The Catholic Worker (i of 1 so far)

from Ammon Hennacy, Thomas C. Cornell, Robert Ellsberg, and James H. Forest

Every time the Catholic Workers in New York City send me the Catholic Worker newspaper I send them folding money in memory of Ammon Hennacy, same age as my grandparents, all small children in 1900.

From the fifth year of publication, 1937, Ammon was the Worker’s tireless newsboy. For a penny a copy you also got a conversation with the anarchist, Christian, pacifist, and socialist who exhorted every reader to their own “one-man revolution.”

The prophet served as an editor across 10 years in the 1950s and 60s then died in 1970. He left behind in his Book of Ammon the most heterodox record of radicalism in the United States of America. But that’s not what I came to tell you about.

Viet Nam, country or war, does not come up in Ammon’s collected reports of conversations with Americans. You could say well he gathered this work for the final time in 1964 for publication in 1965 just as we occupied the Republic of Viet Nam. I do say that.

But I also say that anarchist and socialist Noam Chomsky already had been speaking with Americans in church basements against our commitment since 1962 and then in 1964 all but 2 of our senators had endorsed the Gulf of Tonkin resolution with 0 representatives voting against.

That war must have come up in the Catholic Worker. But it didn’t make it at all into the summa of the most radical Catholic Worker. It’s barely there in the later, uptown collection from the paper, Penny a Copy, not in the edition of 1968 (!) or the 1995 revision by Robert Ellsberg, son of the dissident to that war.

I take this anomaly as an occasion to make 4 assertions that may be novel to you whether you already are touched by the nation of Viet Nam or not.

#1

The war with the Democratic Republic of Viet Nam where we occupied the other Republic while raiding the nations of Cambodia and Laos under their various states was not nearly so big a thing here in the USA as you may have heard.

See my friend the late Paul Lyons’ Class of ‘66: Living in Suburban Middle America (1994) about the very cohort of United States Americans with good reason to pay attention, 18 years old the year we started spending the lives of Marines and soldiers like water.

Nope, the civilians hardly noticed. They had other things to do in prosperity. Jody, as the infantry sang, got your Cadillac.

#2

But even in the infantry and allied branches and the other services and agencies, the big show was the containment of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics without a thermonuclear exchange. Daniel the father of Robert Ellsberg the Catholic Worker had worked on that first, in graduate school.

His peers among the eggheads saw him as kind of a dope, an enthusiast, a freak for then involving himself at all in a sideshow, the Vietnamese war, even before he engaged in dissent.

#3

The war for Viet Nam was also a sideshow in the peace movement. Ammon Hennacy first did time for peace in 1917. Catholic Workers sat out the war for the world in prison from 1940, when our Selective Service began.

More prisoners of conscience arrived in 1951 against the war for Korea and then through the end of conscription in 1973. Robert was just 1 who got himself into jail in 1978 over the continuing war with the USSR.

#4

For these Christians, Viet Nam was just another damned war. What kind of Christians were they? This is what I came to tell you about.

A Catholic Worker is, first, a worker. Any one of them may or may not be a Roman Catholic but all their works are the Catholic ones of mercy.

They feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and shelter the homeless. They resist war for fun after works.

A Catholic Worker is not a member of a religious order under Rome but a militant of a movement. The movement is personalism.

Nobody knows what that is. I explain personalism by asking remember back when we said that capitalism is the exploitation of man by man?

And that communism is just the opposite? Well, personalism is neither of those. I suspect that I have journeyed from not understanding personalism to expounding it impenetrably.

When Ammon Hennacy first heard the personalist ideologue of the Catholic Worker movement speak, in 1937, Ammon told him “Peter, you talk like an anarchist.” Peter Maurin told him sure, but I prefer the name personalist.

I can’t tell you what anarchism is either. Nobody can. But I can tell you 1 thing you must know about republics of Viet Nam. The declared, official, position of Ngo Dinh Diem, his political party, and the republic he founded in 1954, is personalism, just like the Catholic Workers.

The peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds.

Viet Nam letters respects the property of others under paragraph 107 of United States Code Title 17. If we asked for permission it wouldn’t be criticism. We explain our fair use at length in the letter of September 12, 2022.

The colophon of these Viet Nam letters, directly above, shows the janitor speaking with poet David A. Willson on a Veterans Day.