By Ken Westhues
Published December 1996
Christmas is a time of remembering not only a prophet but those of our ancestors who, by word and example, passed the prophet’s two great commandments down to us. It is the season for celebrating a legacy with which our generation now tries to keep faith.
As an organization, the Working Centre has ancestors. It, too, is only the most recent bearer of a tradition, namely, the long lineage of social experiments aimed at nourishing human solidarity and promoting just and inclusive forms of community.
Our book about the centre, published a year ago, describes some of those earlier experiments. Two of them are seldom cited in the same breath. Hull House, founded in Chicago by Jane Ad-dams in 1889, grew out of the Protestant social gospel and American pragmatism. It gave practicality a high priority. The Catholic Worker, by contrast, founded in New York by Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin in the early 1930s, rested on deep devotion to Roman Catholicism and drew little from American thought and culture. It was more anarchic and utopian in character.
Preparing our book, I recognized both Hull House and the Catholic Worker as antecedents to the Working Centre, but I knew of no actual ties between them. I wondered if their leaders had ever met and if so, what they thought of each other’s experiments.
Thankfully, an 85-year-old man in St. Louis named Cyril Echele came across our book shortly after its publication. Hull House and the Catholic Worker were indeed connected, he informed me. Indeed, as a young university graduate, he personally had accompanied Peter Maurin to visit Jane Addams in Chicago shortly before her death in 1935. Respect for each other’s programs of self-help and community development had outweighed confessional and philosophic differences.
I interviewed Cyril Echele last May, during his stopover at Toronto Airport en route to Europe. Spry, alert, soft-spoken, and with impish humour, he told stories for an hour about his depression-era embrace of the social justice movement.
As an undergraduate at St. Louis University, he had heard Day lecture, was drawn to her teaching, and travelled to the Catholic Worker after finishing his B.A. in philosophy. It was a story not unlike that of Kitchener’s own Mackenzie King three decades earlier. As an undergraduate at Toronto, King had heard Addams lecture, was drawn to her teaching, and so joined her at Hull House following his graduation.
Peter Maurin was a thorn in the flesh, Echele told me, a highly individualistic thinker steeped in the culture of his French peasant background. Maurin sometimes threatened to leave the Catholic Worker. He and Day managed to live and work together only by giving each other lots of room.
Echele recalled taking the subway with Maurin, soapbox in hand, to Columbus Circle at the south end of Central Park, where Maurin would “lecture and rant” at the passing crowd, within shouting distance of some Marxist opponent doing the same thing.
Returning from his visit with Day and Maurin, Echele helped open a Catholic Worker storefront in St. Louis, and lived there from 1936 to 1940. He left to marry a fellow activist, and spent 40 years teaching social philosophy in a succession of high schools and colleges. Unlike Mackenzie King, Echele did not later place his knowledge in the service of propertied elites, and never won fame. Last spring in the Toronto Airport, Cyril Echele was a vibrant, encouraging reminder of the tradition the Working Centre now carries on, adapting it to a new time and place. Christmas is a good occasion to thank Cyril Echele, along with Maurin, Day, Addams, and thousands more, for their adventures in social change; to thank them for keeping alive and passing along the elusive vision of community that beckons still.
