assumptions pervaded life at the Catholic Worker.” She would often chastise people whose conduct she disapproved of, as in the case of Jim Forest, whose “divorce and remarriage in 1967 moved Dorothy to request that Forest remove himself as head of the Catholic Peace Fellowship or she would remove her name from the list of sponsors.”[53] On another occasion, she banned alcohol at Peter Maurin Farm. Her most forceful actions, however, consisted of the outright expulsion of individuals from the movement. The most notorious of these episodes took place in 1962, when “there were young people living in Worker house apartments whose standards were so at variance with traditional morality that Dorothy, in one of her moments of a towering righteous anger, threw them all out.”[54]
Within her own Worker community in New York, Day’s exercise of authority—as has often been remarked—was to a large extent modelled on the monastic role of the abbess, who exercised final sovereignty within an institution whose components functioned more or less autonomously on an everyday level. While many of the criticisms of Day’s heavy-handedness by other Workers are undoubtedly justified, any explanation of Day’s willingness to vest such authority in herself must take into consideration the fact that she felt a strong personal responsibility for the institutional survival of the New York Catholic Worker. Arguably, it was because Day voluntarily shouldered this burden and the complex and often painful problems of decision-making that came along with it that other figures within the movement—Maurin in particular—were able to lead lives of greater consistency, to adopt more literally “the values of smallness and openness to failure that Day espoused.” As Dan McKanan points out, Maurin’s “practice, during all the years he was associated with the movement, was simply to outline his ‘program’ and provide a personal example of a life of scholarship and manual labour, then leave it to others to follow suit or not.”[55] Determined to build a movement, Day clearly felt that she could not afford the luxury of perfect exemplarity, and it was in New York more than elsewhere that the instrumentalities of movement-making stood out in her actions and gave them a more controlling aspect. It is crucial to acknowledge with McKanan, however, that whatever truth there
