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.

Family Farms

There could be, I believe, groups of families on the land, surrounding a chapel, disciplined by family life and daily attendance at Mass, all subject to one another, with a division of skills and labor and accepting too the authority of one coordinator. Ideally speaking, this should be as successful as any community of monks who maintain themselves by the labor of their hands.

It is no use comparing such a community of families, however, to a community of monks, because the latter are often maintained by the alms of the faithful. Land is often left to a monastery and usually there is income from the schools. If lay communities were given the start, if young families were given an initial subsidy, free and clear, and left to work out their way of life, great things could be done.--Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness, pg. 234

So Brian Jacques had to have been familiar with some of Dorothy Day's ideas, or with Chesterton, Gill, Belloc, and McNabb, or something!