Remembering Daniel Berrigan

I've been reading some of the selected writings of Daniel Berrigan, the Jesuit priest and peace activist. It's been a bracing and introspective experience, reencountering Berrigan's life and witness for peace as wars rage around the world. 

Sadly, my students have no idea who Daniel Berrigan was. I expect many readers don't as well. For a time, in the late 60s and early 70s, Daniel Berrigan and his brother Phillip were front page news and household names. For a season they were outlaw priests, hunted by the FBI for their protest against Vietnam at Catonsville, Maryland. 

If you don't know this history, let me recommend Shawn Peters' book The Catonsville Nine: A Story of Faith and Resistance in the Vietnam Era. 

The Catonsville Nine protest was one of the more iconic anti-war protests against the war in Vietnam because two Catholic priests were involved, the brothers Daniel and Philip Berrigan. Along with the Berrigan brothers were David Darst, John Hogan, Tom Lewis, Marjorie Melville, Thomas Melville , George Mische, and Mary Moylan. All were Catholics.

On May 17, 1968 the Nine entered the building of the draft board in Catonsville, removed the A-1 draft files (along with some others), took them outside and set them on fire with homemade napalm. Upon burning the files, Daniel Berrigan read a statement, a part of which read:

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 parlor of the charnel house. We could not, so help us God, do otherwise.

For we are sick at heart, our hearts give us no rest for thinking of the Land of Burning Children. And for thinking of that other Child, of whom the poet Luke speaks...

We say: killing is disorder, life and gentleness and community and unselfishness is the only order we recognize. For the sake of that order, we risk our liberty, our good name.

The time is past when good men can remain silent, when obedience can segregate men from public risk, when the poor can die without defense. We ask our fellow Christians to consider in their hearts a question which has tortured us, night and day, since the war began. How many must die before our voices are heard, how many must be tortured, dislocated, starved, maddened? How long must the world's resources be raped in the service of legalized murder? When, at what point, will you say no to this war? We have chosen to say, with the gift of our liberty, if necessary our lives: the violence stops here, the death stops here, the suppression of the truth stops here, this war stops here.

Defending the actions of the Nine to reporters on the scene David Darst said, "I wanted to make it more difficult for men to kill each other."

At the time of the Catonsville action Philip Berrigan and Tom Lewis had already been convicted for their actions as a part of the The Baltimore Four protest, where they had entered a Selective Service facility and poured blood over draft files.

The Nine were arrested and but on trial. Daniel Berrigan famously turned the trial transcripts into a widely produced play The Trial of the Catonsville Nine. After their conviction, both Philip and Daniel refused to turn themselves in to start their prison sentences. Philip was captured quickly, but Daniel remained at large for four months, kicking off a very public and widely publicized cat and mouse game with FBI, much to the agency's embarrassment. During these months, the "holy outlaw," as one documentary described Berrigan, would suddenly appear to speak at anti-war protests, preach in a Sunday morning pulpit, or sit down for interviews, often slipping away minutes before the FBI arrived to capture him. Berrigan was eventually arrested at the house of William Stringfellow and served two years in prison. 

After he was released from prison, Berrigan went on the found the Plowshares movement to protest nuclear proliferation. Throughout his life he continued to participate in peace protests and was arrested many more times. 

But Berrigan was more than a peace activist. He was also an acclaimed poet, author, and Bible scholar.

In short, Daniel Berrigan lived a singular life. He passed way in 2016, and I've found it invigorating and inspiring to revisit his life and witness. 

They don't make many Christians like Daniel Berrigan anymore.