“anarchism has a broad back, like paper it endures anything,” one could hardly do better than to point to the existence of the Catholic Worker movement.[1] Launched by Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin on May 1, 1933, when the first issue of the Catholic Worker was distributed to bemused radicals assembled in Union Square, Manhattan, the Catholic Worker movement has from its inception fused an anarchist sensibility with intense Catholic piety. Effecting that unlikely pairing required, to use the term employed by one of the movement’s most perceptive scholars, nothing less than “inventing” Catholic radicalism in the United States, where Social Gospel Protestants had a near monopoly on faith-based social activism in the early 20th century.[2] If the mystery of its very existence were not enough, the unusual longevity of the Catholic Worker raises questions as to what deeper lessons about social movements might be contained in the Worker’s seemingly idiosyncratic synthesis of disparate influences.
By no means can those lessons be illuminated comprehensively in the space of this chapter. Instead, in what follows I will attempt to draw attention to a feature of the movement that has garnered much comment but little systematic exposition, a feature that goes some way towards explaining how the Worker was able to find an affinity between anarchist ideas and a specifically Catholic version of the Christian faith. The concept that will underpin this discussion is the concept of “exemplarity,” a concept whose flagging philosophical reputation has begun to revive thanks to recent scholarly work on the subject in the areas of philosophy, literary criticism, rhetoric, pedagogy, and legal studies.[3] Exemplarity, I will argue, played an instrumental role in shaping the Catholic Worker movement’s self-conception and determining the manner of the movement’s operation. After offering a brief history of the idea of exemplarity from its roots in ancient philosophy, history, and rhetoric to its incorporation into Christianity, I will examine its place in the founding vision for the Catholic Worker as fleshed out by Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin in the early 1930s. The ideal of contemporary sainthood that informed the Worker’s activities was, I maintain, informed by interpretations of central Christian figures like Christ, the saints, and the figure of the “holy fool” that placed special emphasis on their exemplary qualities. I will then consider whether Day, the Worker’s de facto leader, consistently
