What I Learned from Dorothy Day

The following is a transcript of Robert Ellsberg’s presentation to the National Catholic Worker gathering at the San Antonio Catholic Worker in early October 2025.

Robert Ellsberg is the publisher of Orbis Books. From 1975-80 he was part of the Catholic Worker community in New York City, and served two years as managing editor of The Catholic Worker paper. He has edited five volumes of Dorothy Day’s writings, and in this presentation, he reflects on what he has learned from her.

The transcript was auto-generated from the recording and reviewed by a human editor, who made minor edits for clarity. Cover photo: Robert Ellsberg and Dorothy Day.

Martha Hennessy:

Welcome. Welcome, Robert, thank you so much for speaking to us long distance. I’ve been asked to introduce you—I don’t feel like I will ever do you justice, but here goes.

I think you look like the Dalai Lama with your treatment. You’re beautiful. So, Robert Ellsberg, a dear friend of mine. We happen to be the same age. He was copying Pentagon Papers while I was going to the Woodstock Festival.

Robert came to the Worker—he deferred college, came to the Worker as a very young man, and Dorothy most immediately saw what his gifts and vocation would be. She made him editor of the paper at quite a young age, and so that set him on a beautiful trajectory. He has translated much of Dorothy’s works and done a beautiful job. I mean, his dedication is hours and hours and hours of hard, hard work with this transcribing and printing and editing and putting together. So we are incredibly grateful for your body of work, Robert, and your most recent book, The Spiritual Writings of Dorothy Day, is a wonderful gift to all of us.

So without any further ado, please speak to us. Thank you.

Robert Ellsberg:

Thank you very much, Martha.

I’m glad I’m able to join you via this technology, not able to be with you in person, but I’m very glad to know that this gathering is occurring. I wanted to just make mention of the death of a great Catholic Worker last night, Patrick Jordan. I presume that Martha knows about that. He was one of Dorothy’s, I think, dearest sons—came to the Catholic Worker as a former Franciscan in the late ’60s, became editor of the paper. He was arrested for draft resistance, and the judge was so impressed by him that he in effect sentenced him to work at the Catholic Worker, which he would have done anyway.

He met his wife there, Kathleen, a former Sister of Loretto. He worked in other Catholic Worker communities, and later they lived in the bungalow next to Dorothy’s cottage on Staten Island and really cared for her very closely in her later years. To me, Pat really embodied so many of the greatest virtues and values of the Catholic Worker. He was a real mentor to me—just a few years older—and I’m conscious of the fact that that circle of people who worked with Dorothy and knew her and sat at her feet learning from her, it grows smaller, you know. And it makes me grateful that I am still with you to share some thoughts.

I’m now almost 70, shortly, but once I was young and I came to the Catholic Worker when I was very young. As Martha said, I was 19 in 1975, September. So last month, that was exactly 50 years ago. I’ve spent many years, as Martha has mentioned, editing Dorothy’s writings. I’ve done six volumes now. And I have to say that, although I did know her, much of what I’ve really learned from her has been through this opportunity over many, many decades now—and in different contexts, whether her writings or her letters or her diaries—to get to know her better. And I feel that I’m still learning.

But there are some lessons I thought I would like to share with you, things that I do think I picked up from her implicitly and have tried to understand even more deeply over the years.

Love in Action: Not Sentimental, But Real

Many of you know that she liked the line from Dostoevsky that love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams. And I think the first thing that I learned from Dorothy was that she was not a sentimental person. She knew that poverty and suffering are hard. She knew the sights and smells of destitution, the craziness, the life of the insulted and injured, as she said. People used to praise her for her, quote, ‘wonderful work among the poor.’ She knew that a lot of it wasn’t really all so wonderful. It was also discouraging. It was exhausting. It was unrelenting.

Seeing Beneath the Surface

And yet, I also learned from Dorothy that you have to learn to see beneath the surface of things. On the surface, you can see what seems like noise, chaos, ugliness, squalor. Dorothy had an eye for the transcendent, a capacity always to see something deeper—a deeper truth, a deeper goodness. It was there if you knew where to look for it. She had a great appreciation for beauty. She loved music. She loved beautiful things. She loved nature. She liked to quote Dostoevsky’s other line: the world will be saved by beauty. And that didn’t just mean it would be saved by pretty things. It would be saved by our capacity to see things in their ultimate reality. And particularly in her case, that was the capacity to see the presence of God, the presence of grace, the presence of Christ, even among the destitute, even among what seemed in the world’s eyes to be ugly.

Love as an Act of Will

I learned from Dorothy that love is not a matter of just feelings. It’s about the will. Loving people who are not intrinsically lovable is a matter of will. But Dorothy believed that if you made the effort, you could love this disagreeable person beside you. You could seek Christ in them. And that work was also rooted in discipline, in practice, in daily prayer, in meditation on Scripture, the sacraments, the life of faith—learning to see things with new eyes, learning to see things with the eyes of the gospel.

