The Catholic Worker, Dorothy Day, and Exemplary Anarchism^27to her well-known question—“Where were the saints to try to
change the social order, not just to minister to the slaves but to do
away with slavery?”—lay at least in part in forgotten and under-
emphasized aspects of the Christian tradition itself.^26
As important as Maurin’s perspective was in encouraging
Day to mine the Christian past for unexploded “dynamite,” the
fuller answer to her question was that the saintly precedents of
Christian lore had to inspire analogous saintliness in the pres-
ent. The movement Day and Maurin hoped to create would re-
quire, both realized, modern-day “saints,” and although they were
hesitant to claim the mantle of sainthood for themselves,^27 they
were less reluctant to apply the designation to one another. As
Jim Forest writes, Maurin believed that Day “had the potential of
becoming a new Saint Catherine of Siena, the outspoken medie-
val reformer and peace negotiator who had counselled and repri-
manded both popes and princes. What Saint Catherine had done
in the fourteenth century, Peter believed Dorothy could do in the
twentieth.”^28 Day, likewise, regarded Maurin, who “lived the pov-
erty he admired in St. Francis,” as something of a saint.^29 Maurin’s
chief importance to the movement, in fact, may have been as an
exemplar, as a “religious archetype and symbol.”^30 As Mel Piehl
explains:
ultimately, Maurin’s most important function for Day was that he
provided her—and through her the Catholic Worker movement—
with a personal symbol of traditional Catholic spirituality...
Because he advocated and lived a life of absolute poverty and gen-
erosity based on Catholic ideals, Maurin expressed perfectly Day’s
most deeply held beliefs about religion and society. His humble
appearance and openhearted simplicity brought to mind the saints
she knew so well from her studies and suggested that sainthood
was a present as well as a past reality.^31Day may indeed have had “an intuitive sense of saintliness, even
when it came in strange disguises, and an intense desire to see the
heroic potential of every person whom she met,”^32 but undoubt-
edly her exposure to Maurin played a substantial role in leading
her to the conclusion that, in her own words, “There are many
saints here, there and everywhere and not only the canonized