Friends,
The comments keep coming. I believe
it is important to remember Phil Berrigan’s many acts of resistance. Kagiso,
Max
Hello Max,
VETERAN STILL WAGES WAR FOR PEACE
BY MARY PEMBERTON The Associated Press
Aug 31, 1993 Updated Jan 24, 2015
Philip Berrigan believes ``war is a
social curse.' It keeps him fighting the U.S. government, and it keeps getting
him arrested for his actions.
He is spread-eagled against a police
car, arms handcuffed behind his back, and a smile spreads across Philip Berrigan's
face.
``It's a good day to be arrested,'
he says, a devilish glint in his blue eyes. ``Any day is a good day to be
arrested. I feel renewed.' At age 69, Berrigan is the peace movement's old
warrior. Other activists fell from the front lines long ago, moved to suburbia
and settled down, but not Philip Berrigan.
``War is a social curse,' Berrigan
said during an interview before his most-recent arrest. ``The role of the
military is absolutely deranged.'
The former Catholic priest and his
brother, Daniel, a Jesuit priest in New York, grabbed the nation's attention
May 17, 1968, when as part of the Catonsville Nine they entered a Selective
Service office near Baltimore, snatched some draft records and burned them with
homemade napalm.
Berrigan was sentenced to 3 1/2
years at the Federal Penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pa. While in prison, he was
charged with plotting to kidnap former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and
blow up tunnels under federal buildings in Washington. Those charges were later
dropped.
He's been arrested about 100 times
and has spent a total of about six years in jail. For some, he's the vanguard
of the peace movement. For others, he's a nuisance.
Berrigan recently showed up in the
office of Howard County Court Commissioner Nancy Pope after failing to appear
for trial for trespassing at Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics
Laboratory, a favorite target because it does research work for the military.
Pope, who has dealt with Berrigan
numerous times, became visibly angry when he asked whether he'd be arrested for
failing to appear in court. ``You do whatever you want to do. Why don't you do
it with this too?' she said.
He walked out and moments later was
arrested outside the courthouse and taken to the Howard County Jail. Within a
couple of hours, he was back on the street.
``They act as if they have no
options to what they're doing, and we show them some, and they jail us,'
Berrigan says.
Berrigan says he lucked out when as
a condition of parole from federal prison he was ordered back to Baltimore in
1972 to continue his work with the church. Baltimore is only an hour away from
his favorite protest spots, The White House and the Pentagon.
He rented a house and set up a
``resistance community' with his wife, former nun Elizabeth McAlister, whom he
married in 1967. He was excommunicated in 1973 when the church found out about
the marriage.
``Our work has not changed since the
time we married or before,' Berrigan says. ``We never considered doing anything
different.'
The Rev. Richard McSorley, director
of the Center for Peace Studies at Georgetown University, remembers first
linking arms with the Berrigan brothers during the civil-rights marches of the
1950s and 1960s.
``When I saw those three - Martin
Luther King, Phil and Dan - I thought they are the Christ figures of today, and
that is how I picture both of them,' McSorley says.
Peacetime or not, Berrigan is not
deterred. For him, the threat of war still looms large.
``We're on a war footing,' Berrigan
says. ``The seeds of the next conflict are being sown right now.'
Berrigan knows about war firsthand.
In World War II, he fought with the Army field artillery and infantry in France
and participated in some of the war's worst battles. The experience changed his
life.
``Violence is destroying us,' he
says. ``When you bury tens of thousands of Iraqi soldiers in a trench . . .
just bury people alive, and do that to thousands of Iraqi soldiers, you know
something is radically wrong.'
Daniel Berrigan, 72, says his
brother led the way into the peace movement and showed him how to live
religiously. ``I think he is a towering figure for so many people.'
Berrigan is one in a long tradition
of ``religious radicals' who use protest to speak out against society's ills,
says Burton Wechler, law professor at American University.
``There are so many of the 1960s
radicals that are now stockbrokers, investment brokers, shoe store owners,'
Wechler says. That doesn't mean their politics have changed but their heads
have changed. This is a man who continued to live it.'
``The cross of Christ means holding
to accountability a state that is sometimes criminal,' Berrigan says. ``That's
what it meant for Christ, and that's what it means for us.'
© Copyright 2023 Greensboro News & Record,
"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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