Berkley Center

Robert Ellsberg: What led me to Dorothy Day does go back to my childhood and my role in helping my father, Daniel Ellsberg, copy the Pentagon papers in 1969, when I was 13. He undertook this project, copying these papers with the presumption that he would probably go to prison for the rest of his life. And he came and took me out to lunch and asked whether I would be willing to help him, not because he really needed help, but because I think he wanted me to witness what he was doing, and to have some kind of firsthand personal understanding of what was motivating him for a time in the future when I perhaps wouldn't see him, or when people would be calling him a traitor or worse. I said, "Of course, I'd be happy to help him." Which involved just a couple of nights of my helping with a Xerox machine.

Two years later, the Pentagon Papers were published and he was arrested and faced 115 years in prison. I was called to testify before a grand jury, and this had a tremendous impact on my life, and raised questions for me because of the example of my father and the risks he was prepared to take for what he believed. What did I really believe in and what was my life for? It gave me a deeper sense that there was a higher meaning to my life that I needed to discover and to express and live out.

And that led me, when I was 19, to drop out of college and go to the Catholic Worker in New York City, where I met Dorothy Day. And the example of Dorothy Day and Christians like her, who seemed to be living out their Christian faith in a very radical and committed and consistent fashion really inspired me. And I wanted to experience that firsthand.

Christina Ellsberg: How did you even find out about the Catholic Worker? Had you heard of Dorothy Day before you got there?

Robert Ellsberg: Honestly, I didn't really know a whole lot about it. What I knew largely about Dorothy Day was that she lived among the poor in voluntary poverty, and that she had been a courageous protestor against war throughout her life. For me, it was kind of a school. I went from Harvard to the Bowery, living among homeless people and crazy people and alcoholics and drug addicts and ex-prisoners and people like that. And I realized that there was a lot more to learn from life than you could find just in books, and particularly the kinds of moral issues that were important to me. At that point, I sort of embraced the Catholic Worker as a place, a community that was really living out the gospel in a radical way.

And I had only planned, I should say it to stay there for a few months, but then after a few months, Dorothy Day asked me if I would be the managing editor of the Catholic Worker newspaper. I was 20 at the time and had literally no evident qualifications for this. But, Dorothy had a way of recognizing people's gifts, maybe even gifts that were a secret to them. And she trusted me with this. And I did it for a couple of years. And I ultimately ended up remaining part of that community for five years, which were the last five years of Dorothy Day's life. And I returned to Harvard to continue my education there just a couple of months before she died.

The canonization of Dorothy Day would move her from the margins of the church's story right to the center. It's a way of preserving and amplifying her message, and also the challenge that she posed to all people to think of what it means to follow Christ in our own context, in our own lives.