Neither Andrew Ewell nor his wife Anne grew up farming. But while dating, they both discovered that their vision for Catholic family life included getting out of the suburbs and back to the country — and not to just any plot of ground, but to fertile, productive ground they could farm and let their children run free on.  

“When we were courting, we started thinking about what we’re facing in modernity, within the Church at large — and what would be the best way to raise our family.” Andrew Ewell said. “Anne and I were thinking about homesteading and homeschooling. This, combined with desiring a contemplative life, as far as possible for our family, led us to research everything having to do with Catholicism and this desire to go back to the land.” 

Today, Andrew and Anne and their baby boy live on their 65-acre farm in western Pennsylvania, purchased a year ago, and have become heavily involved in restoring the Catholic Land Movement (CLM), a project that began in the early-20th century and received an apostolic blessing from Pope Pius XI in 1933. 

While the movement fell into dormancy following World War II, the past five years have seen a resurgence of it, especially in the U.S., as many young Catholics discover that it articulates their desires to live more simply and self-sufficiently, closer to nature, and within a community of Catholic families. Along with Ewell, who is co-director of the movement, the Register recently spoke with leaders of the restored movement from its beginning, as well as others who have a vested interest. 

 

Reborn Vision 

Andrew Ewell explained that the Catholic Land Movement began in the late 1800s in Scotland and England.  

“The core of the movement was connected to local parishes, groups who formed Catholic land associations,” he said, “and their main purpose was the rural resettlement of Catholics on to productive property, which they would own.”  

What sparked the movement?  

“In reaction to the Industrial Revolution, the consolidation of nations, the onslaught of modernity and the disintegration of the family as the basic unit of society, these Catholics sought to move onto productive property as a remedy for many of these issues,” Ewell said.  

Another aspect can be seen on the environmental side, he added. There are “numerous benefits a family naturally gains from working the land together.” This doesn’t necessitate full-time or subsistence farming, but encourages combining prayer and work that supports the family. 

Michael Thomas, also co-director of the Catholic Land Movement, remembers how the movement was reborn five years ago.  

“I was part of a small group of men, and many of us were already Catholic part-time farmers. We’d been reading about the historical Catholic Land Movement and said to each other: ‘Why reinvent the wheel? This is what we want to do. Let’s just start it up again!’”  

Thomas pointed out how the movement was historically spurred on by the huge changes the Industrial Revolution brought.  

“Today, another revolution unfolded and prompted the Catholic Land Movement’s revitalization. Like the Industrial Revolution,” he said. “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.”  

An inaugural conference in upstate New York at the National Shrine of the North American Martyrs showed Thomas and his friends that such a desire was in the hearts of many Catholics. With workshops on butchering, harvesting and building, Mass and the Divine Office, and families enjoying fellowship, the conferences have been repeated every summer with increasing attendance and increasing diocesan support. The year 2024 saw the participation of the local shepherd, Bishop Edward Scharfenberger of Albany, New York.  

Once the group put up a website, “we began to grow rapidly,” Thomas recalled. “Thousands of people naturally gravitated towards it ... they go to the website and start registering to form chapters.” The Catholic Land Movement has 25 chapters across the U.S., with interest or activities in every U.S. state (some chapters cover multiple states), as well as Australia, Poland, the U.K. and Portugal. “It’s grown so much and so quickly,” Michael explained. “We get five to 10 emails every day from folks asking where their local chapter is, or asking if they can start a chapter.” 

 

Faith and Farming 

Austin and Sidney Bohenek are a case in point. They recovered their Catholicism while dating in college and shared a dream of owning a ranch one day. Now, married and three kids later, their “ranch” is about to materialize in the form of farmland property they purchased in Kentucky; they are currently building a house on their land. Homeschooling and homesteading is “very important” to Sidney because she wants to give her children “the best by growing food, caring for animals, doing all the way God intended. There are so many learning opportunities for both the children and myself.” 

The Boheneks saw an ad for the 2023 Catholic Land Movement conference and attended. “We were so ready to see what the faith looked like on earth,” said Austin, who heads up a CLM chapter in Kentucky. “We were practicing the faith, but to see people living it like this for a weekend … it was really the Holy Spirit!”  

