The Duty of Delight: The Diaries of Dorothy Day

by Edited by Robert Ellsberg

Marquette Univ. Press. 700p $42

One of the most extraordinary and influential Catholics in the modern church, Dorothy Day—co-founder (with Peter Maurin) of the Catholic Worker movement—was a genuine servant of the poor and an ardent peace activist, whose life embodied the radical Gospel in action. Throughout her decades-long pilgrimage of service and witness, she kept diaries recounting notable and historic events, persons and places, the challenges and struggles of a saint-in-the-making.

Now, per her request that these diaries not be made public until 25 years after her death, they are officially released in a volume entitled The Duty of Delight. Day scholar and former Catholic Worker who worked with her in New York City’s house of hospitality, Robert Ellsberg has compiled, edited and provided helpful and illuminating commentary on these writings—which span from the 1930s through the ‘70s. It becomes readily clear how central a part of her life was prayer, meditation, works of mercy and consciousness of the “holy.” In a 1948 entry, for example, she writes of “jumping from the profane to the sacred over and over….Living in the country [on one of CW’s several farms] with little children, with growing things, one has the sacramental view of life.”

From reflections on everyday local and family matters to reflections on events in the world at large, Day offers readers a sweeping panorama of tumultuous times and happenings in our nation and the church (poverty, racism, wars, post-conciliar reform, et al.), as well as the joys derived from her cherished faith.

The final diary (1980), missing until 2006, are the jottings of 83-year-old Dorothy Day in declining health (she died in November of that year). As with the entries throughout the volume, they are possessed of spirit, verve, candor, keen intellect–qualities that characterized the life and thought of this incredibly dedicated woman.

March 27: “Woke up remembering that we go to press today with our minuscule 8-page paper (compared to the NY Times) and I think my usual wandering thoughts of what I could have written about myself, a woman born in 1897, a woman of long life, of varied experiences.” But she did write, and much—and we are richer for it.

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This article appears in August 18 2008.