Wednesday, May 21, 2008

"Daniel Berrigan: Forty Years After Catonsville" May 20, 2008 The Nation

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."

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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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