Catholic Land Movement

Is the future of Catholicism communal? Oscar Yuill argues that Catholics should begin thinking seriously about communal living and sets out his proposals for a new Catholic land movement When, late last year, I moved into a comfortable house in East Sussex (specifically Brighton), my dream of living on a Catholic commune of the Dorothy Day variety faded into the background. Until, that is, I realised that one of my favourite writers, the painter-poet David Jones, had joined a Catholic artists’ commune in Ditchling, a mere twenty-minute drive away. I then discovered that my soon-to-be newborn son’s godparents, as well as a growing number of our fellow parishioners, are entertaining similar notions. Coincidence began to look a lot like providence; the dream, a reality. Reality, of course, has the especially unwelcome habit of asserting itself. The obstacles to realising anything like a Catholic commune are, in Britain at least, legion. Even on privately owned land, the building of so much as a toilet, let alone a chapel, requires planning permission from the local council. There are agricultural restrictions on what and how much one can grow. Tax law is, as ever, a living nightmare, which is to say naked, broad-daylight, open, overt, explicit, gleeful, unapologetic robbery achieved by means of a Byzantine labyrinth of small print, instilling in the taxpayer a sense of Kafkaesque futility and ultimate despair. Still, it is precisely these hindrances that incentivise the growing anti-statism, not to be confused with libertarianism, that animates people like me to think of these alternative living arrangements. Catholics especially must now ask whether the country in which they live is a country in which they have a secure future. Our moral convictions have long been ridiculed, amounting to a sort of de facto criminalisation. Now, though, the persecution is increasingly de jure , as shown by Isabel Vaughan-Spruce’s numerous arrests and, recently, criminal charge. Nor is it difficult to imagine a future in which Parliament passes a more subtle version of the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, or, as I like to call it, Harold Shipman’s Law, under which Catholics faithful to the duty of palliative care, including towards their only family members, face significant legal repercussions. The Covid lockdowns showed that the State is quite willing to prevent, with force if necessary, the celebration of Easter. The rapid growth of Islam, driven not just by mass immigration but by a dismal indigenous fertility rate, seems likely to drive distinctly Christian moral values farther and farther from the range of tolerable opinion. Moreover, Britain is perched atop a number of economic time bombs, such as the inevitable implosion of the pension system. Inflation remains high, wages stagnant, debt astronomical. Trump’s (i.e. Israel’s) war against Iran will be seen by future historians as a catalyst for our impending financial meltdown. All will be affected. If, then, the “prepper” mentality has begun to seep into the Christian mindset, that is because the writing is very much on the wall. But since when was the Gospel an optimist’s creed? There was always a kind of improbable insanity to the command to give all that one has to the poor, to strive for meekness rather than pride, for forgiveness rather than revenge, for peace rather than conquest. Nietzsche called it “the transvaluation of values”; and indeed the whole history of Christendom could with justice be described as a periodic attempt to ask which values, exactly, it was committed to. As the meme puts it: Which way, western man? The Cluniacs and the Cistercians attest to this pattern of renewal. The Gospel refreshes and restores moribund people, places and institutions, much as the water from Christ’s side splashed onto Longinus’ eyes, healing his partial blindness. If, then, I am far from optimistic, I remain abundantly hopeful that, in the not too distant future, East Sussex, or Scotland or France or Italy (we have cast a wide net), may see the genesis of a Catholic land movement. Which brings me to the nub of this essay: by what Ordo shall our little community be governed? The Rule of Saint Benedict seems the obvious solution. Yet there is no getting round the fact that this foundational masterpiece of brevity, sanity and spiritual moderation is intended for monasteries proper. It also contains some quite hearty endorsements of corporal punishment, and, while my grandfather often spoke with misty-eyed nostalgia of “the cane”, our prospective communist gang would rather spare the rod. No, we shall need a more “contemporary” regula. To wit, I offer the following ten broad brushstrokes: To gain admittance, all visitors will be forced at hoe-point to recite the Nicene Creed. Roosters caught crowing during the Angelus shall be summarily casseroled. All conversation, including about the weather, shall be conducted in one of the eight Gregorian psalm tones. No less than 75 per cent of arable land shall at any time be dedicated to viticulture. A tiered system of preferential treatment shall apply to all Protestant visitors. Calvinists