Appreciation
The life of an inside agitator
By CLAIRE
SCHAEFFER-DUFFY
Renowned antiwar activist Philip Francis Berrigan, who died of
cancer Dec. 6, was a red-blooded American turned prophet, a good kid turned
Christian revolutionary.
“If enough Christians follow the gospel,” he once wrote,
“they can bring any state to its knees.”
The young Berrigan, a talented athlete and enthusiastic World War
II combat soldier, became a priest who railed against economic injustice,
marched against racism and burned draft files to protest the Vietnam War. The
last three and a half decades of his life were defined by a fierce and
relentless opposition to nuclear weapons, “the taproot,” as he put
it, of all American violence.
Berrigan’s religious education was utterly Catholic, his
heritage undeniably American and his life an intertwining of the two. He took
his definition of citizenship from papal encyclicals and the scriptures. He was
the first Catholic priest to join the Freedom Riders in their efforts to
desegregate the South, the first Catholic priest in the history of the United
States known to serve a sentence as a political prisoner.
His most famous antiwar act occurred on May 17, 1968, when he and
his brother Daniel, Jesuit priest and poet, and seven other Catholics burned
draft files with homemade napalm in Catonsville, Md., to protest the Vietnam
War. The group became known as the Catonsville Nine. The action established the
Berrigan brothers as national figures, and they became known as the shock
troops of the Peace Movement, the high priests of the new Catholic left.
A militant pacifist, he and his brother Daniel are among a small
cadre of American Catholic radicals credited with moving their church from a
position of chauvinistic nationalism to a more critical view of the state.
Hardscrabble childhood
Born Oct. 5, 1923, in Two Harbors, Minn., Philip Berrigan was the
sixth and youngest son of Tom and Frida Berrigan. In 1926, financial hardship
forced the family to move to Liverpool, a township north of Syracuse, N.Y.,
where Philip grew up. His hardscrabble childhood, defined by the poverty of the
Depression, was also traditionally Catholic.
Tom Berrigan, a progressive Irish-American whose life passions
were labor and poetry, was a tyrannical and erratic father. But Philip
described his mother Frida, a pious German-American, as the one who taught her
sons life’s important lessons -- compassion for the poor, the meaning of
courage, how to handle fear.
Both parents instilled in their children a love of reading and
from childhood on Berrigan lived a print-rich life. In the mid-’60s, he
subscribed to 12 periodicals and regularly studied The Wall Street Journal
and Business Week to keep abreast of American economics. In
her book Divine Disobedience: Profiles in Catholic Radicalism,
biographer Francine du Plessix Gray described his diatribes against the war
in Southeast Asia as “powerfully documented. Very few priests in the
United States in 1965 knew the chronology of the Vietnam conflict as well as
Philip Berrigan.”
In 1943, at age 19, Berrigan, who was playing semi-pro baseball
and attending St. Michael’s College in Toronto, was drafted.
In his autobiography, Fighting the Lamb’s War: Skirmishes
with the American Empire, Berrigan described himself as a “willing
warrior,” someone who could not yet see the contradiction between killing
a person and the lessons he had learned in the Catholic church and parochial
schools: “that God created man in his own image and that all human beings
carry the divine within us.”
Berrigan was a good soldier, distinguishing himself as a skilled
marksman. He went overseas as a noncommissioned officer in an artillery
battalion that started in Normandy and Brittany and crossed France into Belgium
and the Netherlands. During the last year of the war, he was sent to infantry
Officer Candidate School in Fontainbleau, France, and upon graduation, was
assigned to the Eighth Infantry Division where “life in combat before
being hit or killed was something under two minutes,” he said.
When the European war ended, Berrigan was assigned to be part of
the ground invasion of Japan, but the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
curtailed that mission. In August 1945, a jubilant and patriotic Officer
Berrigan rejoiced in the use of a weapon he would later abhor.
In 1955, he joined the Josephites, an order dedicated to
African-Americans, and threw himself into combating racism. He became a member
of numerous civil rights groups, went to Selma, Ala., to march with Dr. Martin
Luther King and innovated neighborhood organizing within the black parishes
that he served.
Berrigan said his exposure to the suffering of black people gave
him an energizing rage, “a deep fire” that motivated him for years.
The nonviolence of the civil rights movement gave him a method.
A man of enormous energy, he carried out his civil rights work
while fulfilling his assigned duties as a Josephite priest. He was teaching at
St. Augustine’s, an all-black high school in New Orleans, when the Cuban
missile crisis erupted in October of 1962.
“New Orleans became paralyzed. Florida began to be evacuated
and people were pouring up through Georgia and the Carolinas,” he said.
