Friends,
Philip Berrigan’s funeral was held at St. Peter Claver Church in West Baltimore on North Fremont Avenue. This is the church at which Phil served the poor black congregation in 1960s. In fact, he used the parish car to drive across town to engage in the Catonsville Nine draft board raid.
Many of us, including members of the media, marched from the Jonah House to St. Peter Claver, and the media could see the desolation and a side of Baltimore which highlights the immense income inequality in Baltimore. I have not done that march since then, but I do not think much change has happened in two decades. Baltimore’s poverty rate is about 20 %. There’s always money for weapons contractors, but just small change for those suffering ills associated with poverty.
Daniel Berrigan gave the homily and made this point: “What we had at the end was a masterwork of grace and human sweetness. We gazed on him with a kind of awe. Dying, Philip won the face he had earned at such cost.” Phil’s body was at rest in a simple wooden coffin.
Kagiso, Max
Philip
Berrigan, Former Priest and Peace Activist in the Vietnam War Era, Dies at 79
By Daniel Lewis
- Dec. 7, 2002
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the article in its original context from December 7, 2002, Section A, Page 18 Buy Reprints
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Philip
F. Berrigan, the former Roman Catholic priest who led the draft board raids
that galvanized opposition to the Vietnam War in the late 1960's, died last
night in Baltimore after a lifetime of battling ''the American Empire,'' as he
called it, over the morality of its military and social policies. He was 79. .
His
family said the cause was liver and kidney cancer, The Associated Press
reported.
An
Army combat veteran sickened by the killing in World War II, Mr. Berrigan came
to be one of the most radical pacifists of the 20th century -- and, for a time
in the Vietnam period, a larger-than-life figure in the convulsive struggle
over the country's direction.
In
the late 60's he was a Catholic priest serving a poor black parish in Baltimore
and seeing nothing that would change his conviction that war, racism and
poverty were inseparable strands of a corrupt economic system. His Josephite
superiors had previously hustled him out of Newburgh, N.Y., for aggressive
civil rights and antiwar activity there; the ''fatal blow,'' he said, had been
a talk to a community affairs council in which he asked, ''Is it possible for
us to be vicious, brutal, immoral and violent at home and be fair, judicious,
beneficent and idealistic abroad?''
He hardly missed a beat after his transfer to
Baltimore, founding an antiwar group, Peace Mission, whose operations included
picketing the homes of Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara and Secretary of
State Dean Rusk in December 1966. By the fall of 1967 Mr. Berrigan and three
friends were ready to try a new tactic. On Oct. 17, they walked into the
Baltimore Customs House, distracted the draft board clerks and methodically
spattered Selective Service records with a red liquid made partly from their
own blood.
Three
decades later, Mr. Berrigan remembered feeling ''exalted'' as the judge
sentenced him to six years in prison. From then on, he would be in and out of
jail for repeated efforts to interfere with government operations and deface
military hardware.
Even
before his sentencing for the Customs House raid, Father Berrigan instigated a
second invasion, against the local draft board office in Catonsville, Md. Among
those persuaded to join was his older brother, the Rev. Daniel J. Berrigan, a
Jesuit priest and poet, who had been one of the first prominent clergymen to
preach and organize against the war.
The
''Catonsville Nine'' struck on May 17, 1968, taking hundreds of files relating
to potential draftees from the second floor of the Knights of Columbus
building, where the draft board rented space. They piled the documents in the
parking lot and set them burning with a mixture of gasoline and soap chips --
homemade napalm.
Reporters
were on hand, having been told in advance, and they were given a statement that
read, ''We destroy these draft records not only because they exploit our young
men but also because they represent misplaced power concentrated in the ruling
class of America.''
When the police arrived, the trespassers were
praying in the parking lot. The cameras loved the Berrigans. In the definitive
photograph of the event, seven of the Catonsville Nine are nowhere to be seen.
The photo includes only the striking image of two priests in clerical dress,
one big and craggy, the other slight and puckish, serenely accepting their imminent
incarceration.
With
so many marches and campus protests going on across the country, it would have
been impossible to quantify the effect of a single event on public opinion.
What can be said about the Catonsville raid is that it inspired others in New
York City, Milwaukee, Boston, Chicago and other cities, the tactic becoming a
sort of calling card of the ''ultra-resistance.'' It also elevated the Berrigan
brothers to the status of superstars. ''Father Phil'' and ''Father Dan'' were
on the cover of Time magazine and illuminated in profiles by the smartest
writers.
But
many Americans saw them as communists and traitors, or at best naïve dupes of
the Vietcong.
Philip
Francis Berrigan was born Oct. 5, 1923, in Two Harbors, Minn., the youngest of
six sons of Thomas W. Berrigan and Frida Fromhart Berrigan, a German immigrant.
Thomas Berrigan was a frustrated poet and a bullying, tyrannical husband and
father. He was also a political radical whose labor organizing activities led
to his dismissal as a railroad engineer, after which he moved to Syracuse to be
with his family and bought a farm.
After
high school, Philip was a first baseman in semiprofessional baseball before
enrolling in St. Michael's College in Toronto. In January 1943, after one
semester, he was drafted into the Army.
The
life of black sharecroppers in Georgia, where he had basic training, and the
treatment of black soldiers on his troop ship to Europe made an indelible
impression on his conscience. In retrospect, once the war was over, so did his
own role in infantry and artillery battles that earned him a battlefield
commission as second lieutenant. In so many words, he came to consider himself
as guilty of murder as the Germans and Japanese. Along with this came the
conviction that he had grown up on a diet of nationalistic propaganda in which
the good -- ''white Europeans'' -- always triumphed over evil -- ''anyone
else.''
As an assistant pastor in Washington in 1955 and
1956 and a counselor and teacher at St. Augustine High School in New Orleans
from 1956 to 1963, the young priest became passionately involved in civil
rights and antiwar activities, especially after the Cuban missile crisis in
1962.
Donations can be sent to Max Obuszewski, Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 431 Notre Dame Lane, Apt. 206, Baltimore, MD 21212. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski2001 [at] comcast.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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