is for the Kingship of Christ. The ruler of all of Creation and the sovereign to whom all Catholics owe our ultimate obedience.
is for Leo XIII the creator of the term “social justice.” Leo was a visionary pope who made the works of Saint Thomas Aquinas the philosophical foundation of the Catholic faith (Aeterni Patris), wrote the prayer to Saint Michael, and issued the encyclical Rerum Novarum as the Church’s first formal teaching on economics and politics in the Modern Age.
is for Maurin, Peter, who was Dorothy Day’s mentor and the co-founder of the Catholic Worker. Maurin was a living example of blessed Franciscan poverty, having once slept in an abandoned coke oven while preaching and working as a miner. Maurin’s radical street preaching constantly stressed the need to live simpler, self-sufficient lives on the land.
is for New Deal, the massive expansion of the State ushered in by President Franklin Roosevelt and emblematic of the Welfare-Warfare State of the Modern Age. Distributists, including Dorothy Day, fiercely opposed this unprecedented government expansion. Peter Maurin criticized State-based welfare (as opposed to personal charity) as merely “passing the buck,” and most un-Christian.
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