Radical priest who was jailed for burning US draft cards
Daniel Berrigan was a writer, Daniel
peace activist and Roman Berrigan
Catholic priest who, with his 1921-2016
brother and fellow priest Philip, inspired a wave of non-violent protests against the Vietnam war, said The New York Times. On 17 May 1968, the Berrigans and seven other activists, most of them in holy orders, marched into a draft office in Catonsville, Maryland, and seized the records of almost 400 men who were about to be conscripted into the US Army. They then carried the files to a nearby car park, doused them with home-made napalm and set them alight, before being dragged away by police. The group became known as the Catonsville Nine, and their actions – six weeks after the murder of Martin Luther King, when riots were breaking out in cities across America – and subsequent arrest, trial and conviction, sparked a host of other draft-card burnings, marches and sit-ins. In a play about the event, Berrigan, who died in April aged 94, wrote: “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 parlour of the charnel house. We could not, so help us God, do otherwise.”
The fifth of six sons, Berrigan was born in 1921 into a family that was both devoutly Catholic and highly political. His father, a frustrated, violent man, was a trade union member, who passed his radicalism on to his sons; his mother was a housewife who opened their home to the poor. She recalled that even as a child, Daniel – frailer than his brothers – was “obsessed by the suffering of the world”. Growing up in upstate New York, Daniel went to a local high school, then entered a Jesuit seminary. He was ordained in 1952, and subsequently taught English in Catholic schools, while writing poetry; later, he taught at various universities. He grew close to some of his more radical students and became further involved in the civil rights movement.
In 1968, Berrigan flew to Hanoi, to help secure the release of three US Pows, and witnessed at first hand the conditions being endured by US servicemen (who were disproportionately poor and black). On his return, he and Philip – who had an even more radical track record – began planning the Catonsville protest. For destroying US property, Berrigan was sentenced to three years, but before he could be jailed, he briefly went on the run, drawing yet more attention to the cause. He was the first priest to be put on the FBI’S “most wanted” list, and in 1971, he and Philip made the cover of Time magazine. Loathed by many conservatives, Berrigan was considered an enemy of both the state and the Catholic Church, said The Economist. But he was braced for that. As he liked to say: “If you want to follow Jesus, you better look good on wood.”
Later, he and Philip joined the anti-nuclear movement: in 1980, they invaded a General Electric plant in Pennsylvania and rained hammer blows down on missile warheads, evoking the verse in the Book of Isaiah about people beating “their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks”. The so-called Plowshare protest led to further criminal convictions. In the 1990s Berrigan worked with Aids patients in New York. He wrote dozens of books, and lived modestly, carrying most of what he owned in a small rucksack. “My deepest belief is that results are not important,” he said in 1993. “If you want to profess your faith, you have to seek consonance with Christ and let the chips fall. And they often fall in legal jeopardy and public disgrace.”