The distinguished publisher Robert Ellsberg first met Dorothy Day in 1975, on the first floor of the Catholic Worker House of Hospitality in New York’s Lower East Side, in the large room that served as soup kitchen, meeting hall and occasional chapel. He was 19; she was 77. “How do you reconcile Catholicism and anarchism?” he managed to splutter. Dorothy, who dressed in donated clothes and was sometimes mistaken for one of the homeless women on the Bowery who came to the house for food and shelter, looked bemused. “It’s never been a problem for me,” she said. No wonder Dorothy’s cause has been teasing the imagination of the saintmakers for several years.

Ellsberg is one of the many talking heads in Revolution of the Heart, Martin Doblmeier’s engrossing documentary film about Dorothy Day’s extraordinary life, which had its English premiere at the Jesuit Centre next to Farm Street church last week. Kate Hennessy, Dorothy’s youngest granddaughter and the author of The World Will be Saved by Beauty, a precise and beautiful portrait of her, was there to introduce it and answer questions.