May 20, 2008
The Nation.
Daniel Berrigan: Forty Years After Catonsville
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080602/hedges
By Chris Hedges
Forty years ago this month, Father Daniel Berrigan walked into a draft
board in Catonsville , Maryland , with eight other activists, including
his brother, Father Philip Berrigan, and removed draft files of young
men who were about to be sent to Vietnam . The group carted the files
outside and burned them in two garbage cans with homemade napalm.
Father Berrigan was tried, found guilty, spent four months as a
fugitive from the FBI, was apprehended and sent to prison for eighteen
months.
Father Berrigan, unbowed at 87, sat primly in a straight-backed wooden
chair as the afternoon light slanted in from the windows, illuminating
the collection of watercolors and religious icons on the walls of his
small apartment in upper Manhattan . Time and age have not blunted this
Jesuit priest's fierce critique of the American empire or his radical
interpretation of the Gospels. There would be many more "actions" and
jail time after his release from prison, including a sentence for his
illegal entry into a General Electric nuclear missile plant in King of
Prussia, Pennsylvania, on September 9, 1980, with seven other
activists, where they poured blood and hammered on Mark 12A warheads.
"This is the worst time of my long life," he said with a sigh. "I have
never had such meager expectations of the system. I find those
expectations verified in the paucity and shallowness every day I
live."
The trial of the Catonsville Nine altered resistance to the Vietnam
War, moving activists from street protests to repeated acts of civil
disobedience, including the burning of draft cards. It also signaled a
seismic shift within the Catholic Church, propelling radical priests
and nuns led by the Berrigans, Thomas Merton and Dorothy Day to the
center of a religiously inspired social movement that challenged not
only church and state authority but the myths Americans used to define
themselves.
"Dorothy Day taught me more than all the theologians," he says of the
founder of the pacifist Catholic Worker Movement. "She awakened me to
connections I had not thought of or been instructed in, the equation
of human misery and poverty and warmaking. She had a basic hope that
God created the world with enough for everyone, but there was not
enough for everyone and warmaking."
Berrigan's relationship with Day led to a close friendship with the
writer and Trappist monk Thomas Merton. Merton's "great contribution
to the religious left," he says, "was to gather us for days of prayer
and discussion of the sacramental life. He told us, 'Stay with these,
stay with these, these are your tools and discipline and these are
your strengths.'"
"He could be very tough," Berrigan says of Merton. "He said you are
not going to survive America unless you are faithful to your
discipline and tradition."
Merton's death at 53 a few weeks after the trial left Berrigan "deaf
and dumb." "I could not talk or write about him for ten years," he
says. "He was with me when I was shipped out of the country, and he
was with me in jail. He was with his friend."
The distractions of the world are for him just that--distractions. The
current election campaign does not preoccupy him, and he quotes his
brother, Philip, who said that "if voting made any difference it would
be illegal." He is critical off the Catholic Church, saying that Pope
John Paul II, who marginalized and silenced radical priests and nuns
like the Berrigans, "introduced Soviet methods into the Catholic
Church," including "anonymous delations, removals, scrutiny and
secrecy and the placing of company men into positions of great power."
He estimates that "it is going to take at least a generation to undo
appointments of John Paul II." He despairs of universities, especially
Boston College's decision last year to give an honorary degree to
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and this year to invite the new
Attorney General, Michael Mukasey, to address the law school. "It is a
portrayal of shabby lives as exemplary and to be honored," he says.
And he has little time for secular radicals who stood with him forty
years ago but who have now "disappeared into the matrix of money and
regular jobs or gave up on their initial discipline."
"The short fuse of the American left is typical of the highs and lows
of American emotional life," he says. "It is very rare to sustain a
movement in recognizable form without a spiritual base."
All empires, Berrigan cautions, rise and fall. It is the religious and
moral values of compassion, simplicity and justice that endure and
alone demand fealty. The current decline of American power is part of
the cycle of human existence, although he says ruefully, "the tragedy
across the globe is that we are pulling down so many others. We are
not falling gracefully. Many, many people are paying with their lives
for this."
"The fall of the towers [on 9/11] was symbolic as well as actual," he
adds. "We are bringing ourselves down by a willful blindness that is
astonishing."
Berrigan argues that those who seek a just society, who seek to defy
war and violence, who decry the assault of globalization and
degradation of the environment, who care about the plight of the poor,
should stop worrying about the practical, short-term effects of their
resistance.
"The good is to be done because it is good, not because it goes
somewhere," he says. "I believe if it is done in that spirit it will
go somewhere, but I don't know where. I don't think the Bible grants
us to know where goodness goes, what direction, what force. I have
never been seriously interested in the outcome. I was interested in
trying to do it humanly and carefully and nonviolently and let it go."
"We have not lost everything because we lost today," he adds.
A resistance movement, Berrigan says, cannot survive without the
spiritual core pounded into him by Merton. He is sustained, he said,
by the Eucharist, his faith and his religious community.
"The reason we are celebrating forty years of Catonsville and we are
still at it, those of us who are still living--the reason people went
through all this and came out on their feet--was due to a spiritual
discipline that went on for months before these actions took place,"
he says. "We went into situations in court and in prison and in the
underground that could easily have destroyed us and that did destroy
others who did not have our preparation."
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Chris Hedges, former Middle East bureau chief for the New York Times
and a senior fellow at The Nation Institute, is the author, most
recently, of American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on
America (Free Press). more...
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