Holiness in Ordinary Life: The Little Way

And I learned from Dorothy, especially in editing her diaries, where it came through very clearly to me, that the path of holiness and discipleship—the arena for that is largely in just ordinary life.

I was not a Catholic when I came to the Catholic Worker. I was attracted to Dorothy and the Catholic Worker more through my interest in Gandhi and radical nonviolence. I was attracted because of the stories of her civil disobedience, her arrests during the civil defense drills, her support of young men burning their draft cards during the Vietnam War, the iconic picture of her by Bob Fitch being arrested with the United Farm Workers when she was 75. But I learned, especially when I studied her diaries, that most of her life, like the life of anyone else, was spent in very ordinary ways.

I was not familiar with the life of St. Thérèse of Lisieux when I first arrived. I wasn’t familiar with any saints when I came to the Catholic Worker. But soon enough, I learned that this was Dorothy’s favorite saint, and it was hard for me to understand what Dorothy, the activist, had in common with this young, cloistered Carmelite sister who died at the age of 24.

St. Thérèse, you might know, in her autobiography wrote about her path to holiness, her science of holiness that she called the Little Way, which consisted of doing all of our ordinary tasks, all of our encounters, enduring all the inconveniences or discomforts or hardships in our life, in a spirit of openness to God, the presence of God, a spirit of love and spirit of good. And if you did that, all of these things became fuel for holiness. And St. Thérèse was a saint who showed that you did not have to be a founder of a religious order, you didn’t have to be a martyr in some big arena, but that just ordinary daily life was the material of sanctity. And Dorothy took that very, very much to heart.

I saw that it was not just in the big things that she did—her being arrested, her founding the Catholic Worker, going on picket lines—but it was in her everyday practice of trying to be more charitable, more forgiving, more patient with other people, to be more conscious of her own failures and her own purpose of amendment. All of these things in this ordinary life, in the perhaps not very ordinary conditions of a Catholic Worker community, prepared her for the things that she did on a seemingly more heroic public stage.

Acting Without Concern for Results

As a dedicated activist myself, I wanted to be heard, to make a difference, to change the world. But from Dorothy, I learned what it means to act without concern for results, the spirit of detachment, to focus on the rightness or purity of our intentions and the power of things that seem unimportant and with little effect. With Dorothy, I learned that there’s a different approach to effectiveness or success. She always liked to remind us that Christ achieved his victory through apparent failure, and said that unless the seed falls into the ground and dies, it bears little fruit.

From Peter [Maurin], that idea of the little way also had social implications. And she said that’s one of the things that she most wanted people to be aware of: the significance of all the little things we do or don’t do, the protests we make, seemingly foolish things—standing on a street corner holding up a sign saying ‘No more war,’ or sitting down in Central Park or City Hall Park during a civil defense drill. These could seem like small and foolish things, just as foolish as the idea that the response to the hunger and the desperation of the Depression consisted of offering soup and bread to people who knocked on the door. But all these things were a witness, all these things were seeds, were pointing toward a different kind of reality.

I particularly like the line that she said that I think speaks very much to us today, where she says one of the greatest evils of the day is the sense of futility. Young people say, ‘What good can one person do? What’s the sense of our small effort?’ They cannot see that we must lay one brick at a time, take one step at a time. We can be responsible only for the action of the present moment. We can beg for an increase of love in our hearts that will vitalize and transform all our individual actions and know that God will take them and multiply them, as Jesus multiplied the loaves and fishes.

Being Radical: Modeling a Different Set of Values

I learned from Dorothy that to be a radical isn’t just about calling attention to everything that is wrong in the world, but about modeling a different set of values. Not just talking about what others should do or what the government should do, but looking at what we can do right now to live in a different way. To be the change we want to see. To start right now with the means at hand.

Joy and Adventure in the Work

And I learned from Dorothy that to live that way can be a tremendous adventure. When you were with Dorothy, you didn’t have a feeling of gloom or hopelessness at all, despite all the difficulties and frustrations. There was so much joy and celebration.

John Cort, who was another young Harvard graduate in the 1930s, one of the first to come to the Catholic Worker, said that he was attracted by seeing Dorothy. She seemed to just have this vitality and life about her. She seemed to be having a lot of fun. Of course, she seemed like a pretty old woman to him at the time—in her mid-30s. But he said he wanted to experience some of that for himself. And I think that you see that in a lot of the saints. You see someone like St. Francis, that there was just something attractive and appealing that made people want to follow him, want to know the secret of his happiness.

Saints Are Not Perfect People

I’ve spent a lot of my life writing about saints and holy people, and that too is something that Dorothy passed along to me. Many of you are no doubt familiar with the famous line that Dorothy supposedly said: ‘Don’t call me a saint, I don’t want to be dismissed that easily.’ I think it’s the most famous thing that she supposedly ever said. And I regret that, because people think that she had a cynical or flip attitude towards saints, which is actually the opposite.

