38 Essays in Anarchism and Religion: Volume 1
of bureaucratization, given its model of organization, is that “it
has not simply disintegrated into hundreds of local houses and
farms, without any sense of connection to a larger movement.”^73
McKanan concludes, in line with the thesis being proposed here,
that what accounts for this is largely that Day “modeled a practice
of friendship” that fostered ties between diverse communities and
even “reached beyond the boundaries of her movement.”^74 With
Day’s death, Catholic Worker communities themselves took up
the role that Day had exemplified, providing support and encour-
agement to one another and sustaining the movement’s sense of
identity.^75 It was the exemplary model of leadership and authority
that Day brought to the Worker from its origins onward, in con-
tradistinction to the charismatic leader’s drive for domination,
that allowed the movement as a whole to be “a multifaceted anar-
chist affair, with a variety of other leaders and tendencies.”^76
As the foregoing discussion makes clear, the Catholic Worker’s
reliance upon an exemplary model of leadership and authority
has had the (largely intended) effect of enhancing the anarchist
aspects of the movement. The concept of exemplarity has allowed
the Worker to draw sustenance from contemporary and histor-
ical examples of excellence while simultaneously emphasizing
the equality and the empowerment of all individuals within the
movement, who are urged to think of themselves as having the
capacity for self-determination as well as the capacity for self-
less commitment to those in need. The Worker’s emphasis on the
noncoercive and indirect influence of examples rather than the
coercive and direct influence of commands has meshed nicely with
the traditional anarchist resistance to all forms of authority that
are not voluntarily accepted. Finally, the concept of exemplarity
has helped Workers to envision the possibility of a movement that
opts for the centralization of common identity and purpose rather
than the centralization of institutions, enabling Worker communi-
ties to develop autonomously while retaining ties of solidarity and
support to the rest of the movement. It is not an exaggeration to
say that for Day, Maurin, and the Catholic Worker, anarchism was
not embraced as an abstract political ideology, but rather under-
stood as the social arrangement that flowed logically out of exem-
plarity pushed to its limit. While this points to the counterintuitive