Carolyn Zablotny: Dorothy Day is like a well that never runs dry. You of all people, Robert, know that! You’ve been plumbing her depths for decades, always arriving at fresh understandings. 

Robert Ellsberg: Thank you. I was privileged to know Dorothy in the last five years of her life. After she died, I edited her Selected Writings and wrote a long introduction that reflected my reading of all her published writings. I think what I wrote then still stands up after 45 years. But you are right that over the subsequent decades, I have continued to learn and understand more about who she was and what her life means. Partly that reflects my own evolving perspective. My view as I enter my seventies is different than when I first met her at nineteen. 

But a lot of my understanding has been shaped by the opportunity to edit her personal writings—specifically her diaries and letters. These gave me greater insight into her interior life, and how her spirituality—or you might say, her way of holiness—was expressed in the everyday and ordinary practice of faith and charity. In particular, I came to recognize how her appropriation of St. Therese of Lisieux’s “little way” offered a key to understanding her life of faith, the lessons of the Catholic Worker, and her style of social witness.

C.Z.: In all your studies and writings, not just on Dorothy but on saints throughout history, you often stress their reviving of our “moral imagination.” Thinking of Dorothy, I’ve heard people say they were never quite the same after encountering her and the Catholic Worker. 

R.E.: I often quote her granddaughter Kate Hennessey’s line, that to know Dorothy Day is to ”spend the rest of your life wondering what hit you.” That certainly describes my own experience. Through Dorothy and my time at the CW, I became a Catholic, and that has shaped my entire subsequent life. Through her, I found my interest in writing about saints and moral exemplars. And through her appointing me as managing editor of the CW when I was twenty, she was pointing me in the direction of my life’s work and vocation: not just as an editor, but as her editor!

Dorothy’s interest in saints was not confined to their role as heavenly patrons or objects of veneration. She believed that as we learned about the lives of the saints, recognized their humanity, and reflected on the ways they responded to the gospel challenge in their time, they would inspire us in answering our own call to holiness. 

She believed that all Christians were “called to be saints.” This didn’t mean being canonized or having a church named after us. Nor did it mean imitating the great saints. It meant attempting to live, like them, a life shaped by the story of Jesus and the logic of the gospel—a way of life marked by love and humility, the spirit of peace, and a thirst for justice. The stories of the saints might embolden us to think about how we too, in our present circumstances, in the challenges of our own moment in history, and in the needs of our neighbors, might find our own distinctive form of discipleship. 

Yes, in that sense, the saints enlarge our “moral imagination”; they show what the gospel looks like clothed in human form. And of course, because the logic of the gospel turns so much of the values of our world on their head, it calls us to think and live in radically different ways. And once people have encountered those values, embodied in someone like Dorothy Day, they are never quite the same. At least they can’t buy into the dodge that the gospel is lovely in theory, but it cannot really be lived.

C.Z.: I recently came across an appreciation of the saints for their “charisms.” On the centennial celebration of Dorothy’s birth in 1997 at New York University, you presented what I still think of as being the “bible” of her charisms, her unique gifts to us. Can you revisit and summarize? Is there anything today you’d like to add or emphasize?

R.E.: I have always thought that in considering someone to be a saint, it is important to think about the distinctive lessons or gifts that their canonization offers to the church. That is to say, it is not a matter of “honoring” a holy person—adding them to a kind of Hall of Fame. It is also a way of enlarging our understanding of holiness. Simone Weil said “Today it is not nearly enough merely to be a saint; but we must have the saintliness demanded by the present moment.” And so, in that talk I reflected on what I saw as some of Dorothy’s particular “gifts” to the church. 

First, I noted her inspiration to the lay apostolate. The list of official saints is overwhelmingly dominated by clergy and religious. Dorothy was a lay person—thus representing the overwhelming majority of the church. Furthermore, in a canon of saints that is still overwhelmingly male, she was a lay woman. And her conversion was unique in the annals of the saints, prompted by the birth of her daughter. In this age of the laity, she shows that none of us needs any special authorization nor special religious vows to begin living according to the gospel in our own circumstances and conditions.

Secondly, I spoke of her integration of charity and justice. Many saints and religious orders in history have been dedicated to the works of mercy—feeding the hungry, caring for the sick, orphans, and prisoners. But Dorothy believed it was not enough to care for the poor. We must also address and resist the social structures that are responsible for so much poverty. As she noted of her youthful reflections on the saints, while admiring their care for the poor and the leper, she had another thought: “Why was so much done in remedying social evils instead of avoiding them in the first place?. . . Where were the saints to change the social order? Not just to minister to the slaves but to do away with slavery?” Dorothy answered those questions with her life. And in doing so, she really pioneered a new model of holiness.

Thirdly, I noted that Dorothy had done more than any Catholic in modern history to affirm the peace message of Jesus. She believed that Jesus taught and modeled a practice of nonviolence that applied to all the dimensions of our lives. She confronted war and violence throughout her life, not only in words but in prophetic actions. Through most of her life, hers was largely an isolated voice crying in the wilderness. And yet the arc of Catholic teaching in the past sixty years has increasingly bended toward Dorothy’s view. Even if her pacifism is not regarded as the sole or obligatory position of the church, it is moving increasingly to the center of church teaching, now finding strong support from the Vatican, under Pope Francis and now Pope Leo. 

Any of those points, I said, could be a reason for her canonization. I also spoke of the many ways she anticipated the teachings of Vatican II. But now I would also point to her prophetic anticipation of more recent developments in Catholic social teaching—particularly the preferential option for the poor and care for creation. 

C.Z.: Dorothy had hoped to write a spiritual autobiography, entitled “All is Grace.” What was it like to have her diaries opened to you for editing and what most impressed you?

