholicism of non-Catholic Catholics. Non-Catholic Catholics are giving to Protestants a wrong view of Catholicism. To give to Protestants a wrong view of Catholicism is not the right way to make Catholics out of Protestants.

Catholic Principles

Protestants have principles but Catholics have more principles than Protestants. But principles must be applied. To have principles and not to apply them is worse than not having any. Non-Catholic Catholics fail to bring Catholic principles to Protestants because they do not dare to exemplify those Catholic principles that Protestants do not have.

Non-Catholic Catholics like to tell their Protestant friends. “we are just as good as you are.” They ought to tell their Protestant friends, “we are just as bad as you are.” Their Protestant friends ought to tell the non-Catholic Catholics, “you are not just as bad as we are; you are much worse than we are for you are our imitators, you are not yourselves.”

Not Liberals But Radicals

The word liberal.

The word liberal is used in Europe in a different way from the way it is used in America. In Europe a liberal is a man who believes in liberty without knowing what to do with it. Harold Laski accuses liberals of having used their intelligence without knowing what to do with it. Liberals are too liberal to be radicals. To be a radical is to go to the roots. Liberals don’t go to the roots; they only scratch the surface. The only way to go to the roots is to bring religion into education, into politics, into business. To bring religion into the profane is the best way to take profanity out of the profane. To take profanity out of the profane is to bring sanity into the profane. Because we aim to do just that we like to be called radicals.

A Letter from Peter

Dec. 28, 1938 Seattle, Wash.

Dear Dorothy: I arrived in Seattle safe and sound except for a couple bruises on the chin. We were driving back to Spokane from the Jesuit House of Studies. Father Robinson, dean of Gonzaga College, was the driver. I was sitting in the back with a Jesuit scholastic. Our conversation was so interesting for Father Robinson that he forgot to stop at a red light and ran into the middle of a city bus. The head of his car was smashed. His nose was cut while his glasses, which he was wearing, were not broken. The Jesuit scholastic had a cut above the left eye. I was hurt by bumping my chin against the front seat. The schools being closed, I was only able to talk to the scholastics in the House of Studies. It was Bishop White who phoned Father Robinson about me being in town. I am coming back to Spokane the 9, 10, 11 January. I spent Christmas in Butte with Elias Seaman. With a Catholic Hindu student in the School of Mines we went to midnight Mass at a Croatian Church. This Croatian pastor is a great friend of The Catholic Worker. I am sending you a fifty-dollar check, to help pay the debts.

While in St. Paul I paid fifty-two dollars and forty cents for a 5,569-mile trip. That trip takes me from St. Paul to Seattle, then to Los Angeles, then to Denver, then to Omaha, then to St. Paul. I can stop anywhere I want and it is good for 150 days. They intend to start a Catholic Worker group in Minneapolis. It is also a question of a farming commune. Father Le Beau at St. Thomas College, Father Loosen at St. Mary’s Hospital, Sister Helen Angela at St. Joseph’s Hospital are great boosters of The Catholic Worker. Dr. John Giesen is actively connected with a Mexican center. Dr. Bauer, a German sociologist, is now at St. Thomas and is eager to co-operate with The Catholic Worker. Before leaving St. Paul I made a short trip to Eau Claire and La Crosse. The pastor of Eau Claire agrees with us: the youth needs a cause. A Y. M. C. A. secretary in La Crosse is very much in sympathy with the idea of an Unpopular Front on Personalist Democracy. I found that the reaction to The Catholic Worker propaganda is very favorable. There was very little talk either about Franco or Father Coughlin. I wish you all a Happy New Year. Yours in Christ the Worker,

Looking Backward

In new england.

There are three kinds of people in New England: the foreigners. the Irish and the Yankees. The foreigners of New England have given up their own traditions to keep up with the Irish. The Irish of New England have given up their own scholarship to keep up with the Yankees. The Yankees of New England have given up their New England conscience to keep up with the utilitarian, futilitarian political economists of the Manchester School of political economy. So what can you expect from New England?

In Louisiana

Waldo Frank says that America is a lost continent and that to rediscover itself America must go back to Mediterranean thought. Mediterranean thought was brought to Louisiana by the founders of Louisiana, but the people of Louisiana have turned over the State of Louisiana to greedy corporations. The Catholic people of the State of Louisiana had to have a Baptist lawyer by the name of Huey Long to save them from the grip that greedy corporations had on the Catholic people of the State of Louisiana.

Spanish Franciscans went to Texas when Texas was part of Old Mexico. Spanish Franciscans taught the Indians to build churches, to build schools, to build mission-storehouses. The ruins of those churches, the ruins of those schools, the ruins of those mission-storehouses can still be seen in the State of Texas. But the Catholic people of Texas are not interested in the ideology of the Spanish Franciscans. They are interested in keeping up with the Yankees.

In California

The Yankees were not able to make wage-slaves out of the Indians. The Yankees used to say: “A good Indian is a dead Indian.” By combining cult, that is to say liturgy, with culture, that is to say literature, with cultivation, that is to say agriculture, the Spanish Franciscans who went to California succeeded in making willing workers out of the Indians. The Catholics of California have not found the way to do for the Catholic unemployed what the Spanish Franciscans did for the Indians. In the meantime the people of California are looking for a panacea at the expense of the taxpayers.

Going to the Right

Frey of the A. F. of L. says that the Communist Party is pushing Roosevelt to the left. The A. F. of L. does not know enough to push Roosevelt to the right. Going to the left is going towards the Industrial Socialism of Stalin. Going to the right is going towards the Rural Communism of the Franciscan Founders who founded Rural Communes in what are now the State of Texas, the State of New Mexico, the State of California.

Turning to the Church

When I was in St. Louis I met a Maryknoll Father who had recently returned to the United States after eight years in China as a Maryknoll Missionary. He is pleased to see that non-Catholics in the United States are much more curious about the Catholic Church than they were before he left for China ten years ago. While modern nations give the sad spectacle of going back on their word, intelligent people are turning to the Church as the one moral security left in the world. Father McSorley, great friend of The Catholic Worker, has always favored the opening of small offices where non-Catholics curious about the Church could receive information.

Prostitution

Prostitution of marriage.

Birth control is not self-control. What is not self-control is self-indulgence. What is self-indulgence is prostitution of functions. Prostitution in marriage is prostitution of marriage. Prostitution of marriage is prostitution plus hypocrisy.

Prostitution of Education

To educate is to elevate. To elevate is to raise. To raise wheat on a piece of land is to enable that piece of land to produce wheat instead of weeds. To raise men from the animal state to the cultural state is to educate men. The teaching of facts without understanding is a prostitution of education.

