Word spread on Friday, April 30,
2017 that Father Daniel Berrigan, S.J.
died in a Jesuit infirmary at Fordham University where the firebrand pacifist, thinker, and poet had taught for
years and where he made at last a sometimes
shaky accommodation with his
order. He was 94 years old. With his activist
brothers Jerry and especially Phillip, he defined if he did not create
a robust and defiant Catholic peace movement which influenced
and energized the wider secular anti-Vietnam War and
anti-nuclear movements. He even inspired a certain young
heathen and heretic’s draft resistance and prison
sentence.
Daniel was the fifth of six sons and born to Thomas William
Berrigan and the former Frida
Fromhart. in, Virginia, Minnesota a
Masabi Iron Range town better known
for the production of hockey players than
future pacifists. His German
mother and Irish father were
both devout Catholics. His father
was a railroad engineer, union officer,
with thwarted ambitions to be a
Catholic scholar who took his deep frustrations, often physically out on his wife and sons. The tension
between piety and daily brutality at home deeply shaped the lives of Daniel and
Philip.
Sometime after the birth of Philip
two years after him, the family moved to Syracuse,
New York where his father had extended
family. Young Daniel was sickly and was born with such weak ankles that he could not walk until he was four years old. That allowed him to stay close to home under
as much protection as his mother could offer and buffered him from some
of the stern demands placed on his
brothers. At an early age he resented the Church for excusing, even empowering his father’s brutality
toward his mother and tyranny over
his family. Yet he also felt a strong call to the priesthood.
After graduating from high school
those weak ankles and general fragility kept him out of the World War II draft, unlike Philip who
entered the Army and saw action in Europe as an artillery man and
infantry officer. Daniel enrolled at St. Andrew-on-Hudson, a Jesuit seminary
in Hyde Park, New York where he earned a bachelor’s
degree in 1946.
Berrigan taught at St. Peter’s Preparatory School in Jersey City from 1946 to 1949 then continued his education at Woodstock College in Baltimore where he finished his master’s degree in 1952. He was ordained
a priest in the Jesuit order the same year.
Recognized for his brilliant mind in school, Daniel seemed
destined to join the ranks of Jesuit intellectuals
and academics. He
had an eye opening experience when
he was sent to France for a year of
study. That brought him into contact
with the French worker priest movement which
gave him “a practical vision of the
Church as she should be.”
Back in the States in 1954 he joined the faculty
of the Jesuits’ Brooklyn Preparatory
School, teaching theology and French.
He also undertook his own personal study of poetry and was particularly influenced by Robert Frost, E. E. Cummings
and the 19th-century Jesuit Gerard
Manley Hopkins. He began publishing
his own poetry which combined nature
spirituality with Catholic symbolism.
He also established contact with Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement, which had
also been influenced by the French worker priests and with the Trappist mystic,
pacifist, and poet Thomas
Merton. Both would significantly influence his own development.
In 1957 Daniel became professor of New Testament Studies—another intellectual passion—at Le Moyne College in Syracuse. He also won the Lamont Poetry Selection from the
Academy of American Poets for
his first collection, Time
Without Number. In many ways the next few years there were the
happiest of a life not used to happiness or comfortable with it. He was a very popular instructor making friendships
with his students, the cause of
some manageable friction with school
authorities. Satisfying, but more
troublesome to his school and Jesuit superiors was his growing reputation as a radical, civil rights militant, and pacifist as a part of the small but
emerging ban the bomb movement. He was also drawn to interfaith work which before Vatican
II was regarded with deep suspicion
by American church leaders. He founded International House while at Le Moyne.
Daniel’s increasingly high profile role in the growing anti-war
movement and the anarcho-socialist
tendencies of Dorothy Day’s followers and supporters, drew the ire of Francis Cardinal Spellman of New York, the most powerful prelate in the U.S. and a rabid anti-Communist and Vietnam hawk. Spellman was particularly
infuriated by his leadership involvement in the interdenominational Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam.
Berigan was eased out of Le Moyne
before he could obtain tenure in
1963.