R.E.: I tended to think about Dorothy in terms of her great accomplishments—founding the CW, marching on picket lines, her arrests for protesting civil defense drills, and so forth. I realized in reading her diaries that most of her life, as is the case with any of us, was spent in very ordinary ways. But for her, in light of St. Therese’s Little Way, these daily trials, chores,  and encounters, became the true arena for holiness: the daily practice of forgiveness, patience, perseverance, the practice of charity, the effort to restrain her anger and tendency toward judgment. These were real challenges for her.

I found in her diaries a frequent reference to “the duty of delight,” and I chose that as a title for the book. Dorothy believed that delight, like love, was a matter of the will: a constant choice, a conscious decision. As she liked to quote St. John of the Cross, “Where there is no love, put love, and you will draw love out.” I think she felt this was an essential teaching of the gospel. We don’t just love those who are loveable. We don’t just feel delight when things are delightful. God is in all things, the joys as well as the sorrows. But you have to decide to notice and practice that.                  

C.Z.: You’ve referred to her as a “political saint.” Is that how best we should remember her? It seems there are so many ways.

R.E: I wouldn’t say there is a best way to remember her. In referring to “political holiness,” I am of course not talking about partisan politics—but a consciousness of the social dimension of our faith. Too often our spirituality is privatized —my  salvation, my relationship with God. But as Charles Péguy said, at the hour of judgment, the Lord will say, “Where are the others?” You could say that Dorothy helps us understand the social meaning of the Beatitudes. What does it mean to be “poor in spirit” in a world of consumerism, materialism, and  inequality? 

As far as “blessed are the merciful,” I have noted her originality in connecting mercy with justice. “Blessed are those who mourn”: This is not a matter of being sad all the time but of having a heart of flesh instead of a heart of stone—a heart sensitive to the sufferings of the world. What does meekness mean? Perhaps an appreciation for what is small or considered of no account; the power disguised in weakness. Blessed are the peacemakers: When we take this seriously it means adopting a whole new set of values opposed to the glorification of power, violence, and “being number one!” She is clearly among those who “hunger and thirst for God’s righteousness,” and she suffered the consequences of such a prophetic stance—not just time in jail, but of being dismissed as a heretic, a subversive, or a fool. Her expansive FBI file shows that she was at one time placed on an index of subversives to be detained in the event of a national emergency.

There are other examples of “political saints,” such as Joan of Arc, whom Dorothy honored not as a warrior but as a champion of conscience. But I think Dorothy represented a kind of discipleship shaped by the particular challenges of her time: the Depression, the cause of workers, racial justice, revolution, the struggle for freedom. Her efforts were aimed not just at her personal sanctification, but at achieving Peter Maurin’s ideal of a “society where it is easier to be good.” 

C.Z.: The Cause for her canonization has entered its 2nd quarter: its 26th year. You were there at those first meetings in 2000 convened by John Cardinal O’Connor to explore whether or not it should even be opened. What strikes you in retrospect about that meeting — and about the Cause in general over this past quarter century?

R.E.: The meetings with Cardinal O’Connor were very moving. I had a strong sense of his humility in approaching this consideration. “I wouldn’t want it to be said that I had stood in the way of what God wanted,” he said. It has been a long process since then. In the beginning most of those driving the Guild were people, now aging, who had known Dorothy. It has been wonderful to see new young people step up—representing her ability to speak to a new generation. When David O’Brien, after her death in 1980, called her, “the most important, influential, and interesting Catholic in American history,” that might have sounded like a stretch. Now, more than 45 years later, it sounds unquestionably true.

C.Z. One of the Guild’s mantras is that Dorothy is a “saint for our time.” Do you sense a heightened urgency for her canonization given the tenor, the darkness of the times, in this country and elsewhere — and any heightened hope that it will occur “in our time”? 

R.E.: I think an indication of her significance came in 2015 when Pope Francis, in his address to the U.S. Congress, organized his whole remarks around what he called four “great Americans”: Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., Thomas Merton, and Dorothy Day. He said that a country may be considered great to the extent that it reflects the dreams of such figures: the dream of equality, justice, freedom, peace, and the pursuit of dialogue. He wasn’t just talking about their significance for Christians or Catholics. These were universal values that spoke directly to the challenges of our time. 

I felt strongly that Pope Francis was the shepherd of Dorothy’s dreams. By the same token, it seemed that Dorothy embodied Pope Francis’s vision of the gospel: the centrality of mercy, the importance of welcoming the stranger, the mission of peace, hospitality, encounter, and care for the earth. And if there is serious momentum around her cause for canonization, it is a reflection in part of the distance the church has traveled in catching up with her witness. Still, in the purity of her vision and her example, she continues to walk ahead, beckoning the church to follow. 

Will her canonization occur “in our time?” Of course, that is beyond our reckoning. But I feel confident that the process will continue to unfold without impediment. Certainly her model of discipleship feels like an antidote to many of the issues we face today, particularly with the manipulation of the gospel in the service of Christian nationalism, what Pope Francis called “the culture of indifference,” and disdain for “the other.” Dorothy lived out of the radical implications of the Incarnation and Christ’s words that what we do for the least of our brothers and sisters, we do directly to him. On this our salvation is said to depend. And perhaps also the survival of our planet. 

C.Z. Anything you’d like to add, Robert? And please let us add our many thanks to you! 

R.E.: Thank you. I am aware of what a gift it was to know Dorothy when I was young. Now, as I grow old, it feels as if part of my mission is to pay that gift forward, to share her story and message with a new generation. I think for all of us engaged in the Dorothy Day Guild, this work may be the most important thing we do with our lives.