Berrigan spent most of his time listening to back-to-back confessions because
“people sensed that they were going to die.” He then realized that
something was “very, very wrong” in the political order. Two men,
Kennedy and Kruschev, were debating the fate of millions of people. “These
guys are playing God,” he thought.
The totality of nuclear war pushed Berrigan into a pacifist
position. War, he believed was obsolete. Humanity couldn’t afford it. As
early as 1963, he was citing statements from a French cardinal and bishops
condemning modern warfare and nuclear weapons.
What to do with him
According to biographer du Plessix Gray, the Josephites
didn’t exactly know what to do with their outspoken priest. After six
controversial years in New Orleans, he was sent to teach English at the
Josephite Seminary in Newburgh, N.Y., but was transferred to Baltimore three
years later. His public lecture about the inextricable connection between the
evil of the Vietnam War and the race problem at home proved too much for
Newburgh’s conservative Catholic community, which was willing to consider
the plight of American blacks but not the brutality of U.S. foreign policy.
“Is it possible for us to be vicious, brutal, immoral and
violent at home and be fair, judicious, beneficent and idealistic abroad?”
he asked.
Berrigan’s antiwar work merely intensified in Baltimore where
he was assigned to be associate pastor of St. Peter Claver, an inner-city
parish serving 6,000 black people. He founded the city’s first chapter of
Alcoholics Anonymous. In October 1967, he joined three others in pouring blood
on Selective Service files in Baltimore. Eight months later, the Catonsville
Nine action took place. A statement delivered to the press on the day of the
action read:
“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. … 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.”
The six years immediately following the Catonsville action were
the most public and tumultuous period of his life. At his Catonsville trial,
Berrigan was sentenced to three and a half years to be served concurrently with
a six-year term for the Baltimore protest. The defendants appealed their
conviction, lost, and the Berrigan brothers briefly went underground.
In 1970, he married Elizabeth McAlister, an activist and a
religious of the Sacred Heart of Mary. They are parents of three children,
Frida, Jerry and Katie. The public announcement of his marriage in 1973
resulted in his excommunication, which has since been lifted. That same year,
the couple founded Jonah House, a Christian community located in inner-city
Baltimore. The community’s primary mission is nuclear disarmament through
nonviolent resistance.
On Sept. 9, 1980, Berrigan and seven other activists entered a
General Electric nuclear missile plant in King of Prussia, Pa., and poured
blood and hammered on Mark 12A warheads. The action known as the Plowshares
Eight launched the international Plowshares movement, which takes its mandate
from the prophet Isaiah’s call to beat swords into plowshares. To date,
more than 70 plowshares actions have occurred on several continents. Berrigan
participated in six of them, resulting in seven years of imprisonment.
Student of his world
Philip Berrigan allowed the events of his time to shape the way he
lived. In a 1963 lecture on peace, Berrigan, summarizing the sentiment of Pope
John XXIII’s peace encyclical Pacem in Terris, said, “Society
must be known, man must become a student of his world -- otherwise, he cannot
judge it and act upon it.” Berrigan clearly was a student of the world,
always analyzing the events of his time in the context of his faith.
He was ultimately an inside agitator. After his excommunication in
1973, Berrigan said “several other Christian bodies” invited him to
become a minister. He never seriously considered their offers.
At 73 he wrote, “I cling to my Catholic roots because the
church has given me far more than I’ve given the church: the sacraments
and the scripture. It taught me when I was young, was faithful to me during
dimwitted and rather retarded periods in my life. It has stayed with me and I
will stay with the church as long as I live, will be a witness for, and
sometimes against, the church.”
In 1966, during a visit to Saigon, Cardinal Francis Spellman of
New York, arguably the most powerful U.S. churchman at the time, was asked by a
reporter: “What do you think of our policy in Vietnam?” The cardinal
responded, “Right or wrong, my country.” Five years later, the U.S.
bishops condemned the war. While their statement was too late and too modest
for Berrigan, it was, said David O’Brien, professor of history at Holy
Cross College, “the first time ever in modern history that a body of
bishops called the actions of their nation unjust.” The 1971
episcopate’s statement on Vietnam and the 1983 peace pastoral owe much of
their inspiration to Berrigan’s ceaselessly battering away at the unholy
collusion of church and state.
A theologian commenting on Berrigan’s death acknowledged that
he at times found him hard to deal with but he believed Berrigan helped prevent
the church “from becoming entirely a non-prophet organization.”
Among the last words said by the dying Berrigan were: “I die
with the conviction, held since 1968 and Catonsville, that nuclear weapons are
the scourge of the earth; to mine for them, manufacture them, deploy them, use
them, is a curse against God, the human family and the earth itself.”
Claire Schaeffer-Duffy is a free-lance writer living in
Worcester, Mass.
National Catholic Reporter, December 20,
2002
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