In 1965 Daniel felt the full force
of Spellman’s wrath. First, on October
15, 1965 one of Daniel’s former Le Moyne students and friend, David Miller, became the first man to publicly burn his draft card at a mass
demonstration in New York City. Two
years later Miller was the first man convicted
and sentenced to prison for draft card burning.
Next, Roger La Porte, a young Catholic anti-war activist with whom he had
only a slight acquaintance self-immolated himself outside United Nations Headquarters in New York
in November to protest the War in Vietnam.
Although inspired by the act of a Buddhist
monk in Saigon, Spellman
launched an investigation meant to
blame the young man’s death on Berrigan’s influence. Partly to protect him and partly to insulate
themselves from him, his Jesuit superiors got him out of the country by
sending him on a fact finding mission to
study the South American working class. An uproar
from Daniel’s supporters in the
Jesuit community cut short that exile, but what Berrigan learned from
the experience only deepened his radicalism.
Daniel found himself virtually blackballed from Jesuit and Catholic colleges and universities.
Now we must back track and pick up
the story of Phillip Berrigan because from this point forward their lives and
activism were intertwined.
Phillip Berrigan was born on October
5, 1923 in Two Harbors, Minnesota, a tough Iron Range port on Lake Michigan. He was the youngest of
six brothers.
Unlike other well-known anti-war
figures of the Vietnam era, Philip
knew war—and injustice—first hand. At the age of 20 he was drafted in 1943. Basic
training in the South was an eye-opening and painful experience for him.
He had never before witnessed
firsthand the brutal racism of
the Jim Crow South and was stunned that the Army that accommodated it in every way possible.
And that was just the start of his
education. He witnessed the stark horror
of war first hand as an artilleryman in the Battle of the Bulge and, as the war drew to a close in Europe, as a
Second Lieutenant in the infantry. He was the recipient of combat
decorations/
After the war instead of resuming
his interrupted studies at the St.
Michael's College in Toronto, he
entered the College of the Holy Cross
in Worcester, Massachusetts. After graduation in 1950 Philip decided to enter the
seminary of the Josephite Fathers, an order
founded to minister to recently
freed slaves after the Civil War and explicitly dedicated to service
to the African diaspora in the
U.S. He was ordained in 1955.
As the Civil Rights Movement heated up, so did Phillip’s involvement. He marched
and participated in sit-ins and
other protests immersing himself in the movement’s non-violence and sacrificial
militancy, in both of which he found resonance
with his pacifist Catholic theology.
Serving Black parishes, Berrigan was beginning to get in trouble with his
order superiors by the mid-60s. After speaking
at a public forum in which he blasted the Church for complicity in war crimes , his superiors removed him from his Up State New York parish and assigned
him to Baltimore. He was assigned to St. Peter Claver Church in 1965 and founded the Baltimore Interfaith Peace Mission. The group began with public witnesses against the war and actions like the picketing of the homes of Secretary of State Dean Rusk and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara in the Washington suburbs. It was
out of this group and extensive prayerful consideration that the Baltimore Four decided to act.
On October 27, 1967 Father Phillip
Berrigan and three others calmly walked
into a Selective Service office in
the Baltimore Customs House. As the Reverend
James L. Mengel, a United Church of
Christ minister and activist distributed
copies of The Good News For Modern Man to workers, Berrigan, artist
Tom Lewis, and writer David
Eberhardt poured blood on the Draft Board files.
Each of the four men had contributed some of their own blood then supplemented it with duck blood purchased at a local Polish market. In a leaflet
distributed along with the Bibles, Berrigan wrote, “This sacrificial and constructive act is meant to protest the pitiful waste of American and Vietnamese
blood in Indochina.”
When they were finished all four men
calmly awaited the arrival of police and arrest. The Baltimore Four,
as they came to be known, succeeded in grabbing national attention. Their act of symbolic defiance helped energize
the Anti-War Movement as a whole.
Phillip would be sentenced to four years in prison in this celebrated
case. And it was just his Act I.
Daniel meanwhile had gotten a
position at a prestigious non-Catholic
Cornel University as the assistant
director of the campus United
Religious Work organization in 1967.