Prostitution of the Press

Modern newspapermen try to give people what they want. Newspapermen ought to give people what they need. To give people what they want but should not have is to pander. To give people what they need. or in other terms, to make them want what they ought to want, is to foster. To pander to the bad in men is to make men inhuman to men. To foster the good in men is to make men human to men.

Prostitution of Politics

The Republicans say: “Let’s turn the rascals out.” The Democrats say: “Let’s turn the rascals out.” The Republicans call the Democrats rascals. The Democrats call the Republicans rascals. For the Republicans as well as for the Democrats politics is just profitable business. By making a business out of politics politicians have prostituted the noble calling of politics.

Prostitution of Property

All the land belongs to God. God wants us to be our brother’s keeper. Our superfluous goods must be used to relieve the needs of our brother. What we do for our brother for Christ’s sake is what we carry with us when we die. This is what the poor are for, to give to the rich the occasion to do good for Christ’s sake. To use property to acquire more property is not the proper use of property. It is a prostitution of property.

Prostitution of the Theatre

What applies to the Press applies also to the Theatre. In the Middle Ages the Theatre was considered as an efficient way of preaching, They liked to produce Mystery Plays. They aimed to preach and not to pander. Pandering to the crowd has brought the degradation of the theatre. The Theatre started in the Church. The Theatre has ended in the gutter.

Prostitution of Art

In the Middle Ages the artists were not called artists, they were called artisans. When the artists were artisans they had the community spirit. They had the community spirit because they believed in the doctrine of the Common Good. Now that the artists do no longer believe in the doctrine of the Common Good they sell their work to art speculators. As Eric Gill says, “they have become the lap-dogs of the bourgeoisie.”

The Road To Communism

Paraguay reductions.

In a book entitled The Magic Mountain Thomas Mann has a character who has become a Jesuit after having been a Marxist. As a Jesuit he could understand Communism much better than he could understand it as a Marxist. In Paraguay the Jesuits established a Communist society. Part of the land was held individually. The other part, known as God’s land, was cultivated in common. The produce was used for the maintenance of the aged, the infirm and the young.

Proudhon and Marx

“Communism is a society where each one works according to his ability and gets according to his needs.” Such a definition does not come from Marx; it comes from Proudhon. Proudhon wrote two volumes on The Philosophy of Poverty which Karl Marx read in two days. Karl Marx wrote a volume on The Poverty of Philosophy. Karl Marx was too much of a materialist to understand the philosophical and therefore social value of voluntary poverty.

The Sixth Column

We Catholics believe what Dualist Humanists believe, that there is good and bad in men and that men ought to express the good to get rid of the bad. We Catholics believe what Orthodox Jews and Quakers believe: the Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of Men. We Catholics believe what Fundamentalists believe: Virgin Birth and Redemption through Christ. We Catholics believe what the other believers believe plus beliefs that the other believers don’t believe: Papal Supremacy and the Universal Church.

The Catholic Worker stands for co-operativism against capitalism. The Catholic Worker stands for personalism against Socialism. The Catholic Worker stands for leadership against dictatorship. The Catholic Worker stands for agrarianism against industrialism. The Catholic Worker stands for decentralism against totalitarianism.

On Specialization

Ten years ago I asked a college professor to give me the formulation of those universal concepts embodied in the universal message of universal universities that would enable the common man to create a universal economy. And the college professor answered: “That is not my subject.” College professors are specialists who know more and more about less and less and if they keep on specializing they will end by knowing everything about nothing.

A Negro student had a father who was a Baptist minister. The Baptist minister gave to his son Baptist theology but no science. And the son wanted to know science. In the University of Pittsburgh the Negro student learned several sciences without correlation. And the Negro student was complaining about the University of Pittsburgh for having failed to give him a correlated knowledge.

Henry Adams went to four American universities without acquiring a correlated knowledge. He went to England and failed. He went to France and failed. But in France, looking at the Cathedral of Chartres and the Mont Saint Michel, he realized that one could have acquired a correlated knowledge in thirteenth century France. And he wrote a book entitled Mont Saint Michel and Chartres, now published by the American Society of Architects.

Pie In The Sky

Bourgeois capitalists don’t want their pie in the sky when they die. They want their pie here and now. To get their pie here and now bourgeois capitalists give us better and bigger commercial wars for the sake of markets and raw materials. But as Sherman says, “War is hell.” So we get hell here and now because bourgeois capitalists don’t want their pie in the sky when they die, but want their pie here and now.

Bolshevist Socialists, like bourgeois capitalists, don’t want their pie in the sky when they die. They want their pie here and now. To get their pie here and now, Bolshevist Socialists give us better and bigger class wars for the sake of capturing the control of the means of production and distribution. But war is hell, whether it is a commercial war or a class war. So we get hell here and now because Bolshevist Socialists don’t want their pie in the sky when they die, but want their pie here and now.

Bolshevist Socialists as well as bourgeois capitalists give us hell here and now without leaving us the hope of getting our pie in the sky when we die. We just get hell. Catholic Communionism leaves us the hope of getting our pie in the sky when we die without giving us hell here and now.

Let’s Keep the Jews for Christ’s Sake

The Jews are a mystery to themselves. They are not a nation, although the Zionists try to build up one in Palestine. They are not a race. for they have intermarried with many other races. They are not a religion, since their belief calls for one Temple and the Jewish Temple has not been in existence for nearly 2,000 years.

St. Vincent Ferrer, a Spanish Dominican, succeeded in converting 25,000 Jews. When the Spaniards decided to drive the Moors out they also decided to drive the Jews out. St. Vincent Ferrer tried to convert the Jews; he did not start a crusade to drive them out. Driven out of Spain, the Jews found a refuge in Salonika, which was then under the Turkish flag. Spanish is still spoken by Jewish workmen in Salonika.

In the Papal States

The Popes never did start a crusade to drive the Jews out of the Papal States. Jews have lived in Rome and the adjoining territory since the Roman Empire. The Roman Empire protected the Jews living under its rule, and so did the Popes in the Papal States. The Jews themselves admit the fairness with which they were treated in the Papal States.

In the Shadow of the Cross

While the Spaniards refused to keep the Jews the Popes consented to keep the Jews. The Jews were the chosen people and they are still, for God does not change. Because the Jews did not recognize Christ is not a good reason for acting towards them in a non-Christian manner. The presence of the Jews all over the world is a reminder to the world of the coming of Christ. The Jews who refused to accept the Cross find their best protection in the shadow of the Cross.

Under the shadow of the Cross the Jews were protected; under the Swastika they are persecuted. The Cross stands for one thing, the Swastika for another thing. The Cross stands for race equality; the Swastika stands for race superiority. The Catholic Church stands for human brotherhood, the Nazi regime stands for the expansion of one race at the expense of the other races.

