Friends,
I was at the wake on Thursday and at today's funeral.
It was an honor to be in a distinguished community, as we said good bye to an
inspiration and a legend.
Kagiso,
Max
DANIEL BERRIGAN, A LEADER OF PEACEFUL OPPOSITION TO VIETNAM
WAR, INSPIRED A GENERATION OF ACTIVISTS
May 6 2016, 2:43 p.m.
DANIEL BERRIGAN WAS many
things – Jesuit priest, poet, teacher, fine cook, good listener, radical
thinker, antiwar activist, pacifist. And, for his opposition to the Vietnam
war, he was considered an enemy of both state and church.
Of everything he
wrote, including more than forty books, these words stand out as the most
memorable and most emblematic of his life: “Our apologies, good friends, for
the fracture of good order, the burning of paper instead of children, the
angering of the orderlies in the front of the charnel house. We could not, so
help us God, do otherwise . . . How many must die before our voices are heard,
how many must be tortured, dislocated, starved, maddened . . . When, at what
point, will you say no to this war?”
That is what
Berrigan said in May, 1968 as he and his brother, the late Philip Berrigan, and
seven other activists, most of them nuns and priests, burned draft files they
had just removed from the draft board in Catonsville, Maryland, and waited for
police to arrive to arrest them. These words appear in Berrigan’s most famous
writing, The Trial of the Catonsville Nine, a play based on
the transcript of the trial. It has been staged throughout the world.
When Berrigan’s
sister-in-law, Elizabeth McAllister, read those words at his funeral mass
today, the more than 1,000 people in attendance at St. Francis Xavier Catholic
Church in Greenwich Village responded with a thunderous and sustained standing
ovation. They had come from near and far to say farewell. For many of them,
these words he spoke at Catonsville had moved them into civil disobedience and
resistance many years ago.
By the time
Berrigan went to Catonsville, he had become the most visible embodiment of
something that had not been seen before: Catholic priests who publicly opposed
a war in which the United States was engaged. In response to his calls for an
end to the war, top church officials sent him away from the U.S., and a top
government official lied about him in congressional testimony that was designed
to paint him as a bomber and kidnapper. Ultimately these extraordinary efforts,
by church and state, failed to silence Berrigan. After exile abroad and
imprisonment at home, he remained a strong voice against war and other
violence, official and unofficial, until his death last week at age 94.
The actions that
publicly defined Berrigan — non-violent resistance to the Vietnam war and to
the use of nuclear weapons — were born in the aftermath of the Second Vatican
Council, the historic international gathering of bishops convened in 1962 by
Pope John XXIII, who was very similar to Pope Francis. The council’s actions,
which included a strong condemnation of anti-Semitism, were considered radical
in the post-World War II Catholic Church. One of the Council’s reforms urged
Catholics to work for peace, including with people outside the church. The
church hierarchy in America refused to accept that mandate at first. Berrigan,
however, was eager to work for peace.
With his brother
Philip and others, Daniel Berrigan helped establish the Catholic peace
movement, a very large and amorphous group located primarily throughout the
northeast and northern midwest. Officials in both the church and the government
saw the movement as dangerous.
Francis Cardinal
Spellman — the archbishop of New York, the most powerful Catholic official in
the United States, and the most visible symbol of the U.S. Catholic Church’s
strong official support for the Vietnam war — staunchly opposed the peace
movement, especially the participation of Catholics in it. In the earliest days
of American involvement in Vietnam, in fact, Spellman was one of the leading
voices outside government who urged the U.S. to go to war there.
Deeply angered
by Berrigan’s public calls for peace, Spellman in 1965 ordered Berrigan’s
Jesuit superiors to exile him to Latin America and ordered him to stop engaging
in peace work. The Jesuits did so and kept the priest’s whereabouts a secret.
When Berrigan was permitted to return to the U.S. several months later, he and
his supporters defiantly marched for peace in New York City, stopping to pray
in front of churches and synagogues, including St. Patrick’s Cathedral, where
Cardinal Spellman presided.
In 1970,
Spellman’s friend and ally inside the government in matters of protest and war,
FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, took the extraordinary step of publicly and
falsely accusing Daniel and Philip Berrigan of conspiring to blow up tunnels
under federal buildings in Washington, D.C. and to kidnap President Nixon’s
national security adviser, Henry Kissinger. Hoover did this despite knowing
that FBI investigators and Department of Justice officials had officially
concluded there was no such conspiracy. But to save Hoover’s reputation after
his public comments, Justice officials convinced a grand jury to bring charges
against Philip Berrigan and others; Daniel Berrigan was named an unindicted
co-conspirator. The 1972 trial ended in a hung jury.
For a while,
Hoover succeeded in recasting the public image of the Berrigans and the
Catholic peace movement into a group of violent extremists. The effort helped
Hoover get the extra $14.5 million he wanted from Congress that year to hire a
thousand new agents he said were needed because of the crisis created by these
activists. But that effort backfired. Within the bureau, these new agents were
known as “the Berrigan 1,000” because they resisted spying on political
dissidents and asked to be assigned instead to organized crime and other
criminal cases — areas of investigation in which, strangely, Hoover had little
interest.
