Long before the Occupy
movement and the ascendancy of Bernie Sanders, there was Fr. Daniel Berrigan,
the fiery Jesuit who rocked the then complacent American Catholic world with
its ties to government power elites. Catholics in the 1960s and ‘70s knew
priests as ‘Bells of Saint Mary’s’ stereotypes, men who would no sooner join a
picket line or a war protest than raise a fist against their superiors.
Few young people alive today have any sense
of how difficult life was for young men during the Vietnam War. That war split
families apart much the same way that the Civil War set brother against
brother. Draft age men who opposed the war and the draft, escaped to Canada or registered as
conscientious objectors were often disowned by their families. Conversely,
antiwar men and women, called ‘peaceniks’ by their detractors, sometimes returned the favor by disowning
their war hawk parents or their military enlisted siblings. By the war’s end in
1975, U.S. military personnel
casualties numbered 58, 220 with 1.3 million deaths overall. This was not the
era of the carefree collegiate spring break in Cancun . Life for the average
young male was consumed by worry about being drafted and killed.
Fr. Berrigan broke the priest = Bing-Crosby
association like a meteorite hitting Kansas City . With his younger brother, Philip Berrigan, a
Josephite priest, the two made their mark as antiwar activists when they joined
two other men in pouring animal and human blood on Selective Service records in
Baltimore . Known as the (October
1967) Baltimore Four, this “sacrificial act” was followed six months later by
another non violent raid. The Catonsville Nine involved the pouring napalm on
Selective Service files in Catonsville , Maryland .
The choice of napalm as a protest tool was
significant because during the course of the war over 388,000 tons of napalm
had been dropped in Vietnam .
In Napalm
in the Vietnam War, Alan Rohn wrote that the wounds caused by napalm are too
deep to heal. “When contacting human, napalm immediately clung to the skin and
melt off the flesh. The only way to put it out is to smother it as trying to
wipe it off only spread it around and expanding the burnt area.” Napalm became
a symbol of the war’s ultimate brutality. The word was part of the general
lexicon in 1970. One saw it on political posters, graffiti postings and on the
cover of magazines like Time and Ramparts.
After
the Catonsville Nine raid, indictments were
brought against the Berrigan brothers but the priests initially evaded
prosecution when they went underground. Eventually they were apprehended and
served time in prison. Philip’s total time in prison before his death in 2002
amounted to 11 years.
The average American Catholic
at that time supported the Vietnam War. The belief then was that elected public
officials knew what was best for the country. Members of the so called Greatest
Generation could not wrap their minds around the concept of an illegal or
unjust war. Their memories of WWII were just too vivid. The fact that the Berrigan brothers were both
priests led to long stretches of silence when their names were brought up at
Sunday family dinners. This was certainly true in my parents’ home.
Dan and Philip were two of six sons born to
Thomas William and Frida Berrigan. Thomas, a railroad engineer, had an
unmanageable temper that frequently erupted into violence. Dan was a sickly
child with weak ankles who didn’t walk until he was four years old, a condition
that kept him out of the WWII draft. He was ordained a Jesuit priest in 1952. A
decade later he became familiar with the Catholic priest worker movement when
he went to Paris on a teaching
sabbatical. While working as a professor of New Testament Studies at Le Moyne
College in Syracuse , NY his poetry attracted
the admiration of Marianne Moore while his (Gospel-based) activism irritated
the American Church ’s most ardent hawk,
Cardinal Francis Spellman. Spellman, eager to snuff out the renegade priest and
the Roman Catholic “left,” had him removed from Le Moyne before he could gain
tenure.
Spellman blamed Berrigan for the
self-immolation death of a young 22 year old New York Catholic Worker activist,
Roger La Porte, an acquaintance of Berrigan’s. On the morning of November 9, 1965 , La Porte , in protest of the war
in Vietnam , left the NY Catholic
Worker house with a large container of gasoline. Sometime after 5
am he arrived at the United Nations Plaza and set himself on fire. A
priest, Fr. Emmanuel Charles McCarthy, reported that “The intensity of the heat
melted the pavement.”
“He lived in agony for several hours; and, according to the priest
who administered the Sacrament of Reconciliation at the hospital he made a
“profound” confession. Roger insisted that he wanted to live, that he did not
strike the match in order to kill himself but to try to communicate to the
American people the reality of the horror and misery they were mindlessly,
callously and self-righteously pouring onto the people of Vietnam .”
A total of 8 American set themselves on fire
in public places to protest the war in Vietnam , while many more burned their draft
cards, like Catholic pacifist, David Miller, who was the first person to be
prosecuted for his action. The epidemic
of draft card burnings caused President Lyndon Johnson to sign a law in 1965
making it a crime to mutilate draft cards.
In 1980, Dan and Philip and six others
entered a GE plant in King of Prussia where the group struck
two missile nose cones with a hammer, in their words, “turning them into
plowshares.” Throughout his years as activist, poet and author, Dan avoided the
trappings of fame but dressed simply in a Beat manner of dress. Philip left the priesthood after it was
discovered that he was secretly married to Sister Elizabeth McAlister. They
were excommunicated long before Philip’s death in 2002.
Dan, who remained a priest until the end,
wrote in To Dwell in Peace, that he “had
come of age in a church that, for all its shortcomings, honored vows and
promises. I had examples before me in the people of the church, especially in
laypeople and nuns, of those who lived to the hilt the life commended by the
Gospel. Such were my people.”
His critics within
the Church, included some progressive thinkers like Trappist monk Thomas
Merton, who wrote in a 1968 journal entry that, “[Berrigan] is a bit theatrical
these days, now he’s a malefactor—with a quasi-episcopal disarmament emblem
strung around his neck like a pectoral cross.”
Dorothy Day, whom Berrigan credited with
influencing his views on pacifism and war, disapproved of some of his protests
but remained united with him in spirit. “Dorothy Day taught me more than all the
theologians,” Berrigan told The Nation in 2008. “She awakened me to connections
I had not thought of or been instructed in—the equation of human misery and
poverty with warmaking. She had a basic hope that God created the world with
enough for everyone, but there was not enough for everyone and warmaking.”
Kurt Vonnegut was moved to comment: “For me, Father Daniel
Berrigan is Jesus as a poet, if this be heresy, make the most of it.”
In the 1980s Berrigan turned his
attention to the plight of gay men dying of AIDS in New York City . He would visit the sick and dying in St. Vincent ’s Hospital in NYC at a time when few
Catholic priests would do so. True to
his respect for all life, he angered political progressives when he made known
his anti-abortion, pro-life views. He
was not going to follow a left political agenda blindly, unlike many of today’s
social justice warriors. “I have always
made it clear,” he said in an America magazine interview, “that I am against
everything from war to abortion to euthanasia. I have avoided being a single
cause person. “
Before his death in the Jesuit infirmary at Fordham University , Berrigan did offer his support for
the Occupy movement and Black Lives Matter, although it’s doubtful he would
have approved of “trigger warnings” and the insanity of “safe spaces” on
college campuses.
In one poem, Berrigan writes:
Were I God almighty, I would
ordain,
rain fall lightly where old men
trod,
no death in childbirth, neither
infant nor mother,
ditches firm fenced against the
errant blind, aircraft come to ground like any feather.
No
mischance, malice, knives.
Tears dried….
(By Thom Nickels, The Philadelphia Irish Edition, July 2019)
Tears dried….
(By Thom Nickels, The Philadelphia Irish Edition, July 2019)