Catholic Rural Life Maine 2018

​Max here...
​It's getting close to a year since this post about the 2017 Catholic Rural Life Festival in Maine.  The 2018 Festival is just around the corner (this weekend!) and we are playing a more active role in planning and prepping for it.  We took a bold leap this summer, and left our farm and farm store in the hands of able helpers for 3 months, and headed out to Maine for two things.

Great care must be taken to preserve for the nation the essential elements of what might be called genuine rural culture.

Task #1 was to run an experimental 6-week webstore modeled off Ojai Farmstand based out of the Churches that hosted last year's festival.  Task #2 was to help organize and attend the 2018 festival.  Those two tasks are inextricably linked, but this post focuses on the second one: the festival.

I want to spend some time unpacking the meaning of this festival and the reasons behind it, particularly what motivated us to literally leave our farm behind and drive with our family from one corner of the country to the other in order to participate.  Catholic Rural Life Festivals don't happen everyday, so the first question one might ask is: what is it?

That's a good question. Why Catholic? Why rural? what do they have to do with each other, and what is there to celebrate?

The roots of such a festival reach all the way back to the story of creation.  Two passages from the book of Genesis serve as our starting point. Verse 1:31 reads: “God saw everything that He had made, and behold, it was very good.” Verse 2:15 continues: “God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to till it and keep it.”  Without getting bogged down in biblical analysis, it is clear from these verses that God's creation is truly good, and humanity’s roll is to steward and a care for that good.

Put most simply, that is what we are celebrating - the sheer goodness and beauty of creation. It's easy, especially in the modern world where we tend to live surrounded by our own recreations of God's world, to lose a sense of gratitude for the incredible gift of creation.  The Catholic Rural Life Festival calls us back to our senses and helps us to look with new eyes at the simply glorious world we have been bestowed with.

Although cities have an essential role to play in society and culture, it is the outlying rural areas surrounding cities that keep them grounded in their roots.  Just as a plant will die when cut off from its roots, so will cities and all people suffer and die to the extent that they cut themselves off from their natural roots in the countryside.  As Catholics, we recognize not only the dependence of cities upon the countryside for their physical nourishment and survival, but also for their spiritual survival.

The Catholic Rural Life Festival is nothing other than an affirmation of Catholic principles and teachings which speak to the essential role of the countryside and rural culture as a whole for the good of the Church and all Society.  It was with this in mind that Pope Pius XII would say in 1946 that “Great care must be taken to preserve for the nation the essential elements of what might be called genuine rural culture.” Almost 150 years earlier, his predecessor Pius VII affirmed the specific dignity of farmers and those who work closely with the land. “The farmers' calling is a sacred calling … because he collaborates with God in continuing the work of his creation.”

There is hardly a pope in the last 150 years that has not in one way or another addressed the integral importance of rural culture.  I could mention quote after quote to this point, but I will mention only a few more from recent times. In 1981 Pope St. John Paul II wrote “It is necessary to proclaim and promote the dignity of work, of all work but especially of agricultural work, in which man so eloquently ‘subdues’ the earth he has received as a gift from God and affirms his 'dominion’ in the visible world.  In 2006, Pope Benedict XVI said, “the rural family needs to regain its rightful place at the heart of the social order.” Most recently, Pope Francis promulgated an entire encyclical on the urgent need for all to work for the good of creation, which he terms “Our Common Home.”

The words of the Popes all come back to Genesis 1:31 and 2:15.  Creation is simply good, and Mankind's original task is to care for it.  At the Festival this weekend, we will be living this out in several concrete ways.  We are coming together to celebrate the sheer goodness of the gift of creation. We are gathering in prayer to express our gratitude for that gift and to praise its Creator.  We are working to bring back practical elements of rural culture that have a tendency to be lost in our modern world full of conveniences.  We are affirming the vocation of farmers by supporting their work with multiple celebratory meals sourced from their own local farms.  We will thank those farmers explicitly at the meal.  We will join Fr. Paul Dumais in a blessing of the fields of a local dairy farm.  We will celebrate with live folk music and a communal contra dance, both invaluable contributions and social underpinnings of local historic rural culture of New England.  We will appreciate the artwork of a talented local artist who takes his inspiration both from his Catholic faith, and his rural lifestyle.

That's a lot to pack into one weekend. Finally, but definitely not least important, we are coming together to have a conversation about all these things, and their relationship with one another.  These are things we need to be talking about, and asking ourselves what place they have in our lives, in the Church, and in society as a whole. That's the conversation we drove 3,000 miles to have.  My guess is that most other attendees won't be traveling quite as far…

We hope you can make it!  I'll have more to write about these topic going forward.  We're looking forward to a great festival!