http://www.americamagazine.org/content/article.cfm?article_id=11747
A conversation with Daniel Berrigan
George M. Anderson
JULY 6, 2009
W hat are you most grateful for as you look back over your long
life?" I asked Daniel Berrigan, S.J., who is 88. We were sitting last
December in his light-filled living room at the Jesuit residence in
Manhattan where he has lived since 1975. He answered immediately: "My
Jesuit vocation." Any regrets? I asked. "I could have done sooner the
things I did, like Catonsville," he replied. That historic act of
burning draft files took place in the parking lot of a U.S. Selective
Service Office in Catonsville, outside Baltimore, Md., on May 17,
1968. It was one of the earliest and most dramatic of several
demonstrations for peace in which Berrigan took part over the years.
With him on that day were eight other people, including his brother,
Philip, who was a veteran and a Josephite priest; they stood trial
that October, the group known as the Catonsville Nine. While free on
bail awaiting trial, the two Berrigans spoke at St. Ignatius Church
near the Baltimore jail. I had entered the Jesuit novitiate in
Wernersville, Pa., that year, and the novice master drove down with
me to hear their powerful presentation.
In burning the draft files, the Catonsville Nine used napalm, the
gelatinous flammable substance that was then burning the flesh of
Vietnamese women, men and children during the Vietnam War. "It was
Philip who came up with the idea," Berrigan said. "In the military
section of the Georgetown University library, a friend found a copy
of the Green Beret manual with instructions for making napalm from
soap chips and kerosene." Before the stunned eyes of Selective
Service employees, several of the group lifted the files from their
drawer marked A1 and carried them out to the parking lot, because,
said Berrigan, "we didn't want to endanger anyone in the office."
An Emerging Poet
Nothing in Dan Berrigan's early life suggested the dramatic turn his
life would take in later years. Thoughts of a religious vocation came
early as he grew up in New York State. He mentioned his fascination
with a four-volume set of his father's books called Pioneer Priests
of North America that included accounts of Jesuit missionaries like
St. Isaac Jogues. As his senior year in high school approached, a
close childhood friend, Jack St. George, who had already decided on
religious life, asked him, "When are you going to make up your mind?"
They made a bargain: each would write to four religious congregations
for information. "Some replied with nice brochures that showed tennis
courts and swimming pools," Berrigan said, "but the Jesuits sent an
unattractive leaflet, no pictures and no come-on language, just a
brief description of the training, called 'The Making of a Jesuit.'"
Both applied to the Jesuits and entered the novitiate on the same
day, Aug. 14, 1939. Jack went on to a career at Vatican Radio, and
Dan eventually began teaching in Jesuit high schools.
Writing also became an important and continuing part of Berrigan's
work. His activity as a poet is less well known than his work as a
peace activist, yet poetry has played a distinctive part in his life.
His first poem appeared in America in the early 1940s, while Berrigan
was a college student at St. Andrew-on-Hudson, the Jesuit seminary
near Poughkeepsie, N.Y. "I was very proud of that," he told me.
On my return to America House after the interview, I looked up the
poem in the June 13, 1942, issue; it is called "Storm-Song," an ode
to the Virgin Mary. A decade or so later, an editor at Macmillan who
had heard about Berrigan's poetry asked him for a collection of his
poems. He told Berrigan that he would give it to the "toughest
reader" at Macmillan; and if the report was good, "we'll publish it."
That reader turned out to be Marianne Moore, a highly regarded poet,
who gave the manuscript a glowing report. It led to the publication
in 1953 of Berrigan's first book of poetry, Time Without Number,
which won the Lamont Poetry Prize in 1957.
A photograph from that period shows Dan Berrigan as a young priest
with members of the Catholic Poetry Society. It was taken at the
Lotos Club in Manhattan, when Sister Mary Madaleva, a popular
educator and poet at St. Mary's College inIndiana, received an award
from Cardinal Francis Spellman of New York. Since then, Berrigan
observed, some form of writing has been part of his life. "It's a
daily exercise," he said, often in diary form. For the last three
decades, he has studied and written about the Hebrew Bible (the Old
Testament); Eerdmans has published several of the resulting works.
Berrigan wrote a more autobiographical book, Lights on in the House
of the Dead (1974), while in federal prison in Danbury, Conn. for his
part in the Catonsville Nine action. He smuggled his handwritten
pages out of the prison sheet by sheet. By then, Berrigan was a
figure well known to the press; consequently the prison officials
were "very chary about anything I might be writing," he explained. "I
had to write very small and then wait for a visitor who could smuggle
the pages out." When visitors came, he was allowed to embrace them,
which made it possible for him to press a few pages into their hands
unobserved. They passed the pages on to Jesuit friends, who sent them
to Doubleday, his publisher.
Berrigan had been writing even as F.B.I. agents pursued him, after he
went underground in 1970 and before his eventual capture and
subsequent incarceration at Danbury. "I knew I would be apprehended
eventually, but I wanted to draw attention for as long as possible to
the Vietnam War, and to Nixon's ordering military action in
Cambodia," said Berrigan. For several months Robert Coles, a Harvard
professor and personal friend, put Berrigan up in his home. Together
they wrote The Dark Night of Resistance. Two F.B.I. agents attempting
to disguise themselves as birders finally caught up with Berrigan,
however, when he was staying in the home on Block Island, R.I., of
the social activist and lay theologian William Stringfellow. "One
day, Bill looked out the window and saw two men with binoculars
acting as if they were bird watchers," said Berrigan, "but since the
weather was stormy, that seemed strange. 'I think something's up,'
Bill said, and sure enough they knocked on the door." They took
Berrigan back to Providence by ferry; the media, already alerted,
were waiting at the pier. Berrigan showed me a poster in his
apartment made from a photo taken at that moment. Smiling broadly, he
was in handcuffs between two burly F.B.I. agents as they escorted him
off the ferry. A reminder of Block Island lies on his living room
floor: a dozen curiously shaped stones from the beach there.
