relationship between benefactor and beneficiary (whose human dignity was violated by being termed a “client” or a “case”) but that demanded personal sacrifice and fostered personal development. The Worker saw social change as inseparable from personal change: thus, “While trying to transform society…a Catholic Worker was engaged in transforming himself as well.”[44] The development of the self in this sense was personalistic rather than individualistic: cultivating the personality was supposed to result, in the words of the French philosopher and Catholic Worker supporter Jacques Maritain, in “the generous self of the heroes and saints.”[45] The philosophy of personalism helped to enrich, therefore, the links the Worker posited between exemplary personal qualities, the striving for saintliness in everyday life, and the struggle for social change.
Exemplarity, leadership, and authority
If the influence of the exemplary tradition on Day and Maurin has been well documented, less well understood is the relationship between exemplarity and the operation of leadership and authority within the Catholic Worker movement. In the third section of this chapter, I will argue that the concept of exemplarity is in many ways more useful than the Weberian concept of “charisma” in capturing these aspects of the movement as well as explaining the movement’s ability to sustain itself in the absence of Day, who died in 1980. I hope to demonstrate that the Worker’s emphasis on exemplarity created a functional model of leadership and authority which, by eschewing domination and coercion in favour of voluntary emulation, helped to reconcile these components of the movement with anarchist principles.
Before exploring these claims, however, it must be admitted that leadership and authority in the Catholic Worker movement were not always exerted in a strictly exemplary fashion, particularly in the case of Day, whose influence was in a number of important instances both direct and, arguably, authoritarian. Day has, in fact, been described as something of a “benevolent dictator.”[46] As Catholic Worker John Cort remembered: “I don’t think I ever argued with her, so great was her authority among us.
