saints that Rome draws to our attention.” Referring back to Saint Paul’s original call for Christians to live in imitation of Christ, Day held that “saints should be common” because “we are all called to be saints.”[33]
As Day and Maurin interpreted them, then, the examples set by the saints were not to be regarded with passive awe but to be consulted as guides, not just by the “leaders” of the Catholic Worker movement, but by its rank-and-file, for whom it was not out of the question to aspire to saintliness in their own lives. The implication was that “the traditional ‘counsels of perfection’ applied to laypeople as well as to those in religious orders.”[34] One means the Worker adopted of inculcating this view was through the sponsorship of annual weeklong retreats, inspired by the retreat movement of the Canadian Jesuit Father Onesimus Lacouture. These retreats
offered a lofty vision of personal holiness, urging every Christian to aspire to the “counsels of perfection” that mainstream Catholicism enjoined only on members of religious orders. Participants were urged to take the Sermon on the Mount literally—to turn the other cheek and go the second mile—and to give up even minor indulgences if these stood in the way of loving Christ and the poor. In the retreat, Day explained, “We had to aim at perfection; we had to be guided by the folly of the Cross.”[35]
Although their aims were in a sense “lofty,” however, these retreats helped to convince Day of the wisdom of the “Little Way” advocated by one of her favourite saints, Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, who had modelled the possibility of sanctifying even the smallest and humblest acts. The greatness of Thérèse lay not in superhuman feats but in the plodding consistency with which she consecrated her life to God. While Day had initially been attracted to “spectacular saints who were impossible to imitate,” she found in Thérèse a message “obviously meant for each one of us, confronting us with daily duties, simple and small, but constant.”[36] The example of Thérèse illustrated the possibility of bridging the lowly and the transcendent within the context of everyday life, of planting modest “seeds” in one’s own patch of ground that would ultimately bear fruit far beyond it in myriad, often unexpected
