of bureaucratization, given its model of organization, is that “it has not simply disintegrated into hundreds of local houses and farms, without any sense of connection to a larger movement.”[73] McKanan concludes, in line with the thesis being proposed here, that what accounts for this is largely that Day “modeled a practice of friendship” that fostered ties between diverse communities and even “reached beyond the boundaries of her movement.”[74] With Day’s death, Catholic Worker communities themselves took up the role that Day had exemplified, providing support and encouragement to one another and sustaining the movement’s sense of identity.[75] It was the exemplary model of leadership and authority that Day brought to the Worker from its origins onward, in contradistinction to the charismatic leader’s drive for domination, that allowed the movement as a whole to be “a multifaceted anarchist affair, with a variety of other leaders and tendencies.”[76]
As the foregoing discussion makes clear, the Catholic Worker’s reliance upon an exemplary model of leadership and authority has had the (largely intended) effect of enhancing the anarchist aspects of the movement. The concept of exemplarity has allowed the Worker to draw sustenance from contemporary and historical examples of excellence while simultaneously emphasizing the equality and the empowerment of all individuals within the movement, who are urged to think of themselves as having the capacity for self-determination as well as the capacity for selfless commitment to those in need. The Worker’s emphasis on the noncoercive and indirect influence of examples rather than the coercive and direct influence of commands has meshed nicely with the traditional anarchist resistance to all forms of authority that are not voluntarily accepted. Finally, the concept of exemplarity has helped Workers to envision the possibility of a movement that opts for the centralization of common identity and purpose rather than the centralization of institutions, enabling Worker communities to develop autonomously while retaining ties of solidarity and support to the rest of the movement. It is not an exaggeration to say that for Day, Maurin, and the Catholic Worker, anarchism was not embraced as an abstract political ideology, but rather understood as the social arrangement that flowed logically out of exemplarity pushed to its limit. While this points to the counterintuitive
