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That is our job here, to put on Christ, and to put off the old man, so I am not talking of an excessively religious person, an unbalanced person when I talk of Ammon so living that year by year, he "puts on Christ." We are told by our Lord Jesus, after all, to be perfect as our heavenly Father is perfect, not just as St. Francis, St. Benedict, St. Dominic, are perfect.
Ammon has not always been a Catholic, though there is the Catholic strain a few generations back. Surrounded by upright Protestants from his earliest years, he was struck always by the divergence between belief and practice. He distrusted the emotionalism of religious belief too. So it was his early years that he rejected religious faith. He loved his fellows, he loved this good world which God made, though he was not thinking of it as a created world, then, but as something which had evolved. He loved and longed for the good, and he felt the solidarity of man. He knew that an injury to one is an injury to all, so he early had a sense of the body of Christ, of which we are all a part, potentially, or actually. He served Christ, though he denied him.
This service took him to the Socialist Party, to an opposition to war, which brought him to prison. The story of his prison days will rank, I think, with the great writings of the world of prisons. He had nothing to read there but the Bible, and he turned to that with an anxious, hungry mind, a mind that was tortured by inactivity. Ironically enough, in this so called Christian country, when guards, saw his avid interest in the Bible they replaced the one he had, which had good type, with a small type edition. Prison, after all, is to punish men, not to bring them to penitence.
A penitentiary is a place of darkness, not of light these days of man's cruelty to man. But Ammon saw light, lived in light, those days of his solitary confinement in Atlanta Penitentiary, so great a light, Monsignor Hillenbrand once said to me, that it seemed to blind him. He got no further for the time, than an acceptance of religion and the Sermon of the Mount. He came out of prison a philosophical anarchist like Tolstoi, in rebellion still against Church and State.
I always remember those words of Monsignor Hillenbrand because they were to me encouraging words. Ammon, in his articles, sometimes blasted organized religion, as he called it in such as way as to belabor the Church, Holy Mother Church, and that hurt me as though the blows fell on my own body, as indeed they did. Organized religion was one thing, but the Church was another. I tried to moderate these strong statements of his so that he would be attacking what needed to be attack, the human element in the Church. But if it had not been for Monsignor Hillenbrand's deep understanding and encouragement at the time (and the Monsignor is not a pacifist nor an anarchist by any means, though a great lover of freedom) I would perhaps have discouraged from printing so many of Ammon's articles. For by that time, Ammon was a regular contributor to The Catholic Worker, of which I am the editor. Every month his article came in, and every month I am sure, each of us members of the staff, were shamed by his consistence, his true life of poverty and hard work, his utterly consistent pacifism.
He loved peace, he worked for peace, and he did not do any work which contributed to war. From the time time of the second draft, he worked at the