The English Puritans found a refuge in America. The French Huguenots found a refuge in America. The Irish Catholics found a refuge in America. The German Liberals found a refuge in America. America is big enough to find a refuge for persecuted Jews as well as persecuted Christians.

In Palestine

America can produce more than it can consume. What America needs is more consumers. More Jews in America means more consumers for America. It is said that the Jews flock to the cities and become middle men, and that there are too many middle men in America. But in Palestine the Jews are building both cities and country. What the Jews are doing in Palestine they can do also in America.

Logical and Practical

What is not logical is not practical, even if it is practiced. What is logical is practical even if it is not practiced. To practice what is not logical though it is practical is to be a bourgeois. A bourgeois is a fellow who tries to be somebody by trying to be like everybody, which makes him nobody. To practice what is logical even if it is not practiced is to be a leader. A leader is a fellow who follows a cause. The Sermon on the Mount will be called practical when Christians make up their mind to practice it.

For A New Order

The age of reason.

In the seventeenth century a Frenchman by the name of Descartes discarded Thomistic philosophy and formulated a philosophy of his own. St. Thomas’ philosophy starts with Aristotle and helps the reason to accept revelation. For St. Thomas Aquinas reason is the handmaid of faith; not so for Descartes. The eighteenth century became known as the age of enlightenment or the age of reason. An American by the name of Thomas Paine wrote a book entitled The Age of Reason.

The Age of Treason

The use of reason was discarded by the intellectuals of the nineteenth century. Romanticism, positivism, pragmatism, one after another, became the fashion in the nineteenth century. In a book entitled The Treason of the Intellectuals Julien Benda, a French Jew, says the intellectuals gave up the search for truth and consented to become the paid propagandists of nationalists as well as capitalists. So the age of reason of the eighteenth century was followed by the age of treason of the nineteenth century.

The Age of Chaos

And we are now in the age of chaos. In an age of chaos people look for a new order. Because people are becoming aware of this lack of order they would like to be able to create order out of chaos. The time to create order out of chaos is now. The germ of the present was in the past and the germ of the future is in the present. The thing to do is to give up old tricks and start to play new tricks.

The Age of Order

If we make the right decisions in the age of chaos the effect of those decisions will be a better order. The new order brought about by right decisions will be functional, not acquisitive; personalist, not socialist; communitarian, not collectivist; organismic, not mechanistic. The thing to do right now is to create a new society within the shell of the old with the philosophy of the new. which is not a new philosophy but a very old philosophy. a philosophy so old that it looks like new.

True Stories

When I was in Spokane a Catholic Sister told me: “I have a little story to tell you and I think you will like it. I met an Indian woman who was carrying what looked like a white boy. I said to her: ‘You don’t mean to tell me that you married a white man.’ ‘Oh no,’ she said, ‘Just a Frenchman’.”

An Englishman and an American were flying over the Egyptian Soudan. Under them was a stretch of houses four miles long. The American asked the Englishman: “What is the population of this town?” “Nine Englishmen,” answered the Englishman.

A German owned a fruit farm in British Columbia. He and his wife were considered as second-class citizens by the British element. His wife succeeded in inducing him to sell the fruit farm and go back to Germany. She could not stand to be considered inferior by the British element. The English think that they are superior to the Germans and the Germans think they are superior to the English. They cannot stand to be considered inferiors. They can give it but cannot take it.

Let’s Be Fair to the Negroes for Christ’s Sake

The anthropologists say that the western world is anthropologically divided into four kinds of people. They are: a) the Nordics, b) the Alpines, c) the Mediterraneans, d) the Negroes.

Anthropologists add that there is nothing in science to prove that one race is superior to another race. Science cannot prove that the Nordics are superior to another race. Theologians say that Christ died for the redemption of the Negroes as well as the Nordics. The Nordics were created by the same Creator and redeemed by the same Redeemer as the Negroes. The redeemed Nordics will enjoy the beatific vision in the same Heaven as the Negroes. The redeemed Nordics receive the same Christ at the altar rail as the Negroes. The redeemed Nordics belong to the same Mystical Body as the Negroes.

The Holy Father has recently selected African Negro priests and made them Bishops. The Negro Bishops of Africa have the same powers as the Nordic Bishops of Germany. Nordic Bishops are all right for Nordic people and Negro Bishops are all right for Negro people. The Catholic Church wants Nordic Bishops to lead Nordic people and Negro Bishops to lead Negro people. The Catholic Church does not differentiate between Nordic Bishops and Negro Bishops.

The Stuff and the Push

I was in a cafeteria in Greenwich Village. Two young fellows were talking. One said to the other, “Your father has the stuff, but he hasn’t the push.” And the other said: “And I have the push, but not the stuff.” The father had the stuff, but he could not push it, and the son had the push, but he had nothing to push. Catholic journalists have the stuff, but do not have the push, and non-Catholic journalists have the push, but do not have the stuff.

On American Traits

“I have lived in all the major dictatorships– Russia, Italy, Germany. My experience teaches me that democracy with all its faults is better than any of these. My experience teaches me that the maintenance of personal freedom should be the primary consideration of every human being. It is never a choice between freedom and a full stomach. No dictatorship has given either.” LOUIS FISHER

At the base of the American spirit is the functionalism of frontier life, not the acquisitivism of the Chamber of Commerce. The American spirit is characterized by the love of freedom, the spirit of initiative and the will to co-operate. The American does not like to be pushed about and to be sent where he does not want to go. Even the business man likes to talk about the spirit of initiative, which he calls free enterprise. When in America some one is busy doing something for the Common Good he finds people willing to co-operate.

Freedom is a duty more than a right. Man has a duty to be intelligent. Man has a duty to choose intelligently between two alternatives. Man has a duty to act intelligently, using pure means to reach pure aims. To use impure means to reach pure aims is to take the wrong road. You cannot go where you want to go by taking a road which does not lead you there. Having pure aims and using pure means is making the right use of freedom.

The spirit of initiative is what business men call free enterprise. A private enterprise must be carried out for the common good. If a private enterprise is not carried out for the Common Good it turns out to be a public nuisance. A public nuisance produces grievances. Personal grievances against public nuisances produces demagogues who promise to wipe out public nuisances. The spirit of initiative of social-minded people brings into existence social institutions that make for the welfare of the common people.

When someone has something considered by the common man to be beneficial to the Common Good he is admired by the common man. The admiration of unselfish men who are not afraid to take the initiative creates a desire among the admirers to climb on the bandwagon of men of initiative. They want to be part of an unselfish movement. They are willing to make sacrifices for the common cause. So the will to co-operate is the result of the daring of unselfish men who are not afraid to take the initiative.

