Peter Maurin
Background
Peter Maurin came into the world on May 9, 1877 in Outlet, a village in the Languedoc region of southern France. His devotion to religion came much earlier, as he joined the Christian Brothers, a teaching order which stressed simplicity of life, piety, and service to the poor [1]. After leaving the order he took part in a Catholic movement called Le Sillon in France. The idea of this movement was that with strong Christian committment, love, responsibilty, and action for social justice, problems would be gone. Christian love would spread all over [1].
Peter faced a difficult time in his life when, because of law, he was forced to serve in the French military service. The army went against everything he believed and was, for him, a contradiction of religious and political duties. He got through this time, though, and in 1909 moved to Canada where he would not have to serve in the military. After a few years and odd jobs in Canada, he relocated to the United States where he continued the search for odd jobs. It was in these years of hard work that he came to embrace poverty as a gift from God. He had a lot of time for studying and prayer and he began to formulate his vision of a social order taken from the basic values of the Gospels.
Even when he was a novice in the Christian Brothers Peter was obliged to participate in the French military service. The army contradicted everything he believed in and it was an unpleasant time for him. After two years of service he was periodically called up for the reserves for another two weeks.
This military conscription compromised Peter's Christian pacifist principles. He knew well the natural law on the right of self-defense and the philosophical conditions for a just war, but his way was that of St. Francis, of following the Gospel counsels of perfection.
Peter Maurin made a decision to leave France, where his family had owned their farm for almost 1,500 years, to go to Canada, where he would not be required to continue military service and where he could join the large group of French immigrants already there. He left the Le Sillon movement in which he had actively participated, recognizing that while it had offered so much encouragement and hope to many, it lacked serious scholarship and had become political. (Sheehan, p. 75)