shall be informed that their accommodation, the pigsty, was double predestinated, so there’s no use complaining. Anglicans are required to fold thirty-nine articles of clothing before they are permitted to leave. Quakers must sit in silence for the duration of their stay. A large rock shall be placed at the highest point in the commune. Orthodox visitors must hug said rock while chanting “Peter, Peter, Peter,” etc. until such time as the Great Schism of 1054 is miraculously forgotten. We shall have a moat. State-employed homeschooling auditors shall be cast into the moat. Rescue to be contingent upon their observance of Rule No. 1. A feast day for G.K. Chesterton shall be inserted into the General Calendar; on this day, all fences shall be mended. Anyone found using technology invented after the Casio F-91W digital watch, the indisputable zenith of human technological achievement, shall be forced, again at hoe-point, into exile for an arbitrary period. The Casio rule is apt. I have owned several good mid-range watches. None of them lasted longer than three or four years, and I take care of my possessions. I then switched to using my smartphone, which simply increased the time I spent on my smartphone. So, I decided to go back to basics. The Casio F91-W has retained the same design for 35 years: a clock, an alarm clock and a stopwatch. It’s timeless (if you’ll pardon the pun), classless and reliable. It’s also painfully, albeit endearingly, unfashionable. Louis Theroux was seen sporting one in his documentary Inside the Manosphere , a refreshing Everyman rebuke of the gaudy Rolexes worn by his unwitting (and witless) victims. (It seems Osama bin Laden was also a Casio devotee, but the company chose not to lead with that particular endorsement.) It does the job. Three million are manufactured annually. The Amish would approve: they trial new technologies to determine whether they benefit the community. One thinks, as well, of the British economist E.F. Schumacher’s wheelbarrow. A Catholic convert, Schumacher wrote that good technologies should answer to needs, not desires; they are usually cheap and scalable, and tend to lighten labour without adding unnecessary headaches. The wheelbarrow was his favourite example: invented some 3,500 years BC, and still to be seen in every garden and building site in the world. Schumacher’s most famous book is titled Small Is Beautiful . That, it seems to me, must be the governing philosophy of any Catholic commune worth its salt, lest the whole enterprise degenerate into an unnecessarily cumbersome replica of the modern world, a sort of ridiculous LARP, instead of a haven from it. No use living off the land and praying by candlelight if one creeps back to the glowing laptop and the latest Catholic ragebait. The Pope said WHAT?! Indeed, much as the internet siphons people away into little cultic feedback loops, adherents of the Catholic land movement must guard against setting themselves over and above the “normie” world of everyday parish life. This is already a danger. Catholics attracted to communal living are likely sympathetic to the Traditionalist liturgical movement as a whole, and that movement, while often unfairly traduced, can no longer deny that parts of it harbour schismatic tendencies. Whatever one’s view of the SSPX’s planned consecrations this coming July, I suspect most fair-minded Catholics see both sides, it is difficult to deny how the Society may drift farther and farther from the centre and become, in the end, something like the Old Catholics: a voice crying wolf in the wilderness. Certainly, the perceived heroism in this stance can be attractive. But the octogenarian extraordinary Eucharistic minister at one’s local parish is as dear to God as the Texan Thomist whingeing about Pachamama for the third time that week. If there are no atheists in foxholes, there ought to be no Catholics in bunkers. A Catholic commune should be porous to outside involvement and contribution. A fine example is Worth Abbey, which I found, on my first visit, both mysteriously forbidding and delightfully welcoming. Visitors are free to peruse the gift shop, which has an electronic honesty box for payment, as well as the main church and the abbey grounds. But there are clear limits, too, as my wife and I found when a brother gently told us off for having trespassed, by accident, into the monks’ private gardens. Many of those monks have spent time living in Brighton as “Monks in the City”, an initiative for bringing the monastic mindset to the churn of secular city life, and they, in turn, are nourished by the lay concerns they encounter. We are treading carefully, my wife and I. To live on a commune, whether Catholic or tie-dyed-in-the-wool hippy, is no small ask, affecting everything from finance to privacy and healthcare to parenting. It may never happen. But I hope it does. The case is there: many young people already live with their parents to save money. A Catholic commune is, in one sense, merely a spiritualised extension of this intergenerational principle. And if such arrangements were the norm in the past, they may, perhaps, not be entirely abnormal in the future.