The Catholic Worker, Dorothy Day, and Exemplary Anarchism^43should resist the label of saint is perhaps more easily understood than
her suggestion that recognition of sainthood would lead to her “dis-
missal.” My own reading of this quote is that it reflects Day’s deter-
mination to promote an image of herself as someone who was, like
any other Catholic Worker, struggling towards sainthood rather than
someone whose actions could be understood as saintly in an unqual-
ified sense. The exemplarity she valued was that which kept the ideal
in tension with the real, and therefore stimulated further action. To
posit a too-literal saintliness in the present would have been to risk
fostering complacency.
- Forest, All Is Grace, 108.
- Mark Zwick and Louise Zwick, The Catholic Worker Movement:
Intellectual and Spiritual Origins (New York: Paulist Press, 2005),
- Piehl, Breaking Bread, 66.
- Piehl, Breaking Bread, 65.
- Dan McKanan, The Catholic Worker Movement after Dorothy:
Practicing the Works of Mercy in a New Generation (Collegeville,
MN: Liturgical Press, 2008), 34. - Forest, All Is Grace, 118.
- McKanan, The Catholic Worker Movement after Dorothy, 49.
- McKanan, The Catholic Worker Movement after Dorothy, 44.
- Dorothy Day, Loaves and Fishes (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books,
1963), 127. - Day, Loaves and Fishes, 176.
- For a discussion of how the concept of exemplarity factored in to
the anarchist practice of “propaganda of the deed,” see my “Pacifism,
Nonviolence, and the Reinvention of Anarchist Tactics in the
Twentieth Century,” Journal for the Study of Radicalism 9.1 (Spring
2015). The Catholic Worker, I argue, played an important role in the
development of propaganda of the deed into a form of “prefigurative
exemplarity” by nonviolent anarchists in the 20th century. - William D. Miller, A Harsh and Dreadful Love: Dorothy Day
and the Catholic Worker Movement (New York: Liveright, 1973), 6.