to her well-known question—“Where were the saints to try to change the social order, not just to minister to the slaves but to do away with slavery?”—lay at least in part in forgotten and underemphasized aspects of the Christian tradition itself.[26]
As important as Maurin’s perspective was in encouraging Day to mine the Christian past for unexploded “dynamite,” the fuller answer to her question was that the saintly precedents of Christian lore had to inspire analogous saintliness in the present. The movement Day and Maurin hoped to create would require, both realized, modern-day “saints,” and although they were hesitant to claim the mantle of sainthood for themselves,[27] they were less reluctant to apply the designation to one another. As Jim Forest writes, Maurin believed that Day “had the potential of becoming a new Saint Catherine of Siena, the outspoken medieval reformer and peace negotiator who had counselled and reprimanded both popes and princes. What Saint Catherine had done in the fourteenth century, Peter believed Dorothy could do in the twentieth.”[28] Day, likewise, regarded Maurin, who “lived the poverty he admired in St. Francis,” as something of a saint.[29] Maurin’s chief importance to the movement, in fact, may have been as an exemplar, as a “religious archetype and symbol.”[30] As Mel Piehl explains:
ultimately, Maurin’s most important function for Day was that he provided her—and through her the Catholic Worker movement—with a personal symbol of traditional Catholic spirituality. . .Because he advocated and lived a life of absolute poverty and generosity based on Catholic ideals, Maurin expressed perfectly Day’s most deeply held beliefs about religion and society. His humble appearance and openhearted simplicity brought to mind the saints she knew so well from her studies and suggested that sainthood was a present as well as a past reality.[31]
Day may indeed have had “an intuitive sense of saintliness, even when it came in strange disguises, and an intense desire to see the heroic potential of every person whom she met,”[32] but undoubtedly her exposure to Maurin played a substantial role in leading her to the conclusion that, in her own words, “There are many saints here, there and everywhere and not only the canonized
