Opinion: The Trendy Peasant

[Stone]

The Trendy Peasant
Homesteading has become trendy, but the Catholic Land Movement has been advocating for it for decades.

Julian Kwasniewski, Crisis Magazine | February 10, 2025

Trends are funny things. Often, they promote vapid novelties as “cool,” leading to flurries of popularity for ankle socks, ugly and immodest swimsuits, or particular meme rehashes. But sometimes trends are actually occupied with worthwhile things. The difference is that they tend to hide or rebrand the wholesome old things in a new light, hoping that no one will notice the trend’s lack of novelty. After all, if it isn’t new and weird, why bother?

A striking example of this is the homesteading or various “back to the land” movements, especially among Catholics. Admittedly not a “trend” to the full extent of the meaning of that word, which we might normally associate with social media fashion swings, it does seem like something everyone has recently become aware of and, in fact, is promoting, all the while hoping no one will notice that it’s what the trads, distributists, and Amish have been advocating all along.

A first indicator of the way homesteading has begun to “trend” is the multitude of journals and websites dedicated to Catholic or Christian homesteading that have recently sprung up. It seems like I come across a new one every few weeks. There’s the quarterly Hearth & Field (first print edition in 2024, although its website had been active before then), the monthly Homestead Living magazine (first issues in 2023), the Bruderhof-run quarterly Plough, and more established if less trendy publications like Grit, Small Farm Canada, and Acres. At the same time, I started noticing mainstream Catholic publications like OSV running articles on homesteading. And the National Catholic Register just ran a piece of mine about the Catholic Land Movement.

Crisis Magazine has already featured several pieces in this vein, but today I want to speak further about this Catholic Land Movement. I’ve mentioned it in passing before.

Key figures in the original movement were authors G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, along with a Dominican friar, Fr. Vincent McNabb. Inspired by Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum (among other Church documents), these thinkers noted in the 1920s and ’30s how important a “means of production” is in acquiring wealth. With the Industrial Revolution uprooting the working class from the land and resettling them in factories, Leo XIII specifically taught that households have a right to productive property so as to provide for themselves.

Essentially, this means owning the “means of production” on a small scale. One of the slogans of the Catholic Land Movement was “Two acres and a Cow,” a reference to how every family ought to have enough land for a dairy cow. A supporter of the movement, Chesterton made a caricature of his rotund self and a cow with the same caption—perhaps we could call this a pre-internet meme!

Having means of production in the hands of every family “is essentially a bulwark against anti-Catholic ideologies such as Communism,” Andrew Ewell points out. Ewell is the co-director of the modern refounding of the original Catholic Land Movement, and I recently had the pleasure of speaking with him and Michael Thomas, the current director of the Catholic Land Movement.

Thomas states:

Today, another revolution unfolded and prompted the Catholic Land Movement’s revitalization. Like the Industrial Revolution, the medical and global technocracy apparent during Covid consolidated power. Like the response to the Industrial Revolution, this gave rise to a new populism and people returning to ideas of distributism…desiring healthy morality, theology, economics, and culture, and realizing the need for a practical expression of integrated living.

Belloc comments along this vein when he asserts that “If we do not restore the Institution of Property we cannot escape restoring the Institution of Slavery; there is no third course.” The more slavery loomed large, the greater the desire for the freedom property brings.

Unsurprisingly, the movement has been growing rapidly for the past five years and hosts multiple regional conferences. With workshops on butchering, harvesting, and building, celebration of the Latin Mass and the Divine Office, and families enjoying fellowship, the conferences have been repeated every summer with increasing attendance—and increasing diocesan support. 2024 saw the participation of the local bishop of Albany. “We don’t take any public stance on the Liturgy,” Thomas says.