It was the
writings of Daniel Berrigan that inspired William Davidon, a physics professor
at Haverford College, to think of breaking into an FBI office in 1971 to search
for evidence of whether Hoover’s FBI was suppressing dissent. That break-in,
conducted at great risk by Davidon and seven other people who called themselves
the Citizens Commission to Investigate the FBI, led to the historic revelations
of Hoover’s widespread suppression of dissent. Years later, Davidon said, “I
don’t think I would have even considered such steps had it not been for Dan
Berrigan.” Those steps ultimately led, in 1975, to the first congressional
investigations of all intelligence agencies and to the establishment of the
first permanent congressional oversight of such agencies.
BERRIGAN WAS BOTH fierce and
gentle. I saw those qualities the first time I met him–for an interview for the Washington
Post while he was living in the underground. By that time, early
August 1970, he had been moving from place to place for four months, sheltered
in friends’ homes in both rural and urban areas. The day before the interview I
drove from Washington to New York and waited at a friend’s house on Staten
Island for a promised call from an unidentified person. It came the following
afternoon. I was told to take a ferry to Manhattan. As I got off the ferry, I
was met by someone I didn’t know and driven by him to an address in Manhattan I
didn’t know. He drove in circuitous ways so I would not know where I was. That
was unnecessary, for I was completely unfamiliar with Manhattan then.
Daniel Berrigan is taken into the Federal
Building in Providence on August 11th, 1970, after he was found at a summer
home on Block Island.
Bettmann Archive
The interview, in an apartment, went well. Berrigan
explained why he had chosen to escape to the underground. He was determined,
like his brother Philip and others in the Catonsville Nine, to refuse, as long
as he could, the punishment of the war makers. In doing so, he also hoped to
draw more attention to the tragic mistake of continuing the war. At one point
as we talked, shots rang out in the street outside the apartment building. He
smiled. I did not. Two weeks later he was arrested at the home of his friend
William Stringfellow on Block Island. One of the iconic photographs of Daniel
Berrigan is of him handcuffed but smiling brightly as the two agents are
looking grim.
Berrigan’s opposition to all violence, no matter the source, was evident in a
letter he wrote to the Weather Underground in 1970, after three members of the
group were killed when a bomb exploded in a house where some of them were
living in Greenwich Village. He wrote the letter while living in the
underground. The letter demonstrates his consistent condemnation of violence by
both the government and the peace movement. Like Davidon, he was deeply
concerned about the fact that a fragment of the antiwar movement, out of deep
despair that the war had continued for years, was engaging in violence. The
letter began, “Dear Brothers and Sisters”:
“How
shall we speak…to the people? We must never refuse, in spite of their refusal
of us, to call them our brothers. I must say to you as simply as I know how: if
the people are not the main issue, there simply is no main issue and you and I
are fooling ourselves … No principle is worth the sacrificing of a single human
being. That’s a very hard statement. At various stages of the movement some
have acted as if almost the opposite were true, as people got purer and purer…
“When
madness is the acceptable public state of mind, we’re all in danger… for
madness is an infection in the air. And I submit that we all breathe the
infection and that the movement has at times been sickened by it too … In or
out of the military, in or out of the movement, it seems to me that we had best
call things by their name, and the name of this thing, it seems to me, is the
death game, no matter where it appears. And as for myself, I would as soon be
under the heel of former masters as under the heel of new ones …
“I feel at your
side across the miles, and I hope that sometime in this mad world… it will be
possible for us to … find that our hopes and our sweat, and the hopes and sweat
and death and tears and blood of our brothers and sisters throughout the world,
have brought to birth that for which we began. Shalom to you.”
Asked in
2008 to reflect on his lifetime of lectures on peace, hundreds of poems for
peace, and a long rap sheet of arrests for participating in peace protests,
Berrigan assessed its meaning with these words: “The good is to be done because
it is good, not because it goes somewhere. I believe if it is done in that
spirit it will go somewhere, but I don’t know where … I have never been
seriously interested in the outcome. I was interested in trying to do it
humanely and carefully and nonviolently and let it go.”
The
Jesuits have come a long way since the days when they obeyed Cardinal
Spellman’s order for Berrigan to be exiled to Latin America. Jesuit priests
presided at his funeral mass today and spoke repeatedly of justice and peace,
and of what they had learned from him. One of his close friends, Father Steve
Kelly, who is based in California, gave the homily. The audience laughed and
applauded when Kelly evoked Hoover’s ghost. After welcoming friends and family
to the service, Kelly also welcomed the FBI agents who had been “assigned here
today to validate that it is Daniel Berrigan’s funeral mass … so they can
complete and perhaps close their files.”
#####
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
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