Virgil Michel, OSB, and the Catholic Worker

By Rita Ferrone, July 28, 2026

I’ve long been fascinated by the linkage between Virgil Michel OSB and the Catholic Worker movement. Both Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin, the founders to the Catholic Worker, felt close to the Benedictine tradition as they themselves combined work, faith, and prayer with hospitality. “Ora et labora” was more than a slogan to them. They practiced it in their daily commitment to a non-violent life of service, living among the poor.

They knew Virgil Michel personally. They came to visit him in Collegeville, and he came to New York to visit them. He sent them boxes of books from Liturgical Press (which he founded), and he taught them to pray the Liturgy of the Hours.

Incidentally, not everyone was pleased that they were praying the Hours. Mark and Louise Zwick recount in their book, The Catholic Worker Movement: Intellectual and Spiritual Origins, an amusing story told by Stanley Vishnewski on this score: “Dorothy told us one evening that she had just returned from the Chancery office. Here eyes were smiling, and a trace of a smile was playing on her lips. ‘Not again,’ I said, ‘What’s wrong now?’ ‘Nothing really serious at all,’ Dorothy said. ‘They just wanted to know what we were doing here every night. It seems that someone had sent them a letter about the “long theatrical prayers” that we were saying.’”

The Catholic Worker was not the only movement to benefit from Michel’s patronage. He befriended, helped, and encouraged numerous social movements in the conviction that their calling (to social reform) and his (to liturgy) were related at the source and sanctioned by papal teaching. All along the way, he promoted the idea that liturgy was essential to the work of social justice.

In addition to papal teaching, several influences combined to shape Michel’s thinking. One of his mentors was Lambert Beauduin, OSB, considered the founder of the 20th century Liturgical Movement in Europe. Beauduin had served as a labor chaplain for a number of years before discerning a monastic vocation. According to his biographer, Beauduin had become disillusioned with the labor movement because it was not religious enough.

Another influence on Michel was the work of Orestes Brownson, an American educational theorist and philosopher who believed that Catholicism held the key to social challenges in the United States, as America was marked by an excessive individualism. The unbridled pursuit of wealth in such a hyper-individualistic context provoked a sharp critique from Michel. Using an expression borrowed from the German economist Werner Sombart, he classified the resulting distortions of late capitalism as “mammonism.”

But what was the answer? Like Beauduin, Michel placed religious faith at the center of his vision of how individuals may learn to seek the common good, and active participation in the liturgy as the effective source of vitality in pursuing it. To this end, he campaigned for educational and liturgical reform vigorously. His theological argument about the integral relationship of liturgy to social reconstruction became the most outstanding American contribution to the worldwide Liturgical Movement of the early twentieth century. His untimely death in 1938 at the age of 48 cut short what was actually a brilliant witness.

It seems to me that Michel’s witness remains a source of theological reflection that continues to be relevant in our time, as income inequality soars and the empty promises of both “toxic individualism” and “dehumanizing collectivism” become increasingly evident. The insights he articulated should not be confined to the archives of St John’s in Collegeville. That’s why I wrote about him and his relationship to the Catholic Worker in my most recent article in Commonweal magazine (which, I learned in the process, had actually published articles from Virgil Michel back in the 1930s).

You can read my brief reflection at Commonweal in their July-August 2026 issue: No One Can Say “I Don’t Need You”: Virgil Michel’s Vision of the Liturgy and Social Justice Remains Urgent.