Christianity and Democracy

The Common Good is not common, because common sense does not prevail. In a good autocracy the Common Good is incarnated in a good autocrat. In a good aristocracy the Common Good is incarnated in the good aristocrats. In a good democracy the Common Good is incarnated in the good democrats. The good democrats are democrats with the democratic spirit. They are the elite in a democracy.

Jules Beranger followed Jusserand as French Ambassador in Washington. Beranger was an agnostic who could not conceive of a democracy without a cultural elite. The elite in a democracy is imbued with what we call the right spirit. The democratic elite is the spearhead of a democratic society. The democratic elite is recruited from all classes of a democratic society. The democratic elite is not moved by greed for wealth or greed for power. It is moved by clear thinking.

Agnostic intellectuals lack faith in Christ the Redeemer as well as in God the Omnipotent. And now they are losing faith in the power of man to pull himself up by his own bootstraps. Faith in Christ the Redeemer, hope in the life to come, and charity toward all men are motivating forces in the fostering of a democratic elite– without which a democratic society becomes the laughing-stock of totalitarian societies.

What a fine place this world would be if Dualist Humanists tried to be human to men. What a fine place this world would be if Personalist Theists tried to be their brother’s keeper as God wants them to be. What a fine place this world would be if Fundamentalist Protestants tried to exemplify the Sermon on the Mount. What a floe place this world would be if Roman Catholics tried to keep up with St. Francis of Assisi.

On Personalism

A stone is not an individual. You can make little ones out of big ones. A tree is an individual. It comes from a germ. “Only God can make a tree,” says the poet. A horse is an individual. The horse is not an individual the way the tree is an individual. It has animal life. Man is an individual and has animal life like the horse. Man has also reason. which the horse has not.

As an animal, man is an individual. As a reasoning animal, man is a person. The difference between an individual and a person is the power of reasoning. Through the use of reason man becomes aware of the existence of God. Through the use of reason man becomes aware of his rights as well as his responsibilities. Man’s rights and responsibilities come from God, who made him a reasoning animal. Man’s primary duty is to act according to reason.

To guide himself man has not only reason but also faith. Faith is not opposed to reason, it is above reason. The use of reason leads to faith, but reason cannot understand all the faith. The truths of faith that reason cannot understand, we call the mysteries of faith. To use reason is to philosophize and philosophy is the handmaid of faith. Some truths we get through reason and some truths we get through faith.

Emmanuel Mounier wrote a book entitled A Personalist Manifesto. Emmanuel Mounier has been influenced by Charles Peguy. Charles Peguy once said: “There are two things in the world: politics and mysticism.” For Charles Peguy as well as Mounier, politics is the struggle for power while mysticism is the realism of the spirit. For the man-of-the-street politics is just politics and mysticism is the right spirit. In his Personalist Manifesto Mounier tries to explain what the man-of-the-street call “the right spirit.”

Five Forms of Capitalism

Mercantile capitalism.

In the Middle Ages the consumer went to the producer and asked the producer to produce something for him. There was no middle man between the producer and the consumer. When the producer started to sell his products to the middle man he no longer saw the consumer. The producer saw only the middle man and the consumer saw only the middle man and the middle man was only interested in buying cheap and selling dear. And the functional society ceased to exist and the acquisitive society came into existence. And everybody shouted: “Time is money!”

Factory Capitalism

When the use of steam was discovered the middle men started factories. The craftsmen deserted their craft shops and went to work in the factories and became factory hands. Factory owners turned out gadgets to take drudgery out of the home. And then they took women out of the home and brought them into factories. And then they took children out of the home and brought them into factories. And men had to stay home to look after young children.

Monopoly Capitalism

With the American Civil War, monopoly capitalism came into existence. With monopoly capita1ism came the trusts. With monopoly capitalism came high tariffs for the protection of infant industries. With monopoly capitalism came unionism for the protection of proletarianized workers. With monopoly capitalism came trust-busting laws for the protection of the buying public. With monopoly capitalism came Federal laws for the conservation of raw materials.

Finance Capitalism

With the first World War finance capitalism came into existence. With finance capitalism came installment buying. In January, 1927, the Yale Review published an article by a business man in which he said that installment buying has the result of booming boom years and starving lean years. Installment buying gave us the New Era and the promise of a two-car garage, a chicken in every pot and a sign “To Let” in front of every poorhouse. But this promise failed to materialize and people found themselves in the midst of the depression.

State Capitalism

Finance capitalism has not been able to employ the unemployed. The State has now assumed the task of employing the unemployed. Economic activities are now supervised by State bureaucrats. State bureaucrats can give the people State supervision. State supervision is not a substitute for personal vision. And without personal vision people perish. Personalist vision leads to personalist action. Personalist action means personal responsibility. Personal responsibility means dynamic democracy.

Educational Secularism

Puritans came to America so they could worship God the way they wanted to worship God. Quakers came to America so they could worship God the way they wanted to worship God. Huguenots came to America so they could worship God the way they wanted to worship God. English Catholics came to America so they could worship God the way they wanted to worship God.

The founders of America agreed in this, that there is a God and that God wants to be worshipped. The founders of America did not agree about the way God wants to be worshipped. That there is a God and that God wants to be worshipped is no longer taught in the public schools of America. Religion is no longer taught in the public schools of America, but politics and business are still taught in the public schools of America.

When religion has nothing to do with education, education is only information: plenty of facts but no understanding. When religion has nothing to do with politics, politics is only factionalism: let’s turn the rascals out so our good friends can get in. When religion has nothing to do with business business is only commercialism: let’s get all we can while the getting is good.

The Marxists and the Chambers of Commerce agree in this, that religion ought to be kept out of the public schools. And American Protestants keep silent about the secularism of the public schools. In the nineteenth century public schools were the hotbeds of bourgeois capitalism. In the twentieth century public schools are the hotbeds of Bolshevist Socialism.

Irish Culture

After the fall of the Roman Empire the scholars, scattered all over the Roman Empire, looked for a refuge and found a refuge in Ireland, where the Roman Empire did not reach and where the Teutonic barbarians did not go. In Ireland, the scholars formulated an intellectual synthesis and a technique of action. Having formulated that intellectual synthesis and that technique of action, the scholars decided to lay the foundations of medieval Europe.

In order to lay the foundations of medieval Europe, the Irish Scholars established Salons de Culture in all the cities of Europe, as far as Constantinople, where people could look for thought so they could have light. And it was in the so-called Dark Ages which were not so dark, when the Irish were the light. But we are now living in a real Dark Age, and one of the reasons why the modern age is so dark, is because too few Irish have the light.