What she did not want was to be put on a pedestal and have people think that what she was able to do came easily to her because, after all, she was a saint—’We couldn’t do those kinds of things.’ And she didn’t want people to be like her or to be like St. Francis. She wanted them to take seriously their own call to holiness, to put off the old person, to put on Christ. Something that was a lifetime journey, something that was not finished or completed according to some timetable or checking off some virtues on a list. It was not about whether we were canonized or whether churches would be named after us. Dorothy didn’t want to be called a saint, she wanted to be a saint. And she believed that was the vocation of all Christians.

But I learned from Dorothy that being a saint is not about being a perfect person, as if there was any doubt. Saints are human beings, they’re flawed. They do and say things that they regret. Dorothy’s flaws are most evident because she herself calls attention to them in her diaries constantly—her capacity for anger, self-righteousness, impatience. Dorothy once said—someone said to her, ‘You know, hold your temper, Dorothy.’ And she said, ‘I hold more temper in one minute than you will in your entire life.’

Being a saint was not about being perfect, but a process of getting back up, starting again, trying harder, knowing you’ll fail, practicing faith, hope, and charity. Lessons that are never left, that are never finished. It’s a call that is constantly inviting us to go deeper, to go farther.

Youthfulness and Starting Again

But one of the other things I learned from Dorothy or received from her was her incredible spirit of youthfulness and adventure. She was attracted to young people because of what she called their instinct for the heroic. She urged us to aim for the impossible. She said, ‘If you lower your goal, you’ll diminish your effort.’ And she was understanding of our mistakes and foibles because of the memory of her own youthful struggles.

As I get older, I learn different lessons from Dorothy. I’m continuously inspired by the way she retained that spirit of youthfulness, that readiness to begin again. When she was in her 70s, she started a house for homeless women. She faced down the IRS when they were threatening to close her down for supposed failure to pay federal income taxes. Arrested with the farm workers at the age of 75. Always prepared to start again.

I love this quote that I found in her diaries, where she says: ‘No matter how old I get, no matter how feeble, short of breath, incapable of walking more than a few blocks, what with heart murmurs, heart failure, emphysema perhaps, arthritis in feet and knees, with all these symptoms of age and decrepitude—my heart can still leap for joy as I read and suddenly assent to some great truth enunciated by some great mind and heart.’

The Sacrament of the Present Moment

Dorothy was a believer in the sacrament of the present moment—a line that she found in Jean-Pierre de Caussade’s book, Abandonment to Divine Providence. This idea that God is speaking to us in every moment of our lives. That every encounter, every duty we have to undertake, every responsibility, there is a way to God. There’s a way to love. There’s a way to truth there, in what seems like just very ordinary, matter-of-fact daily encounters.

And I could see that so much in her diaries that are a kind of conversation with God about just the very ordinary things in her life. And as I say, training herself to experience all of those opportunities as an opportunity for love, as an opportunity to spread love, to receive love, to see Christ in others, to spread peace, to put more peace into the world. And that this was something that required daily practice, daily work.

The Catholic Worker as a School

I look back on my life and I recall that Dorothy Day spoke of the Catholic Worker in one of her later columns as a school, she said, where young people come to find their vocations. And that certainly was the case for me—not to remain at the Catholic Worker. I left in 1980 after five years, and I had become a Catholic by that time and was on the road to finally better understanding the spiritual foundation or motivation of Dorothy and what she was trying to do with the Catholic Worker.

And I think of how when I was 20, she invited me to be the managing editor of the Catholic Worker, something of which I had no evident qualifications. I wasn’t even a Catholic. I didn’t have even that bare minimum qualification. I don’t know what I was qualified for, but there was some way in which I feel like she commissioned me in some way to become a certain kind of writer, a certain kind of editor, and remarkably, her editor. And I’ve tried to live up to that.

Passing on the Witness

There does come a point when the first generation of witnesses begin to fade. I think of the first generation after the resurrection, of the people who received the gospel from those who had known Jesus. And then eventually the witnesses were people who had learned about Jesus through reading the gospels or hearing the stories about him. But most of all, the people who had seen how his teachings were embodied and lived out in the community, in the early church. Same thing with St. Francis, as we move to the era when we know about him through the legends and the stories that are told about him, through his own writings. And so it is with Dorothy Day.

But it makes me really happy to see and know and be part of a gathering like this of people who are attempting to walk in that path and have been inspired by her way and her teachings. Of course, she did not want people to follow her. She hoped that through her witness and her way of living, people would come to see the gospel in action in a way that would speak to them and that they would find a way of following Jesus more closely and faithfully in their own lives.

And it is very heartening, inspiring for me at a distance even, to be with you here, a group of people in whom the light and the spirit of Dorothy Day is obviously still living and will continue to live.

Thank you very much.

Robert Ellsberg’s latest book is Dorothy Day: Spiritual Writings, published by Orbis Books. Use code AUT30 for 30% off.