Steps Toward Pacifism
Berrigan described his first meeting with Dorothy Day in the 1940s,
while he was teaching at Jesuit schools in New York. "I'd bring
students over to the Catholic Worker," he said, especially for the
Friday night "clarification of thought" meetings when various
speakers gave talks. In the 1950s, after Berrigan's ordination and
while he was teaching at Brooklyn Preparatory School, Dorothy Day
sent him a young man who sought instruction in the Catholic faith; he
was a pacifist. "It was Dorothy who got me thinking about the issue
of war," Berrigan told me. "She made me thoughtful about things I
hadn't really considered," including the way in which the United
States had conducted the war in Europe. Then he read an article by
the Jesuit moral theologian John Ford, in the quarterly periodical
Theological Studies in 1944, about the morality of saturation
bombingthe kind of bombing that had reduced the German city of
Dresden to ashes. Reading that, Berrigan said, was the first time he
had come across an examination of a World War II issue from a wider
moral perspective.
Much later, while on sabbatical in Paris in 1963 from a teaching
position at LeMoyne College, Berrigan noted the despair of French
Jesuits over the situation in Indochina. The French forces had left
after the 1954 Geneva Accords, and U.S. involvement in Vietnam had
continued to increase. With his brother Philip, Dan co-founded the
Catholic Peace Fellowship, which helped to organize demonstrations
against the U.S. role in Vietnam.
Such activities "were not well received" by his Jesuit superiors,
Berrigan said, so he was "eased out of the country." Berrigan spent
four months in Latin America, which turned out to be a good change.
He sent back reports to the periodical Jesuit Missions about what he
saw, including assessments of each country's poverty. Meanwhile, a
groundswell of protest at what was seen as Berrigan's forced exile
led his superiors to recall him.
"My future seemed dark and I didn't know how it would all end," said
Berrigan, emphasizing that he was determined to go on speaking about
peace and Christ. His determination led not only to nonviolent
actions like the record burning at Catonsville, but to those at the
town of King of Prussia in Pennsylvania, where he and other peace
activists hammered on nuclear warhead nose cones at the General
Electric nuclear missile facility, a symbolic action reminiscent of
Isaiah's phrase: "beating swords to plowshares." That action led to
further time behind bars for Berrigan.
In the 1960s, Dan Berrigan came to know Thomas Merton, the Trappist
monk and writer at Gethsemane Abbey in Kentucky. On being asked how
the initial meeting with Thomas Merton came about, Dan explained that
it took place in the early 1960s. "I was teaching at LeMoyne College
in New York State. Merton had written an article in The Catholic
Worker newspaper about what he saw as the imminent likelihood of
nuclear war. I was appalled by the article," he said, "and I wrote to
thank him for the piece but also to say it was hard to accept his
version of what was taking place in regard to the nuclear threat.
Merton wrote back and said, 'Come down and we'll talk about it.'"
"I did go down to the Trappist monastery in Kentucky, and was taken
both by his temperament and by his spiritual view of the world. The
chemistry was good and our frienship got underway. After that first
visit, we had the idea of getting together with some friends there.
He didn't use the word resistance, which was not yet in the
vocabulary of people who opposed the Vietnam War. He used a phrase
like the roots of dissent. He invited 15 people from various
denominations and backgrounds for a long weekend, which proved to be
very fruitful. All the ones who attended ended up either in jail or dead."
Merton, who was also writing about peace, persuaded James Fox,
O.C.S.O., the abbot, to invite Berrigan to give an annual address to
the community; Berrigan did so from 1960 until Merton's death in
1968. Around that time, Berrigan worked at Cornell University with a
team that directed the various chaplaincies. "We had a big anti-war
following among the students," he said. "It was a hard time, but a
good time, and I loved it."
After completing a two-year sentence at the Danbury federal prison in
1972, Berrigan celebrated his first Mass at the Catholic Worker house
in Manhattan. "The government gave me $50 when I was released," he
said, and he presented the money to Dorothy Day for her ministry to
poor people. She instructed one of the Workers, "Go to my room and
get the bottle of holy water by the bed." Then she dipped the bills
in the holy water and "held them up dripping," Berrigan recalled.
"Now we can use this," she said. Berrigan laughed as he recounted the story.
For part of Berrigan's two years at Danbury, his brother, Phil, was
also a prisoner there and became a valuable personal support. "I was
not strong in handling prison" from a health perspective, Berrigan
said. Once, during a dental procedure, he came close to death. "The
technician inserted a needle into my gum, hit a vein, and I went
out." A staff member, alarmed, called for Phil Berrigan to be brought
from the prison library right away. "Even though I was
semi-conscious, I knew he was near me," Dan told me. An ambulance
rushed him to a local hospital. Afterward, Dan asked Philip what had
gone through his mind then. "Philip, thinking I was dying, replied,
'Now I have to go it alone.'" That turned out not to be the case.
Throughout most of his life as a Jesuit, Daniel Berrigan has
consistently spoken out against violence in all its forms, including
abortion. "I have always made it clear," he said, "that I am against
everything from war to abortion to euthanasia. I have avoided being a
single-issue person."
The community's consistent support for his varied activities over
three decades is something else for which Father Berrigan is
especially grateful. With considerable understatement, he suggested
that the inscription over his grave might read: "It was never dull. Alleluia."
Another reason for an "Alleluia" is the scheduled fall publication of
Daniel Berrigan: Essential Writings, edited by John Dear, S.J.
.
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