Pacifist Berrigan fought hard for peace
“At what point will you say no to this war?”
This was the “burning” question asked by Jesuit priest Daniel Berrigan on May 17, 1968, as he ignited a new current in the U.S. antiwar movement.
Joined by brother and fellow cleric Philip, along with seven other Catholic activists, Daniel Berrigan seized hundreds of draft files from the Knights of Columbus Building in Catonsville, Md.
Using homemade napalm concocted reputedly of kerosene and Ivory soap flakes, a replica of the terrible incendiaries cascading from U.S. bombers in Vietnam, Berrigan burned the draft files, apologizing for “the fracture of good order, the burning of paper instead of children.”
With his passing April 30, just days before his 95th birthday, encomiums to this intrepid activist, poet, prolific author and steadfast peace advocate have graced the pages not only of the religious press, but also the New York Times, the Guardian, the Economist and the New Yorker.
Following his arrest and sentencing for his role in the Catonsville protest, Daniel extended his political dissent by evading the law for four months in what he called “felonious vagrancy,” becoming the first priest to top the FBI’s Most Wanted list, and popping up, Houdini-like, for media interviews to protest the war in Vietnam.
By the time of his rearrest in August 1970, he had helped inspire a rash of protests and acts of civil disobedience across the U.S., including sit-ins, demonstrations, and the public burning of draft cards.
According to U.S. peace activist John Dear, who considered Berrigan his “greatest friend and teacher,” Berrigan was a world changer and, along with Martin Luther King, Jr., Catholic Worker founder Dorothy Day and Mohandas Gandhi, represented one of the greatest paladins of peace in the 20th century.
Berrigan’s peace advocacy continued long after the bombs stopped falling in Vietnam. He protested the U.S. military intervention in Central America and acceleration of the nuclear arms race during the 1980s, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, all the while reaching out to AIDS victims in New York City and later, the Occupy Wall Street movement.
His consistent denunciations of the “war-making sins” of the state and his lifelong screed against what he termed “American military imperialism” made his relationship with the Catholic Church a complicated one. His stance on Vietnam and refusal to denounce certain controversial protesters, such as the self-immolating Roger LaPorte, for example, did not sit well with the powerful Cardinal Francis Spellman of New York, who allegedly put pressure on Berrigan’s Jesuit superiors to send him into ministerial exile in Latin America.
After widespread protest, Berrigan returned from Latin America after only three months, apparently even more radicalized by the poverty and state violence he had witnessed there.
In addition, some on the religious left critiqued Berrigan for his unflinching opposition to abortion and euthanasia, his lack of alacrity surrounding the church’s sex abuse scandal and the sense that his protests alienated as many as they attracted.
Berrigan’s response to this latter critique was characteristically witty and laconic: “A good peace movement starts out small and gets smaller.”
Despite his award-winning poetry and profound writings, Berrigan’s stubborn embrace of peace, for a variety of reasons, will perhaps be his most perduring legacy.
First, at the heart of his peace message is that every person must be treated with respect, dignity and compassion. Every human life is precious. There are no exceptions. Such a stance does not fit easily into a post-9/11 political milieu marked by a globalized “war on terror” in which “illegal non-combatants” are held without charge or trial, torture is rebranded as “enhanced interrogation” and relentless drone strikes obliterate women and children as “collateral damage.”
Second, for Berrigan, you can’t have peace without justice. Economic and social justice form the requisite social soil for the tendrils of peace to spread and flourish.
Third, the path of peace involves conflict. Like Martin Luther King, Jr., Berrigan knew that one could not shy away from compassionate contestation in order to wage peace. The work of pacifism is never passive.
Ultimately, Daniel Berrigan’s greatest legacy may well be his life itself, which demonstrates that, even in times of war, peace is always possible.