Once Austin got a taste of that, he wanted more of it — thus the family’s plans for their Blue Grass State back-to-land life.  

Tim Catalano, an ex-military helicopter pilot and now operator of the Edelweiss House retreat center and farm, in Greensburg, Indiana, described the four main purposes of the movement: restoration of families to rural property; education of those families about the lost arts of working the land; fellowship in that endeavor “because we can’t do it alone”; and glorification of God through prayer and stewardship of his creation.  

Catalano explained how facilitating these goals is important, especially when it comes to finding affordable farmland. “Maybe we can help one another find land, resources and spread those. It’s common knowledge that small farms are going out of business, but how can we prevent this, or make sure that their lands don’t get turned over to corporate farms?”  

To this end, Andrew Ewell and others have founded VeraxPatria, an affiliate of the Catholic Land Movement that focuses on developing raw land, vocational training, and provides families with zero-interest financing to purchase land in partnership with TridFi, a Catholic banking platform.

 

Going to Rome 

A recent development for the Catholic Land Movement was an invitation to present their work to the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development in Rome. Facilitated by Bishop Scharfenberger, the trip to the Vatican was fruitful.  

“We presented and gave the dicastery all our info and included a copy of the original apostolic blessing from 1933, along with our request that Pope Francis grant a recognition of our continuation under that original movement and blessing,” Ewell explained. “And then we had an open audience with Pope Francis. I was able to shake his hand on behalf of the Catholic Land Movement.”  

Ultimately, the hope is that Vatican recognition will lead to more widespread diocesan support throughout the U.S., Ewell added: “We want to bring our work to various bishops in the U.S. and spread our resources to their faithful. The many emails we receive prove how many Catholics there are who want to settle on land, to help heal it and help restore society, rebuild the family, rebuild community and Christian society as a whole.” 

Soon the Catholic Land Movement will begin a fundraising phase to employ staff. “Up until now it’s all been volunteer work,” Ewell said. “We also hope to raise money to fund future agricultural farms and build demonstration farms.”  

 

Land-Based Life 

There’s lots of work for them to do. As other magazines and websites devote themselves to homesteading and rural Catholicism, the trend is clear: Many people attracted to raising wholesome food and grounded kids see some form of homesteading as “living under the umbrella of good things,” according to Austin Bohenek.  

John Cuddeback, a professor at Christendom College and founder of the online site LifeCraft, which bills itself as “a community project about discovering and applying natural wisdom in today’s challenging context with special attention to issues relating to household, friendship, work, and stewardship,” described a longing for rural life as “a central motivator for many couples” because “the insight that living on and from the land” can provide “is especially well-suited to restoring the home life they desire.”  

His site promotes resources on forming a healthy concept of “household,” including those that are land-based, explaining, “Homesteading is a key way to bring meaningful work back into the home as a sort of scaffold for the richer life Catholic families are seeking.”  

Jason Craig, co-author with Thomas Van Horn of The Liturgy of the Land: Cultivating a Catholic Homestead, speaks about how both of them “tried all sorts of things from commercial-scale compost to heritage turkeys” but “settled into two main focuses: He was doing bees, and I had a small dairy —lands of milk and honey.”  

Craig, who runs St. Joseph’s Farm in Columbus, North Carolina, with Van Horn and others (Craig and Van Horn also co-founded Fraternus Catholic brotherhood) advises potential back-to-landers “to be careful in … discernment, having the right mentors and understanding” of all it entails. The book offers people a realistic glimpse into the realities of making this kind of change and what it asks of a household.  

“What this looks like for a young couple with a baby on the way versus a retired couple is completely different,” he said. “Most people moving to the land are doing so with a bit of a pioneering spirit, meaning not inheriting a tradition or even the infrastructure of productive property; this discernment becomes very important.”  

Craig hopes his book serves this movement by helping to prayerfully and seriously think through principles and see homesteading not as “some sort of lifestyle rebranding, but as a conversion to a different way of life than what the modern consumerist economy offers.”