Catholic book editor recounts lifelong moral journey

National Catholic Reporter, Feb 8, 2008 by Thomas C. Fox

After graduating in 1982 he received a fellowship to go to Latin America for a year where, among other things, he studied Spanish at the Maryknoll Language School in Bolivia. There he came into contact with religious missioners, theologians and authors who were advocating a combination of justice and theology. It was called liberation theology. Many liberation theologians, Ellsberg recalls, were being published by Orbis Books--and he was devouring every one of those books he could put his hands on.

"I was so turned on by that that I decided I wanted to study theology. So I went back to Harvard Divinity School and went into a doctoral program."

By this time Ellsberg was steeped in theology and in Latin America. He was alive in his newly adopted faith, infused with the spirit of the Catholic Worker movement, his association with Dorothy Day, and his affinity for the radical call to Christian nonviolence. His faith and career path had long been set by the events of his childhood and the strong influence of his father's life and moral decisions.

In 1987, he was recommended for the post of editor in chief at Orbis Books. He left his studies, went to Maryknoll in Ossining, N.Y. A few years earlier he had married his wife, Peggy, who currently is a professor of English at Barnard College. The couple has three children.

Ellsberg recently marked his 20th anniversary at Orbis. He was named publisher in 2006.

Dorothy Day remains for Ellsberg a kind of patron saint--though some feel the worldly Day would never want that word associated with her name. At the request of the archivist at Marquette University, where the Day archives are housed, Ellsberg has just finished editing Day's diaries, which became available 25 years after her death. Day appears to be keeping Ellsberg's moral compass fixed.

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I arrived in Vietnam in June 1966, days after I graduated from college, to work with an organization called International Voluntary Services, a kind of Peace Corps in a war zone. My assignment was to work with countryside families displaced by the war and living in refugee camps along the coast outside Tuy Hoa in central Vietnam.

Nothing could have prepared me for what I found in those camps. The war, which was largely taking place in the countryside, had devastated the lives of these Vietnamese. I was struck by the ocean of disconnect between what was being reported by the U.S. press, still largely touting the official line that progress was being made in the war, and what I was witnessing at the time. Until January 1968 and the Tet offensive, when North Vietnamese soldiers began capturing segments of Vietnamese cities, including Hue and Saigon, the story being manufactured by the U.S. embassy and military command was that we were slowly "winning the hearts and minds" of the Vietnamese people through the U.S. "pacification" program.