Then, on a December afternoon in 1932, Peter Maurin, a French peasant emigre, ex-Christian Brother and teacher, arrived at her apartment on East Fifteenth Street. He introduced her to the social teaching of the Church, to the doctrine of the common good of St. Thomas Aquinas, to the English Distributists like Chesterton, Eric Gill, and Hilaire Belloc, and to the lives of the saints. He called his philosophy personalism, which was shortly thereafter expounded by Emmanuel Mounier and Jacques Maritain, both of whom later published in the Catholic Worker . Personalism rejected the welfare state, a creation of the modern era that had taken away the responsibilty of individuals for one another. Her critique of the New Deal was that it did not offer ownership.
Property is proper to man.
Dorothy and Peter founded the Catholic Worker newspaper in 1933 precisely to present the Church's social teaching and to counter the influence of communism, fascism, and other statist doctrines. She regularly confessed and made retreats. For Dorothy no kingdom was worth striving for unless it was grounded in such a regimen. To be in her presence when she kneeled in prayer was to experience a woman who talked with God. I was trying to be a loyal servant of the Church Jesus had founded.