The Irish Scholars established free guest houses all over Europe to exemplify Christian charity. This made pagan Teutonic rulers tell pagan Teutonic people: “The Irish are good people busy doing good.” And when the Irish were good people busy doing good, they did not bother about empires. That is why we never heard about an Irish Empire. We heard about all kinds of empires, including the British Empire, but never about an Irish Empire, because the Irish did not bother about empires when they were busy doing good.

The Irish Scholars established agricultural centers all over Europe where they combined cult– that is to say liturgy with culture– that is to say literature, with cultivation– that is to say agriculture. And the word America was for the first time printed on a map in a town in east France called Saint-Die where an Irish scholar by the name Deodad founded an agricultural center. What was done by Irish missionaries after the fall of the Roman Empire can be done today during and after the fall of modern empires.

Catholic Action

Our business.

Catholic Bourgeois used to tell the clergy “Mind your own business and don’t butt in on our business.” Catholic bourgeois by keeping up with non-Catholic bourgeois have made a mess of their own business. And now the Holy Father tells Catholic bourgeois “The Bishop’s business is your business.”

The Bishop’s Voice

The Bishop’s business is to teach the Christian Doctrine. The Holy Father appoints a Bishop to a seat (a cathedral) so people may hear the truth that will set them free. Clergy, teachers, journalists are the amplifiers of the Bishop’s voice. Fathers and mothers must also be the Bishop’s voice. Bishop O’Hara is fostering the teaching of Christian Doctrine by fathers and mothers. Everything connected with the teaching of Christian Doctrine can be called Catholic Action No. 1.

But the Bishop, although he is a Bishop, cannot teach an empty stomach. Some people are Bishop-shy because they are hungry, shivering or sleepy. So the Bishop asks the faithful to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, shelter the homeless at a sacrifice. Feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, sheltering the homeless at a sacrifice was the daily practice of the first Christians. The daily practice of the Works of Mercy is what we can call Catholic Action No. 2.

Social Reconstruction

We are asked by the Holy Father to reconstruct the social order. Reconstructing the social order means the creation of a Catholic society within the shell of a non-Catholic society with the philosophy of a Catholic society. Catholic bourgeois made the mistake of trying to keep up with non-Catholic bourgeois. Catholic reconstructors must create a Catholic technique in harmony with Catholic thought. Social reconstruction by Catholic laymen and women is what we can call Catholic Action No. 3.

Three Kinds

Catholic Action No. 1, or the teaching of Christian Doctrine, must be carried out with the Bishop’s supervision. Catholic Action No. 2, or the daily practice of the Works of Mercy, can be carried out with or without the Bishop’s supervision. Catholic Action No. 3, or the reconstruction of the social order, through the foundation of new Catholic institutions, must be left to the initiative of Catholic men and women. The function of the Bishops is to be not directors but moderators. Political action is not to be considered as Catholic Action.

For God’s Sake

Honest to god.

One of the slogans of the Middle Ages was “Honest to God.” We have ceased to be “Honest to God.” We think more about ourselves than we do about God. We have ceased to be God-centered and have become self-centered.

Father Denifle

Father Denifle was an Austrian Dominican. In 1872, he delivered four sermons in Graz, Austria, about “Humanity, its destiny and the means to achieve it.” Translated by a priest of Covington, Kentucky, these four sermons were published in America by Pustet, the editor. Father Denifle emphasizes that having forgotten God, humanity cannot realize its own destiny. God has not forgotten man, but man has forgotten God.

American Founders

The founders of America came to America to serve God the way they thought God wants to be served. How God wants to be served is no longer taught in American schools. How to be successful is still taught in American schools. Thinking of time in terms of money is at the base of the thinking of our business men. We put on our coins: “In God we trust,” but persist in thinking that everybody else ought to pay cash.

Cardinal Gasquet

Cardinal Gasquet was an English Benedictine. He was a student of that period of English history that preceded the Reformation. In a book entitled: The Eve of the Reformation he points out that externalism –another word for materialism– prevailed in that period of English history. The externalism of English Bishops made them follow the King instead of the Pope when the King ceased to mind the Pope.

St. Augustine

St. Augustine said, “Love God and do what you please.” We do what we please but we don’t love God. We don’t love God because we don’t know God. We don’t know God because we don’t try to know God. And man was created in the image of God and every creature speaks to us about God and the Son of God came to earth to tell us about God.

Industrialism

It started with england.

Lenin said: “The world cannot be half industrial and half agricultural.” Lenin made the mistake of industrializing Russia. Lenin industrialized Russia because the Japanese industrialized Japan. The Japanese industrialized Japan because the Americans industrialized America. The Americans industrialized America because the Germans industrialized Germany. The Germans industrialized Germany because the English industrialized England. It started with England.

A Few Englishmen

R. H. Tawney said that the Englishmen wear blinkers. Because they wear blinkers the Englishmen lack vision. Because they lack vision the Englishmen are very strong for supervision. And supervision is not a substitute for vision. A few Englishmen got rid of their blinkers. Among the Englishmen who got rid of their blinkers one can name: William Cobbett, John Ruskin, William Morris, Arthur Penty, Hilaire Belloc, G. K. Chesterton, Eric Gill. The best of all is Eric Gill.

“The sex problem, the marriage problem, the crime problem, the problem of armaments and international trade, all those problems could be solved if we would recognize the necessity of abolishing trade in money, and especially the international trade in money; that is to say, the usury, the legalized usury, practiced by the banks under the protection of their charters with the support of the so-called orthodox economists. That is the first thing to be recognized.”

God and Mammon

Christ says: “The dollar you have is the dollar you give to the poor for My sake.” The banker says: “The dollar you have is the dollar you lend me for your sake.” Christ says: “You cannot serve two masters, God and Mammon.” “You cannot, and all our education is to try to find out how we can serve two masters, God and Mammon,” says Robert Louis Stevenson.

Tips for Persuasive Legal Writing | Luther Munford | Texas Appellate Law Podcast

Presented by: Butler Snow LLP

Sponsored by: Court Surety Bond Agency and Thomson Reuters

Full transcript and more information can be found here:

https://www.butlersnow.com/news-and-events/tips-for-persuasive-legal-writing-luther-munford

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They don’t just cater to experienced users, and newcomers will find themselves comfortably making their way through the site. They’ve also detailed essential features like free revisions and continuous customer support, which have been lifesavers for me on more than one occasion.

With thousands of clients each year and an 85% return rate, it’s clear they’re doing something right. Their commitment to their customers really shows through in every aspect of their service.

7.  GradeMinders  — Best for Quick Turnaround

Reputable company, solid and consistent quality;

The fastest college essay service on the market (1-hour turnaround time available);

Finding a writer during crunch season might be time-consuming.

GradeMiners is more expensive than most essay writing sites in the industry.

