Friends,
It is with a very heavy heart that I am sharing the
news that Dan Berrigan died today. He was one of the great resisters
against the empire, and to those of us who knew him a wise and respected
mentor. Dan Berrigan, presente!
Kagiso,
Max
Daniel J. Berrigan, Defiant
Priest Who Preached Pacifism, Dies at 94
By DANIEL LEWIS APRIL 30, 2016
Rev.
Daniel J. Berrigan gave an anti-war sermon at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New
York, 1972.CreditWilliam E. Sauro/The New York Times
The
Rev. Daniel J. Berrigan, a Jesuit priest and poet whose defiant protests helped
shape the tactics of opposition to the Vietnam War and landed him in prison,
died on Saturday in New York City. He was 94.
His
death was confirmed by the Rev. James Martin, a Jesuit priest and editor at
large at America magazine, a national Catholic magazine
published by Jesuits. Father Berrigan died at Murray-Weigel Hall, the Jesuit
infirmary at Fordham
University in the Bronx.
The
United States was tearing itself apart over civil rights and the war in
Southeast Asia when Father Berrigan emerged in the 1960s as an intellectual
star of the Roman Catholic “new left,” articulating a view that racism and
poverty, militarism and capitalist greed were interconnected pieces of the same
big problem: an unjust society.
It
was an essentially religious position,
based on a stringent reading of the Scriptures that some called pure and others
radical. But it would have explosive political consequences as Father Berrigan;
his brother Philip, a Josephite priest; and their allies
took their case to the streets with rising disregard for the law or their
personal fortunes.
A
defining point was the burning of Selective Service draft records in
Catonsville, Md., and the subsequent trial of the so-called Catonsville Nine, a
sequence of events that inspired an escalation of protests across the country;
there were marches, sit-ins, the public burning of draft cards and other acts
of civil disobedience.
Photo
Father
Berrigan and his brother, Philip Berrigan, seized hundreds of draft records and
set them on fire with homemade napalm in 1968. Credit United Press
International
The
catalyzing episode occurred on May 17, 1968, six weeks after the murder of the
Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the outbreak of new riots in dozens of
cities. Nine Catholic activists, led by Daniel and Philip Berrigan, entered a
Knights of Columbus building in Catonsville and went up to the second floor,
where the local draft board had offices. In front of astonished clerks, they
seized hundreds of draft records, carried them down to the parking lot and set
them on fire with homemade napalm.
Some
reporters had been told of the raid in advance. They were given a statement
that said in part, “We destroy these draft records not only because they
exploit our young men but because they represent misplaced power concentrated
in the ruling class of America.” It added, “We confront the Catholic Church,
other Christian bodies and the synagogues of America with their silence and
cowardice in the face of our country’s crimes.”
In
a year sick with images of destruction, from the Tet offensive in Vietnam to
the murder of Dr. King, a scene was recorded that had been contrived to shock
people to attention, and did so. When the police came, the trespassers were
praying in the parking lot, led by two middle-aged men in clerical collars: the
big, craggy Philip, a decorated hero of World War II, and the ascetic Daniel,
waiting peacefully to be led into the van.
Protests
and Arrests
In
the years to come, well into his 80s, Daniel Berrigan was arrested time and
again, for greater or lesser offenses: in 1980, for taking part in the
Plowshares raid on a General Electric missile plant in King of Prussia, Pa.,
where the Berrigan brothers and others rained hammer blows on missile warheads;
in 2006, for blocking the entrance to the Intrepid naval museum in Manhattan.
“The
day after I’m embalmed,” he said in 2001, on his 80th birthday, “that’s when
I’ll give it up.”
Photo
Father
Berrigan being handcuffed in 2001 after he and others blocked an entrance to
the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum in Manhattan. Credit Richard
Drew/Associated Press
It
was not for lack of other things to do. In his long career of writing and
teaching at Fordham and other universities, Father Berrigan published a torrent
of essays and broadsides and, on average, a book a year, almost to the time of
his death.
Among
the more than 50 books were 15 volumes of poetry — the first of which, “Time
Without Number,” won the prestigious Lamont Poetry Prize, given by the Academy of
American Poets, in 1957 — as well as autobiography, social criticism,
commentaries on the Old Testament prophets and indictments of the established
order, both secular and ecclesiastic.
While
he was known for his wry wit, there was a darkness in much of what Father Berrigan
wrote and said, the burden of which was that one had to keep trying to do the
right thing regardless of the near certainty that it would make no difference.
