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Daniel Berrigan
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Berrigan in 2008
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| Born |
Daniel Joseph Berrigan
May 9, 1921
Virginia, Minnesota, United States
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| Died | April 30, 2016 (aged 94)
The Bronx, New York City, U.S.
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| Occupation | Jesuit priest, peace activist, university educator |
| Known for | Anti-Vietnam War activism Anti-nuclear activism |
| Relatives | Philip Berrigan (brother) |
Daniel Joseph Berrigan SJ (May 9, 1921 – April 30, 2016) was an American Jesuit priest, anti-war activist, Christian pacifist, playwright, poet, and author.
Like many others during the 1960s, Berrigan's active protest against the Vietnam War earned him both scorn and admiration, but it was his participation in the Catonsville Nine that made him famous. It also landed him on the Federal Bureau of Investigation's "most wanted list" (the first-ever priest on the list), on the cover of Time magazine, and in prison. His own particular form of militancy and radical spirituality in the service of social and political justice was significant enough, at that time, to "shape the tactics of resistance to the Vietnam War" in the United States.
For the rest of his life, Berrigan remained one of the United States' leading anti-war activists. In 1980, he founded the Plowshares movement, an anti-nuclear protest group, that put him back into the national spotlight. He was also an award-winning and prolific author of some 50 books, a teacher, and a university educator. He, along with his activist brother Philip Berrigan, was nominated in 1998 for the Nobel Peace Prize by 1976 laureate Mairead Maguire.
Early life
Berrigan was born in Virginia, Minnesota, the son of Frieda Berrigan (née Fromhart), who was of German descent, and Thomas Berrigan, a second-generation Irish Catholic and active trade union member. He was the fifth of six sons. His youngest brother was fellow peace activist Philip Berrigan.
At age 5, Berrigan's family moved to Syracuse, New York. In 1946, Berrigan earned a bachelor's degree from St. Andrew-on-Hudson, a Jesuit seminary in Hyde Park, New York. In 1952 he received a master's degree from Woodstock College in Baltimore, Maryland.
Berrigan was devoted to the Catholic Church
throughout his youth. He joined the Jesuits directly out of high school
in 1939 and was ordained to the priesthood on June 19, 1952.
Career
Berrigan taught at St. Peter's Preparatory School in Jersey City from 1946 to 1949.
In 1954, Berrigan was assigned to teach French and theology at the Jesuit Brooklyn Preparatory School. In 1957 he was appointed professor of New Testament studies at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, New York. The same year, he won the Lamont Prize for his book of poems, Time Without Number.
He developed a reputation as a religious radical, working actively
against poverty and on changing the relationship between priests and lay
people. While at Le Moyne, he founded its International House.
While on a sabbatical from Le Moyne in 1963, Berrigan traveled to
Paris and met French Jesuits who criticized the social and political
conditions in Indochina. Taking inspiration from this, he and his
brother Philip founded the Catholic Peace Fellowship, a group that
organized protests against the war in Vietnam.
On October 28, 1965, Berrigan, along with the Rev. Richard John Neuhaus and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel,
founded an organization known as Clergy and Laymen Concerned About
Vietnam (CALCAV). The organization, founded at the Church Center for the
United Nations, was joined by the likes of Dr. Hans Morgenthau, Dr. Reinhold Niebuhr, Rev. William Sloane Coffin, and the Rev. Philip Berrigan, among many others. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who delivered his 1967 speech Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence under sponsorship from CALCAV, served as the national co-chairman of the organization.
From 1966 to 1970, Berrigan was the assistant director of the Cornell University
United Religious Work (CURW), the umbrella organization for all
religious groups on campus, including the Cornell Newman Club (later the
Cornell Catholic Community), eventually becoming the group's pastor.
Berrigan at one time or another held faculty positions or ran programs at Union Theological Seminary, Loyola University New Orleans, Columbia, Cornell, and Yale. His longest tenure was at Fordham (a Jesuit university located in the Bronx), where for a brief time he also served as poet-in-residence.
Berrigan appeared briefly in the 1986 Warner Bros. film The Mission, playing a Jesuit priest. He also served as a consultant on the film.
Activism
Vietnam War era
But how shall we educate men to goodness, to a sense of one another, to a love of the truth? And more urgently, how shall we do this in a bad time?
— Berrigan, quoted on the cover of TIME (Jan. 25, 1971)
Berrigan, his brother and Josephite priest Philip Berrigan, and Trappist monk Thomas Merton founded an interfaith coalition against the Vietnam War
and wrote letters to major newspapers arguing for an end to the war. In
1967, Berrigan witnessed the public outcry that followed from the
arrest of his brother Philip, for pouring blood on draft records as part
of the Baltimore Four.