I’ve been using GradeMiners for a while now, and I have to say, they offer a solid service at a fair price. A high school essay runs about $16 per page, and a college paper is $18 per page. They offer a wide array of professional academic writing services beyond just essays; you can get help with everything from presentations and book reviews to lab reports and dissertations.

The process is straightforward: you go to their website, pick your subject, set your deadline, and the professional writers take it from there. They assure that your paper will be completely original and plagiarism-free, which is crucial.

One of the standout features is their speedy delivery. If you’re pressed for time, you can get a college paper done within an hour—as long as it’s not too long. This frees you up to concentrate on other things that might need more of your attention or are more appealing to you.

8. EssayTerritory — Best New Essay Writing Company

Good quality, fair price;

Great loyalty program, good choice for students who are looking to use this site regularly;

Exceptional customer service.

No sample essays available;

Plagiarism report doesn’t come for free;

Expensive extras.

I recently tried out EssayTerritory, a new but promising college paper writing service. It was easy to find an essay writer that matched my specific needs, and the platform has a roster of over 800 active paper writers. They’ve already completed more than 1300 orders, which is impressive for a newcomer.

What stands out most about EssayTerritory is their 98% satisfaction rate. It seems they really know how to please their customers, as about 85% of users return for more academic papers. They offer a plagiarism-free guarantee like many top essay writing services, and they’ll give you a full refund if they miss your deadline or if your work contains plagiarism.

You can order various assignments from them—essays, research papers, case studies, term papers, dissertations, and even help with presentations or speeches if that’s what you need. They also provide proofreading and editing services.

Privacy and confidentiality are top priorities for them. They ensure that every “write my essay” request is kept anonymous and your personal details are secure. They have robust measures in place to prevent any data leaks. This level of security gave me a lot of confidence in using their essay writer service.

FAQs About Best Paper Writing Services

Should i trust essay writing service reviews.

Trusting essay writing service reviews can be tricky. Unfortunately, some companies that offer a custom essay writing service also operate fake review sites to maintain a positive online reputation. This means you need to be cautious about where you look for reviews.

For more reliable information, it’s better to use independent review platforms like SiteJabber and Reviews.io. These sites are generally more trustworthy because they’re not directly affiliated with any essay writing services.

However, even with these platforms, it’s wise to approach reviews with a critical eye. Some dedicated essay writing review sites might have biases or hidden motives, so take their recommendations with skepticism and always cross-reference multiple sources if possible.

How long does it take to have my essay written for me?

Essay writers generally focus on producing high-quality work, and the time it takes to write an essay largely depends on its length. For a standard 275-word essay, the average turnaround is about 3 hours. Most essay writing services strive to meet these deadlines consistently.

If you’re in a rush and your deadline is just a few hours away, you can opt for a premium service. This usually involves having several top-rated writers collaborate to deliver your essay in about half the standard time.

It’s worth noting that the best college paper writing services might experience delays during peak times when demand is high. Typically, they recommend giving writers at least six hours to complete an essay. If you’re willing to pay extra, your order can be prioritized to ensure a faster delivery.

For more complex assignments like thesis papers or extensive research projects, the process can take up to five days. Writers often submit a partial draft by the second day for client feedback, allowing any revisions to be included in the final submission by day five.

Will my essay be written by a professional essay writer?

Picking a reliable essay writing website is crucial for ensuring the safety, confidentiality, and quality of the service.

When hiring writers, most companies put them through a rigorous vetting process. They typically require that writers have native or near-native proficiency in the language they’ll be writing in, along with a relevant degree from an accredited university.

Once hired, these writers undergo further training on the platform to polish their linguistic and formatting skills. They only start working on actual assignments once their writing meets the company’s professional standards.

The best writing services take extra steps to maintain high-quality standards. For example, every piece of work is checked by a moderator before it goes to the client. Writers are also provided with ongoing opportunities to enhance their skills within the company’s supportive environment.

The person who is labeled as a premium paper writer often has more experience and higher qualifications, like a Ph.D., and at least two years of writing experience. While their services cost a bit more, the quality they deliver usually makes the investment worthwhile.

Is using a paper writing service confidential and safe?

The internet is a vast resource where people often share their knowledge, which is a huge help, especially for college students working on their homework. It’s also completely legal and secure to purchase essays and custom papers online if you need them. However, it’s crucial to choose a reputable provider to avoid issues like plagiarism or low-quality work, which could waste your time, money, and effort.

I’ve found that doing your homework on these services is essential. Make sure to look at the company’s refund policy in case you’re not satisfied with their work, and confirm that they’ll keep your school’s name confidential. It’s also a good idea to check reviews of their past work to see if it’s well-written and structurally sound.

From my experience, as long as you do this research beforehand, buying essays online can be a safe option that keeps your details private. Just be vigilant to avoid scams.

What if I’m not satisfied with my paper?

Most top-rated essay writing companies strive to deliver excellent quality, because they want their customers to come back. They have skilled writers who are well-versed in various academic tasks, including essays, lab reports, and research papers. They work hard to produce top-quality work.

If there are any issues with the finished product, these services usually offer free revisions until you’re satisfied with the quality. Client satisfaction is a high priority for these companies, driven by stiff market competition. The goal is to deliver a flawless paper that helps you achieve a high grade.

What are the main drawbacks of using essay writing services?

For many students, using essay writing services is considered a luxury, primarily because the reputable ones that offer great reviews, unlimited revisions, and maintain confidentiality tend to be more expensive. Opting for cheap essay writing services often means risking quality and reliability, especially when it comes to meeting deadlines.

Plagiarism is another serious issue. Both intentional and unintentional plagiarism can occur, particularly with services that don’t carefully vet their writers. Sometimes, clients don’t discover the plagiarism until it’s too late to rewrite the paper and meet their deadline.

Moreover, if an essay writing company lacks a quality control team, the work submitted by writers might be subpar, filled with typos and grammatical errors. Some writers might also resist feedback, making it hard to get the necessary revisions to ensure the essay meets your standards.

Who will write my work and what determines the price?

Your assignment will be handled by writers with diverse backgrounds. Some are full-time professionals dedicated solely to writing, while others are former academics who’ve embraced the flexibility of working from home. There are also those who write as a side job.

Regarding pricing, we’ve discussed the main factors in our article: the length of the assignment, its complexity, and the deadline. Another element influencing cost is the location of the company. Businesses based in regions like Eastern Europe, North Africa, and Central Asia often have lower rates because the cost of living is lower there, making the dollar stretch further.

Comparison of the Top Paper Writing Services

#1. paperhelp 🏅.

Academic papers written from scratch by writers with Ph.D. and Master’s degrees;

No need to provide any personal information;

Reasonable price, great quality, plagiarism-free papers.