In the withering of the pacifist movement and the country’s general support for
the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, he saw proof that it was folly to expect
lasting results.
“This
is the worst time of my long life,” he said in an interview with The Nation in
2008. “I have never had such meager expectations of the system.”
What
made it bearable, he wrote elsewhere, was a disciplined, implicitly difficult
belief in God as the key to sanity and survival.
Many
books by and about Father Berrigan remain in print, and a collection of his
work over half a century, “Daniel Berrigan: Essential Writings,” was published
in 2009.
He
also had a way of popping up in the wider culture: as the “radical priest” in
Paul Simon’s song “Me and
Julio Down by the Schoolyard”; as inspiration for the character
Father Corrigan in Colum McCann’s 2009 novel, “Let the Great
World Spin.” He even had a small movie role, appearing as a Jesuit
priest in “The Mission” in 1989.
But
his place in the public imagination was pretty much fixed at the time of the
Catonsville raid, as the impish-looking half of the Berrigan brothers —
traitors and anarchists in the minds of a great many Americans, exemplars to
those who formed what some called the ultra-resistance.
After
a trial that served as a platform for their antiwar message, the Berrigans were
convicted of destroying government property and sentenced to three years each
in the federal prison in Danbury, Conn. Having exhausted their appeals, they
were to begin serving their terms on April 10, 1970.
Photo
Father
Berrigan, right, and a defense lawyer, William M. Kunstler, center, after he
was sentenced to three years in federal prison in Danbury, Conn. Credit Associated
Press
Instead,
they raised the stakes by going underground. The men who had been on the cover
of Time were now on the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s most-wanted list. As
Daniel explained in a letter to the French magazine Africasia, he was not
buying the “mythology” fostered by American liberals that there was a “moral
necessity of joining illegal action to legal consequences.” In any case, both
brothers were tracked down and sent to prison.
Philip
Berrigan had been the main force behind Catonsville, but it was mostly Daniel
who mined the incident and its aftermath for literary meaning — a process
already underway when the F.B.I. caught up with him on Block Island, off the
Rhode Island coast, on Aug. 11, 1970. There was “The Trial of the Catonsville
Nine,” a one-act play in free verse drawn directly from the court transcripts,
and “Prison Poems,” written during his incarceration in Danbury.
Father
Berrigan on “Meet the Press” in 1972.
Credit Patrick Burns/The New York Times
Credit Patrick Burns/The New York Times
In “My Father,” he wrote:
I sit here in the prison ward
nervously dickering with my ulcer
a half-tamed animal
raising hell in its living space
nervously dickering with my ulcer
a half-tamed animal
raising hell in its living space
But
in 500 lines the poem talks as well about the politics of resistance, memories
of childhood terror and, most of all, the overbearing weight of his dead
father:
I
wonder if I ever loved him
if he ever loved us
if he ever loved me.
if he ever loved us
if he ever loved me.
The
father was Thomas William Berrigan, a man full of words and grievances who got
by as a railroad engineer, labor union officer and farmer. He married Frida
Fromhart and had six sons with her. Daniel, the fourth, was born on May 9,
1921, in Virginia, Minn.
When
he was a young boy, the family moved to a farm near Syracuse to be close to his
father’s family.
In
his autobiography, “To Dwell in Peace,” Daniel Berrigan described his father as
“an incendiary without a cause,” a subscriber to Catholic liberal periodicals
and the frustrated writer of poems of no distinction.
“Early
on,” he wrote, “we grew inured, as the price of survival, to violence as a norm
of existence. I remember, my eyes open to the lives of neighbors, my
astonishment at seeing that wives and husbands were not natural enemies.”
Battles
With the Church
Born
with weak ankles, Daniel could not walk until he was 4. His frailty spared him
the heavy lifting demanded of his brothers; instead he helped his mother around
the house. Thus he seemed to absorb not only his father’s sense of life’s
unfairness but also an intimate knowledge of how a man’s rage can play out in
the victimization of women.
At
an early age, he wrote, he believed that the church condoned his father’s
treatment of his mother. Yet he wanted to be a priest. After high school he
earned a bachelor’s degree in 1946 from St. Andrew-on-Hudson, a Jesuit seminary
in Hyde Park, N.Y., and a master’s from Woodstock College in Baltimore in 1952.
He was ordained that year.
