Maurin's Program for Action

...about which he otherwise talked and wrote about under the heading of "Cult, Culture, and Cultivation."  "Cult" involved religion--the recognition of the Catholic Church and what it taught, especially in the social encyclicals, as the ordering center of his idea.  As one's faithful participation in the liturgy of the Church, "cult" should be the central, cohering action of daily life.

"Culture" was the medium in which this liturgically oriented life of the person would operate. The desired revolution of culture would occur when the spirit of "gentle personalism" took precedence over bourgeosity and class-struggle ideology. "We are interested in standards of loving and not in standards of living," he would sometimes say to Dorothy.

"Cultivation" was the instrumentality for bringing the new life into effect. People in crowded cities would re-establish themselves in "agronomic universities," or farm communes. Maurin believed that a fulfillment of the need for creative work was necessary to a complete humanism and that by going back to the land in agrarian cooperatives, by initiating the "green revolution," the inhuman effects of complex industrialization could be relieved. In a phrase he used many times, his agrarian commune would be a place "where the worker would become a scholar and the scholar would become a worker." It would be a place, as Dorothy explained, "where a man can develop his personality." In his Worker article, Maurin said that he knew his idea was "Utopian Christian communism," but that he was no afraid of the word communism: "I am not opposed to private property with responsibility. But those who own private property should never forget that it is a trust."--William D. Miller, Dorothy Day: A Biography, pg. 256-257.

A widely ignored or underappreciated reality: the monastic and religious life is "Utopian Christian communism," made possible by the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, the assurance of perfect justice and mercy in the next life such that one can submit to great self-denial in this, and the familial structure of the religious life, a structure which served as the foundation of human civilizations the world over. Brian Jacques had to be familiar with some of these same ideas.