#2. BBQPapers 🥈

Premium quality, best writers in the industry;

On-time delivery guarantee, even on rush orders;

Free revisions.

#3. EssayPro 🥉

Good quality at a reasonable price (ENL writers);

Free plagiarism report;

Good reputation.

Best Essay Services: Conclusion

Working with a professional essay writing service is important not only for the quality of the work you’ll receive but also for the security of your personal details. Many students turn to these services when they’re pressed for time and need to complete their academic tasks—there’s nothing wrong with this approach.

Today, numerous legitimate essay writing services uphold high standards of academic integrity and deliver plagiarism-free papers. These paper writing websites are generally affordable for most students, although there are some exceptions.

Before placing an order, it’s important to do your homework. Check the company’s reviews, find out if it offers a refund policy, and look into its track record on past projects. A reliable service will prioritize your confidentiality, which is a vital consideration.

The news and editorial staff of the Santa Cruz Sentinel had no role in this post’s preparation. This is a paid advertisement and does not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Santa Cruz Sentinel, its employees, or subsidiaries.

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AskEasy: AI ChatBot Assistant 12+

Ask chat bot・your 24/7 helper, zilingial limited, designed for iphone.

• #60 in Productivity
• 4.7 • 18.3K Ratings
• Offers In-App Purchases

iPhone Screenshots

Description.

AskEasy: simplify your life with a smart assistant! Looking for a good recipe to surprise your guests? Need ideas for a birthday party? Or some help with writing an essay or composing a resume? Simply open the app and ask! AskEasy is a real lifesaver. It finds answers to any questions, generates texts and brainstorms ideas, helps with daily tasks, proofreads and improves your content, and even acts as a fun empathetic friend always open for a chat! All you need to do is just type in your request and see how an accurate answer magically appears on your screen! What sets this app apart are its four most powerful chat models: GPT 3.5, GPT 4, Llama 2, and Gemini. These cutting-edge AI technologies ensure that you can easily choose the model that best meets your specific needs, providing tailored, intelligent responses in real-time. Have questions about a YouTube video? Or need a short summary of a video instead of watching it whole? Now, you can simply paste the video link and ask away. Our chatbot will answer your questions based on the video content and provide a concise summary of it. Need to create unique visuals for your project? Go to Image Generator and get inspiring images generated by AI in seconds! All you have to do is just to type in the text description – and see how it magically transforms into images. Moreover, you can easily get creative captions, tags and stories based on your images by using the Text to Image tool. AI understands and interprets the context and emotions of your photos, and brings the ideas of creative texts that will enhance your social media presence. With """"Upload & Ask,"""" you have the power to directly upload a PDF document and effortlessly ask questions about its content. This feature deciphers the text, providing you with precise answers and insights without the need for manual searching or reading. Meanwhile, """"Ask by Link"""" offers an equally innovative capability where you can insert a link to a web page and receive answers derived from its content. Whether it's a detailed explanation, summary, or specific information, this feature ensures you get the answers you need quickly and efficiently. Your creativity is your only limit! Experiment with your queries to discover everything the chatbot can do for you, and you will be amazed by the mind-blowing results: - Choose the chat model (GPT 3.5, GPT 4, Llama 2, or Gemini) to solve your tasks quickly and efficiently - Write anything: from tweets, email responses, and ad copies to essays, poems, and creative stories - Brainstorm ideas: new recipes, movie and song recommendations, places to go, party ideas, etc. - Check and improve your writing - Simplify your texts by summarizing them - Insert a link to YouTube video and ask your questions based on it - Get quick and concise summary of a video on YouTube - Get AI-generated images from your word description - Transform any text into visually captivating quotes - Generate captivating captions, relevant tags, or stories for your pics - Create original jokes and holiday greetings - Translate texts into other languages or even into programmatic commands - Use it for analytics and business intelligence - Get prepared for an exam or job interview - Or simply check out your daily horoscope! Features: - Smart chat for iPhone - GPT 3.5, GPT 4, Llama 2, and Gemini support - Spell and grammar check - Images Generator - Quote Maker - Text for Image - “Ask by Link” and “Upload & Ask” features - Ask Youtube and Youtube Summary - Text writing and facts search - History of your queries - CV and social profile builder - Clear and smart design - Simple and blazingly fast to use Privacy Policy Url - https://mychat-ai.cloud/pp Term Of Use Url - https://mychat-ai.cloud/tou Support Address - [email protected]

Version 2.1

Why update the app that already works great? To get the most out of it, of course! The benefits of the new version: —Flawless bug-free experience —Improved user interface and app's navigation Your positive reviews in the App Store will inspire us to new achievements!

Ratings and Reviews

18.3K Ratings

Ok so I have a problem

The concept of having ai write you a story is amazing. The stories are amazing. But, what good is it if it doesn’t give an ending. It doesn’t have to be long to end well. But it leaves you hanging. Not a fan of that. Especially since I paid for it UPDATE: ok, so I changed most review from three stars to 5z mainly because regardless of if the story ends or not, I’m able to end it myself quite well. I enjoy the app and it helps me a lot in my work

Developer Response ,

Dear Juliabrown1966!!!!!Thank you for your feedback. We apologize for the inconvenience caused and we understand your frustration with the limitations you've encountered in the application. The application has certain restrictions in place due to server limitations and the significant computing resources required for advanced AI technology like GPT-4. These limitations are in place to ensure the app's performance and availability for all users. We have increased the limit of characters to the maximum allowed from GPT itself and we cannot go beyond it. Thank you for understanding. Warmest regards, AI ChatBot: Smart Assistant Support Team

Not as described

Right after installing presented programs not functioning, i didn’t get try all, with in two minutes was forced to rated with 5 stars if i was too quick to press buttons. I didn’t even get to read what was the gpt’s response to me but as it was typing things really fast noticed everything being typed was flickering like screen power is too low. Remember after 3 days i trial you will be charged automatically. This look good but just like most of them, taking a freeware altering in some cases not much from the original and start chasing the money with tricks and dancing around the truth with lies. I think today’s browsers gpt is good as most of these tricksters version unless you need a serious one for school or work then I suggest getting a real one pay a few more dollars than what these people are asking and have a real one, if that’s not the case stick with ones as browsers add on is my opinion.

Dear User! We are very grateful to you for taking the time to leave us a review. We consider a customer-centric approach and always put ourselves in our customer’s mind. That way, we can align the learning experience with their expectations and improve our application. We will definitely take into account the fact that the users need more time to evaluate the application and will not force them to rate the app too quickly. We have our users' best interests at heart and will continue to work tirelessly to better ourselves and our application. Best regards, AI ChatBot: Smart Assistant Support Team

Concern over longevity

I have tried numerous AI Assistants. And this one, by far, is my favorite. I even went so far as to opt in for paying for full features. However, as an assistant or even aid, it is limited and out dated. When querying about the up-to-date information it could provide me, my assistant informs me that it is only as up-to-date as 2021. So, I queried about when the databases may be updated. And there was no information on that. The databases are already years behind and this is concerning. I didn’t pay to have something that can’t actually do as it is alleged to be able to perform. I can google and get more current information.