Sent
for a year of study and ministerial work in France, he met some worker-priests who
gave him “a practical vision of the Church as she should be,” he wrote.
Afterward he spent three years at the Jesuits’ Brooklyn Preparatory School,
teaching theology and French, while absorbing the poetry of Robert Frost, E. E.
Cummings and the 19th-century Jesuit Gerard Manley Hopkins. His own early work
often combined elements of nature with religious symbols.
But
he was not to become a pastoral poet or live the retiring life he had imagined.
His ideas were simply turning too hot, sometimes even for friends and mentors
like Dorothy Day, the co-founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, and the
Trappist intellectual Thomas Merton.
At
Le Moyne College in Syracuse, where he was a popular professor of New Testament
studies from 1957 to 1963, Father Berrigan formed friendships with his students
that other faculty members disapproved of, inculcating in them his ideas about
pacifism and civil rights. (One student, David Miller, became the first
draft-card burner to be convicted under a 1965 law.)
Father
Berrigan was effectively exiled in 1965, after angering the hawkish Cardinal
Francis Spellman in New York. Besides Father Berrigan’s work in organizing
antiwar groups like the interdenominational Clergy and Laymen Concerned About
Vietnam, there was the matter of the death of Roger La Porte, a young man with
whom Father Berrigan said he was slightly acquainted. To protest American
involvement in Southeast Asia, Mr. La Porte set himself on fire outside the United
Nations building in November 1965.
Soon,
according to Father Berrigan, “the most atrocious rumors were linking his death
to his friendship with me.” He spoke at a service for Mr. La Porte, and soon
thereafter the Jesuits, widely believed to have been pressured by Cardinal
Spellman, sent him on a “fact-finding” mission among poor workers in South
America. An outcry from Catholic liberals brought him back after only three
months, enough time for him to have been radicalized even further by the facts
he had found.
For
the Jesuits, Father Berrigan was both a magnet to bright young seminarians and
a troublemaker who could not be kept in any one faculty job too long.
At
onetime or another he held faculty positions or ran programs at Union Seminary,
Loyola University New Orleans, Columbia, Cornell and Yale. Eventually he
settled into a long tenure at Fordham, the Jesuit university in the Bronx,
where for a time he had the title of poet in residence.
Father
Berrigan was released from the Danbury penitentiary in 1972; the Jesuits,
alarmed at his failing health, managed to get him out early. He then resumed
his travels.
After
visiting the Middle East, he bluntly accused Israel of “militarism” and the
“domestic repressions” of Palestinians.
His remarks angered many American Jews. “Let us call this by its right name,”
wrote Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg,
himself a contentious figure among religious scholars: “old-fashioned
theological anti-Semitism.”
Nor
was Father Berrigan universally admired by Catholics. Many faulted him for not
singling out repressive Communist states in his diatribes against the world
order, and later for not lending his voice to the outcry over sexual abuse by
priests. There was also a sense that his notoriety was a distraction from the
religious work that needed to be done.
Not
the least of his long-running battles was with the church hierarchy. He was
scathing about the shift to conservatism under Pope John Paul II and the
“company men” he appointed to high positions.
Much
of Father Berrigan’s later work was concentrated on helping AIDS patients in
New York City. In 2012, he appeared in Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan to
support the Occupy Wall Street protest.
He
also devoted himself to writing biblical studies. He felt a special affinity
for the Hebrew prophets, especially Jeremiah, who was chosen by God to warn of
impending disaster and commanded to keep at it, even though no one would listen
for 40 years.
A
brother, Jerry, died in July at age 95, and another brother, Philip, died in
2002 at age 79.
Father
Berrigan seemed to reach a poet’s awareness of his place in the scheme of
things, and that of his brother Philip, who left the priesthood for a married
life of service to the poor and spent a total of 11 years in prison for
disturbing the peace in one way or another before his death from cancer in
2002. While they both still lived, Daniel Berrigan wrote:
My
brother and I stand like the fences
of abandoned farms, changed times
too loosely webbed against
deicide homicide
A really powerful blow
would bring us down like scarecrows.
Nature, knowing this, finding us mildly useful
indulging also
her backhanded love of freakishness
allows us to stand.
of abandoned farms, changed times
too loosely webbed against
deicide homicide
A really powerful blow
would bring us down like scarecrows.
Nature, knowing this, finding us mildly useful
indulging also
her backhanded love of freakishness
allows us to stand.
Christopher Mele contributed reporting.
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives."
Eugene Victor Debs
