Essays in Anarchism and Religion

28 Essays in Anarchism and Religion: Volume 1

saints that Rome draws to our attention.” Referring back to Saint
Paul’s original call for Christians to live in imitation of Christ,
Day held that “saints should be common” because “we are all
called to be saints.”^33
As Day and Maurin interpreted them, then, the examples set by
the saints were not to be regarded with passive awe but to be con-
sulted as guides, not just by the “leaders” of the Catholic Worker
movement, but by its rank-and-file, for whom it was not out of
the question to aspire to saintliness in their own lives. The impli-
cation was that “the traditional ‘counsels of perfection’ applied
to laypeople as well as to those in religious orders.”^34 One means
the Worker adopted of inculcating this view was through the
sponsorship of annual weeklong retreats, inspired by the retreat
movement of the Canadian Jesuit Father Onesimus Lacouture.
These retreats

offered a lofty vision of personal holiness, urging every Christian to

aspire to the “counsels of perfection” that mainstream Catholicism

enjoined only on members of religious orders. Participants were

urged to take the Sermon on the Mount literally—to turn the other

cheek and go the second mile—and to give up even minor indul-

gences if these stood in the way of loving Christ and the poor. In the

retreat, Day explained, “We had to aim at perfection; we had to be

guided by the folly of the Cross.”^35

Although their aims were in a sense “lofty,” however, these re-
treats helped to convince Day of the wisdom of the “Little Way”
advocated by one of her favourite saints, Saint Thérèse of Lisieux,
who had modelled the possibility of sanctifying even the smallest
and humblest acts. The greatness of Thérèse lay not in superhu-
man feats but in the plodding consistency with which she conse-
crated her life to God. While Day had initially been attracted to
“spectacular saints who were impossible to imitate,” she found
in Thérèse a message “obviously meant for each one of us, con-
fronting us with daily duties, simple and small, but constant.”^36
The example of Thérèse illustrated the possibility of bridging the
lowly and the transcendent within the context of everyday life, of
planting modest “seeds” in one’s own patch of ground that would
ultimately bear fruit far beyond it in myriad, often unexpected