Dear Crashed and Lost! Thank you for your feedback and for choosing our AI ChatBot as your favorite assistant. We apologize for any inconvenience caused by the limitations of the up-to-date information provided. We are constantly working on improving our databases and ensuring the latest information is available. But as we use the official open AI api and their system is based on data up to 2021, the assistant informs you that it is only as up-to-date as 2021. Best regards, AI ChatBot: Smart Assistant Support Team

App Privacy

The developer, Zilingial Limited , indicated that the app’s privacy practices may include handling of data as described below. For more information, see the developer’s privacy policy .

Data Used to Track You

The following data may be used to track you across apps and websites owned by other companies:

• Identifiers

Data Not Linked to You

The following data may be collected but it is not linked to your identity:

• Diagnostics

Privacy practices may vary, for example, based on the features you use or your age. Learn More

Information

English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Simplified Chinese, Spanish, Traditional Chinese

• AI ChatBot: 1 Week Access $7.99
• AI ChatBot - 1 Week Access $7.99
• AI ChatBot: Access for 1 Year $49.99
• AI Chat Bot: Weekly Access $7.99
• AI ChatBot: 1 Week Access $4.99
• AI Assistant - 1 Month $19.99
• AI ChatBot for 1 Year $19.99
• AI ChatBot: 1 Year $39.99
• AI ChatBot: 1 Year Access $49.99
• AI Helper for 1 Week $4.99
• Developer Website
• App Support
• Privacy Policy

More By This Developer

AI Wallpapers & Widgets - Flex

Politicians and dog experts vilify South Dakota governor after she writes about killing her dog

P oliticians and dog experts are criticizing South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem after she wrote in a new book about killing a rambunctious puppy . The story — and the vilification she received on social media — has some wondering whether she's still a viable potential running mate for presumptive Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.

Experts who work with hunting dogs like Noem’s said she should have trained — not killed — the pup, or found other options if the dog was out of control.

Noem has tried to reframe the story from two decades ago as an example of her willingness to make tough decisions. She wrote on social media that the 14-month-old wirehaired pointer named Cricket had shown aggressive behavior by biting.

“As I explained in the book, it wasn’t easy,” she said on X. “But often the easy way isn’t the right way.”

Still, Democrats and even some conservatives have been critical.

“This story is not landing. It is not a facet of rural life or ranching to shoot dogs,” conservative commentator Tomi Lahren posted online.

Several posters described Noem as Cruella de Vil, the villain from the Disney classic “101 Dalmatians.” A meme features a series of dogs offering looks of horror.

“I’m not sure which thing she did was stupider: The fact that she murdered the dog, or the fact that she was stupid enough to publish it in a book,” said Joan Payton, of the German Wirehaired Pointer Club of America. The club itself described the breed as “high-energy,” and said Noem was too impatient and her use of a shock collar for training was botched.

But South Dakota Democratic Senate Minority Leader Reynold Nesiba considered the disclosure more calculated than stupid. He said the story has circulated for years among lawmakers that Noem killed a dog in a “fit of anger” and that there were witnesses. He speculated that it was coming out now because Noem is being vetted as a candidate for vice president.

“She knew that this was a political vulnerability, and she needed to put it out there, before it came up in some other venue," he said. “Why else would she write about it?”

In her soon-to-be-released book, “No Going Back: The Truth on What’s Wrong with Politics and How We Move America Forward,” of which The Guardian obtained a pre-release copy, Noem writes that she took Cricket on a bird hunting trip with older dogs in hopes of calming down the wild puppy. Instead, Cricket chased the pheasants, attacked a family's chickens during a stop on the way home and then “whipped around to bite me," she wrote.

Noem's spokesperson didn't immediately respond to questions from The Associated Press about whether the dog actually bit her or just tried to do so, or whether Noem had to seek medical treatment. The book's publisher declined to provide AP an advance copy of the book.

Afterward, Noem wrote, she led Cricket to a gravel pit and killed her. She said she also shot a goat that the family owned, saying it was mean and liked to chase her kids.

The response to the story was swift: “Post a picture with your dog that doesn’t involve shooting them and throwing them in a gravel pit. I’ll start,” Democratic Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz posted on X. The post included a photo of him feeding ice cream off a spoon to his Labrador mix named Scout.

President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign added a photo of the president strolling on the White House lawn with one of his three German Shepherds. Two of Biden's dogs, Major and Commander, were removed following aggressive behavior, including toward White House and Secret Service personnel. The oldest, Champ, died.

Democrat Hillary Clinton reposted a 2021 comment in which she warned, “Don’t vote for anyone you wouldn’t trust with your dog.” She added Monday, “Still true.”

Conservative political commentator Michael Knowles said on his titular podcast that while Noem could have handled the situation differently, “there is nothing wrong with a human being humanely killing an animal.” He later added: “Fifty years ago, this political story would not have made anyone in most of America bat an eyelash. And the fact that it does today tells you something, not about the changing morality of putting down a farm animal, but about the changing politics of America.”

He later said that the story is “extremely stupid and insignificant” because Noem doesn’t have a chance of being selected as Trump’s running mate.

Payton, who is a delegate to the American Kennel Club and lives in Bakersfield, California, said the situation was a mess from beginning to end.

“That was a puppy that had no experience, obviously no training,” she said. “If you know a minuscule amount about a bird dog, you don’t take a 14 month old out with trained adult dogs and expect them to perform. That’s not how it works.”

The club itself said puppies learn best by hunting one-to-one with their owners, not with other dogs.

When problems arose she should have called the breeder, Payton said, or contacted rescue organizations that find new homes for the breed.

Among those groups is the National German Wirehaired Pointer Rescue, which called on Noem in a Facebook post to take accountability for her “horrific decision” and to educate the public that there are more humane solutions.

“Sporting breeds are bred with bird/hunting instincts but it takes training and effort to have a working field dog,” the group's Board of Directors wrote in the post.

Payton described Cricket as nothing more than “a baby,” saying the breed isn't physically mature until it is 2 years old and not fully trained it's 3- to 5-years old.

“This was a person that I had thought was a pretty good lady up until now," she said. "She was somebody that I would have voted for. But I think she may have shot herself in the foot.”

This story was first published on April 29, 2024. It was updated on April 30, 2024, to correct the spelling of Tomi Lahren's name. She is Tomi Lahren, not Tomi Lahrenco.