Maritain & Pope Paul VI

Maritain’s role in the writing of the Credo of Paul VI was only recently revealed publicly and it validates what many have come to know about the great French Catholic philosopher.

Jacques and Raissa Maritain are an inspiring Catholic couple—who made a mutual suicide pact, before they became Catholic, to act on if they could not discover a true and honorable way to live in a world they saw as deeply corrupted—and the book about them, Jacques and Raissa Maritain: Beggars for Heaven, is wonderful.

Jacques' long correspondence with Saul Alinsky, captured in the book The Philosopher and the Provocateur: The Correspondence of Jacques Maritain and Saul Alinsky, reveals the incredible balance Maritain reached between his orthodox Catholicism and social change, which Maritain notes in one of the letters:

"Saul Alinsky does not share in my religious faith. His religious philosophy seems to me rather inconsistent. Yet I would wish that many Christians may exhibit, in their approach to social matters, as deep an understanding of the moral implications of our basic temporal problems, as bold a courage in fighting for the dignity of the people, and as ardent a thirst for justice and freedom as Alinsky does." (p. 20)

Alinsky represented, from another side of the social equation, the type of change based on human needs from a material perspective that Maritain did from the spiritual and their deeply warm thirty year relationship was of great benefit to both, and wonderfully revealing for us in how men of good will can work together even when apparently so far apart in their philosophic view of the world.