In addition to this interfaith work he was chaplain to the Catholic Cornel
Newman Club. He continued writing
and speaking out against the war and was becoming one of the best known
national figures in the rapidly growing national movement. He also found time to become directly
involved in Philip’s work in Baltimore.
Daniel had been further radicalized
against the government by Phillip’s long sentence in the Baltimore case and by mischaracterizations by the government
of his work on behalf of American POWs held in North Vietnam. In January of
1968 Daniel and historian Howard Zinn went
to Hanoi as the Tet offensive raged in South
Vietnam where they received and brought home the first American POW
released since the beginning of President
Johnson’s bombing campaign against the North. He was widely denounced as a traitor in the press.
While Philip was out of jail awaiting sentencing in the first Draft
Board raid, he planned another even more dramatic raid.. This time he was joined by his older brother Daniel
In addition to the Berrigan brothers Tom Lewis was once again on hand as
were George Mische, De La Salle
Christian Brother Br. David Darst, John
Hogan, Marjorie Bradford Melville,
Thomas Melville, and Mary
Moylan. On May 17, 1968 they went to
a Draft Board in Cantonville, Maryland. Not content with the mere symbolic vandalism of draft records,
this time they hauled hundreds of files
from the office into the parking lot,
doused them in homemade napalm concocted
of gasoline and soap flakes, and set them on fire.
The trial of the Cantonville Nine—which Philip Berrigan would later turn into a play using mostly trial transcripts—became a media sensation and offered the
Berrigans and their collaborators an opportunity
to eloquently and defiantly state their positions about
war, exploitation, and the
complicity of the Church and American society in the carnage. “Our apologies,
good friends, for the fracture of good order, the burning of paper instead of
children.”
All of the defendants were convicted. Phillip and Berrigan were sentenced to 3½
years in prison. Allowed out on bail before reporting to serve their
sentences the Berrigan brothers and some of the other defendants decided that
since they had a right to protest manifest injustice, they also had a
right not be complicit in their own persecution. They disappeared
before reporting and went underground.
Both Berrigans would emerge from hiding, make a public
appearance, and once again slip away. Daniel was even interviewed for the documentary
film The Holy Outlaw. Despite
Philips more central role in planning the Cantonville raid, Daniel who was
better known became the center of much of the press’s attention. FBI
Director J. Edgar Hoover was enraged and put both Berrigans on the Ten Most Wanted List. A massive nationwide man hunt followed. On April 11, 1970 Philip Berrigan was
arrested when FBI agents broke down the door of Church of St. Gregory the Great in New York City and arrested him in the rectory. Daniel was nabbed
at the home of radical lay Episcopal
theologian and lawyer William
Stringfellow.
Both brothers were sent to high security Federal Prisons. Daniel spent his time writing poetry and
essays that continued to be published.
But his always fragile health
deteriorated. He suffered from painful even life threatening bleeding ulcers. His health problems led to his early release in 1972.
Philip was sent to prison with his two
sentences to be served concurrently. While serving these sentences he secretly wed
Sr. Elizabeth McAlister and anti-war
activist in her own right. He was released in 1972. When the church learned of the marriage both
Berrigan and his wife were excommunicated.
The pair faced a new hurdle when they and five
others were indicted for an alleged plot to kidnap Secretary of State
Henry Kissinger and perhaps “blow up”
some steam tunnels. The Federal case against the so called Harrisburg Seven was built on smuggled letters between the two facilitated
by a prisoner/informant and intercepted by authorities. The government spent over $2 million trying
to prove the case in the 1972 trial.
The lead defense attorney,
former Attorney General turned
anti-war activist Ramsey Clark did
not even call a witness. After lengthy
deliberations there was a hung jury. The greatly embarrassed government declined to re-file the charges.
In 1973 Philip and McAlister founded Jonah
House in Baltimore to support the
community of non-violent resistance to war and injustice. Styled a Catholic Worker Resistance House,
it was their home for the rest of his life.
The couple had three children.
The House served as a center of action and in 1980 was the birthplace
of a new activist group, Plowshares which initiated many more actions
over the next decades. Daniel was also
deeply involved in Plowshares.
