Who was Dorothy Day?
What led her to the Catholic Church? Ellsberg: Dorothy Day was a radical journalist who converted to Catholicism and who found a way, in the Catholic Worker movement that she co-founded in 1933 and directed until her death in 1980, to combine her faith with her passion for social justice. She had rejected Christianity in her youth, feeling that Christians were too complacent about the status quo. But a series of events — culminating in her pregnancy and the birth of her daughter — led her to a profound experience of God’s love. In return, she felt irresistibly drawn to enter the Church, even though this meant separating from her “common-law husband,” the father of her child. Q: Why have you chosen to title her diaries, “The Duty of Delight”? Ellsberg: This was a line that recurred frequently in her diaries. She herself contemplated using it as the title for one of her books. Often, after a recital of drudgery and disappointment, she would simply write, “The duty of delight.” I think
Born in 1897, she lived until 1980. For the last fifty years of her life, she was an activist for the homeless. She founded the Catholic Worker newspaper and social organization, both of which are currently still active. During the war years and the decades that followed, she was jailed numerous times for participating in anti-war and anti-nuclear marches. Around the middle of the century, she was widely regarded as a communist, but, by the time of her death, many viewed her as a living saint. With the exception of brief, bookending scenes that take place in the 1960s, Entertaining Angels proceeds in a strictly chronological fashion, starting in 1917 and concluding around 1938. When we first meet Dorothy Day, she’s a twenty year old women’s rights activist, marching in a suffrage demonstration in New York City. She’s a resident of Greenwich Village, hangs out with Eugene O’Neill, entertains numerous lovers, has an illegal abortion, and keeps a second child conceived out of wedlock. In