It’s not our focus or expertise, but many of us attend the Ancient Liturgy, and it’s just part of the phenomenon—not intentional, but just organically happening. We’re not an exclusive group, we invite and accept all valid liturgies, but what you will find at our conferences is that the Divine Office is in the Ancient Form, because the founders of the movement had that liturgy. As Pope Benedict said, “What earlier generations held as sacred, remains sacred and great for us, too.”

Already in love with the idea of Catholic homesteading, I wanted to speak to some of the regional leaders of the movement. One, Mark Mannerino, is the co-leader of the Western Pennsylvania & Eastern Ohio Chapter of the Catholic Land Movement.

“We live on a small plot in Eastern Ohio, and we push our 1.5 acres to the max,” he says.

We raise laying hens, big gardens, berries, a pig; and some meat chickens are coming this spring. Our goal is to eventually farm on a large tract of land in community with other Catholic Land Movement families. My wife and I have always preferred to be more self-sufficient and were regularly trying new ways to remove ourselves from the culture of consumption. We dreamt of a lifestyle for ourselves and our children where we could produce, not just consume; where we could embrace hard work and instill similar values in our kids, and where we could hold our Catholic faith at the center of it all. We thought that we were the only ones with this dream until we discovered CLM.

It sounds like a familiar story. Mannerino explains:

Our CLM chapter, and the revitalization of the movement in America, is in its infancy, but the momentum of its growth is astounding. The four tenets of the movement speak to our hearts and feed our souls; they satisfy the longing that so many people have had and represent, what feels to me, like a true calling from Our Lord.

These four tenets, or pillars, of the Catholic Land Movement are:

1.) the restoration of Catholic rural property through productive Catholic homesteads and rural communities;

2.) education and formation to help families form a true Catholic culture on their homesteads;

3.) fellowship and support between chapters, communities, and homesteading families; and, most importantly,

4.) the glorification of God.

Mannerino comments that

these pillars and this lifestyle satisfy one of the deepest and most fundamental desires of man, as they harken back to God’s first command to us in the Garden of Eden: Tend the garden, till the soil, be fruitful and multiply.

Another CLM member I spoke with was Chris Horan. He and his wife first heard about the CLM at Clear Creek Abbey. Fr. Francis Bethel, a biographer of John Senior, suggested Horan read Senior’s work. Senior’s The Restoration of Christian Culture led Horan down a path studded with rural realities—star gazing, barn dancing, wonder.

Unsurprisingly, Horan became an oblate of Clear Creek. “The Benedictine lifestyle mixed well with friends moving to land. It made me want to get out of the suburbs. There, we could have up to twelve chickens, but we were looking for more.” Horan eventually found a house with 62 acres outside of St. Louis, Missouri, and has now gone from three to thirty chickens. “Since then, we’ve raised them for meat and eggs. My parents moved in next to us and got milk goats. Then, we got piglets and raised them last year, everything from the butchering process…quite the experience!” This year their fruit orchard should be ready to produce for the first time. With four kids ranging in age from ten to two, the Horans are not just grateful that their kids have meaningful work to help with but that they are able to freely run out of the house into the beautiful outdoors.

The Horan’s and Mannerino’s stories are like that of many members. The Catholic Land Movement has a presence in nearly every state, with over 20 regional chapters in the United States. Anyone reading this article with an interest in finding out more should head over to the movement’s website and submit a contact form for information on the nearest chapter.

With the support of their local bishop, Ewell, Thomas, and other proponents of CLM were recently able to visit Rome and present their work to the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development. In another charming twist, the traddy homesteaders were welcomed to the Vatican and presented their vision, which met with support. They hope increasing Vatican recognition of their work will lead to a greater ability to work with dioceses to form chapters, hold workshops, and generally spread their resources among other Catholics longing for a similar way of life.

Like its members’ vegetables and fruit trees, it seems like the principles of the Catholic Land Movement are taking deep root—and are ready to weather rain or shine. As the Dominican Vincent McNabb put it a hundred years ago, in the first years of the original movement: “The natural defense of freedom is the home and the natural defense of the home is the homestead.”