Dorothy Day’s granddaughter says that the founder of Catholic Worker was totally real and totally flawed – and yet a saint

There is a way that Kate Hennessy sits sometimes, with her chin rested on curled fingers and her eyes on you, but searching out a memory or an idea, that is startlingly reminiscent of her grandmother.

This is, I suspect, a problem she has had all her life. Really, I don’t want to see Dorothy Day sat across from me. I want to see past her, to her youngest granddaughter, Tamar Hennessy’s daughter, a prodigal Catholic Worker, whose book The World Will Be Saved By Beauty paints a unique picture of the famous Catholic anarchist and activist. A re-telling of Day’s life by the women who knew her best, her only daughter and her granddaughter, it is intimate, daring, empathetic and personal. It is not hagiography, but it is brimming with love.

“I tried to convince my mother to write her own book, but she refused to. Then she died, and that opportunity was gone, and I knew I had to write her story,” Kate tells me when we meet in stormy west London, where she was due to speak in support of the peace group Pax Christi. “I wasn’t a historian. I wasn’t a theologian. I wasn’t even an expert on the Catholic Worker and I wasn’t an expert on Dorothy Day, but I was an expert on being her granddaughter. I thought: if I did not write this book, my mother’s story will never be told – and she really is the catalyst for everything that my grandmother did.”