42 Essays in Anarchism and Religion: Volume 1
holiness” of the Virgin Mary, who is conceived as the first and quint-
essential disciple of Christ, the model of the Church, and a “living
catechism.” See, for example, the encyclicals Marialis Cultus and
Catechesi Tradendae.
- Larry Scanlon, Narrative, Authority, and Power: The Medieval
Exemplum and the Chaucerian Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1994), 9–10. It should be noted that Scanlon
ultimately concludes that the exempla, as employed by Chaucer in
particular, did not so much subvert Church authority as appropriate it. - Adolf von Harnack provides a helpful account of the novelty of
Francis and the mendicants more generally in his History of Dogma,
vol. VI (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company), ch. 2, pt. 1. - Ferrara, The Force of the Example, ix–x.
- Day is quoted in Mel Piehl, “The Politics of Free Obedience,” in
Patrick G. Coy, ed., A Revolution of the Heart: Essays on the Catholic
Worker (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1988), 210. - Jim Forest, All Is Grace: A Biography of Dorothy Day (Maryknoll,
NY: Orbis Books, 2011), 122. - Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness (New York: Harper & Row,
1952), 204–5. - Maurin quoted in Forest, All Is Grace, 107.
- Forest, All Is Grace, 14.
- Forest, All Is Grace, 77.
- As Piehl writes, Day’s “commitment to Catholicism was closely
attuned to the models she found in the early saints of the Church,
whose spiritual illumination came through asceticism and prayer.”
Breaking Bread, 84. - Jim Forest describes, for example, how Maurin’s idea for houses
of hospitality (and, at a smaller level, rooms of hospitality, or “Christ
Rooms”) was inspired by Saint Basil’s care for the poor in 4th- century
Cappadocia. All Is Grace, 121. - Day, The Long Loneliness, 45.
- One of Day’s best-known quotes captures this reluctance: “Don’t
call me a saint. I don’t want to be dismissed so easily.” That Day