He had attempted to
resume an academic career after his release while continuing peace work in the post-Vietnam
era. He held faculty positions or ran programs at Union
Seminary, Loyola University New Orleans, Columbia, and Yale
but was often seen as a trouble maker and a facilitator of campus
radicalism. A journey to Holy
Land and Middle East led him
to denounce the State of Israel for its repression of the Palestinian people.
That, predictably, led to charges that he was engaged in “old-fashion theological anti-Semitism.”
Despite the turmoil
in his career, Daniel kept up a steady stream of publican—about a book a
year—including theological works, Biblical
history and interpretation, philosophical and political essays, and a stream of
poetry. His work with Philip and
Plowshares, however ushered in a new, even more intense period civil
disobedience and protest.
The first Plowshares
action was a raid on the General Electric Nuclear Missile Re-entry Division in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania where nose cones for the Mark 12A
nuclear warheads were made. Phillip
and Daniel Berrigan and six others symbolically
pounded on the nose cones with hammers
and drenched them in blood. This
time they were sentenced 11 years in prison after the trial and appeals dragged
on for nearly ten years. Much of that
time both brothers were held in custody. In 1990 the Berrigans were re-sentenced to
23½ months and immediately paroled for time served.
Plowshares would continue to conduct similar
such raids often planned by the Berrigan brothers.
In December of 1999 Philip Berrigan
participated in his last Plowshares protest—at the Warfield Air National Guard Base in Maryland where members pounded
on A-10 Warthog warplanes like those
which had been used in the Persian Gulf
War. He was sentenced to 30 months
in prison for malicious damage to
Federal Property. He was released
from prison for the last time in 2001.
Altogether Phillip served more than 11 years
in jail or prison for his defiant acts of civil
disobedience. That is likely a record for any non-violent activist in American History.
Soon after release, Philip died at Jonah House
surrounded by his family and supporters of cancer on December 6, 2002 at the
age of 72. He was buried on the grounds
of Jonah House, where his wife continues his work.
Daniel continued his work. He finally found a comfortable academic home
at Jesuit Fordham University,
embraced by a new generation of Jesuit leaders who had matured admiring
him. He was able to hold on even when he became publicly and harshly critical of conservative Pope John Paul II and the reactionary leadership he installed in
the American church hierarchy.
He continued to plan and participate in
Plowshares actions and was regularly arrested.
Daniel called the days after 9/11
when the American people embraced the aggressive
War on Terror, and wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan the darkest of his life. He
was deeply disappointed by a feeble
anti-war movement and
despaired that the government and media had become a seamless, unchallengeable
monolith. Yet he continued on,
offering his frail body time and time again in arrest. Among his last arrests in 2006 were for civil
disobedience blocking the Intrepid Naval
Air and Space Museum and United
Nations Headquarters in New York.
He was a contributing editor at Sojourners,
a left interfaith journal with strong connections to radical Evangelicals.
He was encouraged by the Occupy Wall Street Movement and addressed a rally at Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan in 2012. No
longer physically able to put his body on the line, he also embraced the Black Lives Matter protests. In those two movements he saw the seeds of real and widespread popular resistance to systematic evil.
The frail man outlasted all expectations. Despite infirmities, he was tough to the core. He left behind a great legacy that morally challenges each and every one of us.
I know National
Poetry Month has passed, but I would be remiss if I did not include some of Daniel Berrigan’s accomplished
and moving verse.
Miracles
Were I God almighty, I would ordain, rain fall lightly where
old men trod, no death in childbirth, neither infant nor mother, ditches firm
fenced against the errant blind, aircraft come to ground like any feather.
No
mischance, malice, knives.
Tears dried. Would resolve all
flaw and blockage of mind
that makes us mad, sets lives awry.
So I pray,
under
the sign of the world's murder, the ruined son;
why are you silent?
feverish as lions
hear us in the world,
caged, devoid of hope.
Still,
some redress and healing.
The hand of an old woman
turns gospel page;
it flares up gently, the sudden tears of Christ
—Daniel Berrigan, S.J.
[Fragment]
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.
—Daniel Berrigan, S.J.
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