Philip was sentenced to six years in prison for defacing government
property. The fallout he had to endure from these many interventions,
including his support for prisoners of war and, in 1968, seeing firsthand the conditions on the ground in Vietnam, further radicalized Berrigan, or at least strengthened his determination to resist American military imperialism.
Berrigan traveled to Hanoi with Howard Zinn during the Tet Offensive
in January 1968 to "receive" three American airmen, the first American
prisoners of war released by the North Vietnamese since the U.S. bombing
of that nation had begun.
In 1968, he signed the Writers and Editors War Tax Protest pledge, vowing to refuse to make tax payments in protest of the Vietnam War. In the same year, he was interviewed in the anti-Vietnam War documentary film In the Year of the Pig, and later that year became involved in radical non-violent protest.
Catonsville Nine
The short fuse of the American left is typical of the highs and lows of American emotional life. It is very rare to sustain a movement in recognizable form without a spiritual base.Daniel Berrigan, on the 40th anniversary of the Catonsville Nine (2008)
Daniel Berrigan and his brother Philip, along with seven other Catholic protesters, used homemade napalm to destroy 378 draft files in the parking lot of the Catonsville, Maryland, draft board on May 17, 1968. This group, which came to be known as the Catonsville Nine, issued a statement after the incident:
We confront the Roman Catholic Church, other Christian bodies, and the synagogues of America with their silence and cowardice in the face of our country's crimes. We are convinced that the religious bureaucracy in this country is racist, is an accomplice in this war, and is hostile to the poor.
Berrigan was arrested and sentenced to three years in prison, but went into hiding with the help of fellow radicals prior to imprisonment. While on the run, Berrigan was interviewed for Lee Lockwood's documentary The Holy Outlaw. The Federal Bureau of Investigation apprehended him on August 11, 1970 at the home of William Stringfellow and Anthony Towne. Berrigan was then imprisoned at the Federal Correctional Institution in Danbury, Connecticut until his release on February 24, 1972.
In retrospect, the trial of the Catonsville Nine was significant,
because it "altered resistance to the Vietnam War, moving activists
from street protests to repeated acts of civil disobedience, including
the burning of draft cards." As The New York Times noted in its obituary, Berrigan's actions helped "shape the tactics of opposition to the Vietnam War."
Daniel Berrigan is arrested for civil disobedience outside the U.S. Mission to the U.N. in 2006
On September 9, 1980, Berrigan, his brother Philip, and six others (the "Plowshares Eight") began the Plowshares movement. They trespassed onto the General Electric nuclear missile facility in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, where they damaged nuclear warhead nose cones and poured blood onto documents and files. They were arrested and charged with over ten different felony and misdemeanor counts. On April 10, 1990, after ten years of appeals, Berrigan's group was re-sentenced and paroled for up to 231/2 months in consideration of time already served in prison. Their legal battle was re-created in Emile de Antonio's 1982 film In the King of Prussia, which starred Martin Sheen and featured appearances by the Plowshares Eight as themselves.
Consistent life ethic
I see an 'interlocking directorate' of death that binds the whole culture. That is, an unspoken agreement that we will solve our problems by killing people in various ways; a declaration that certain people are expendable, outside the pale. A decent society should no more have an abortion clinic than The Pentagon." — interview by Lucien Miller, Reflections, vol. 2, no. 4 (Fall 1979)
Berrigan endorsed a consistent life ethic, a morality based on a holistic reverence for life. As a member of the Rochester, New York-area consistent life ethic advocacy group Faith and Resistance Community, he protested via civil disobedience against abortion at a new Planned Parenthood clinic in 1991.
AIDS activism
Berrigan said of pastoral care to AIDS patients:
We deal with very many gay Catholics who have felt terribly hurt and misused by the church. There are some people who want to be reconciled with the church and there are others who have great bitterness. So I try to perform whatever human or religious work that seems called for.
Berrigan published Sorrow Built a Bridge: Friendship and AIDS
reflecting on his experiences ministering to AIDS patients through the
Supportive Care Program at St. Vincent's Hospital and Medical Center in
1989. The Religious Studies Review wrote, "the strength of this volume lies in its capacity to portray sensitively the impact of AIDS on human lives." Speaking about AIDS patients, many of whom were gay, The Charlotte Observer
quoted Berrigan saying in 1991, "Both the church and the state are
finding ways to kill people with AIDS, and one of the ways is ostracism
that pushes people between the cracks of respectability or acceptability
and leaves them there to make of life what they will or what they
cannot."
Other activism
Berrigan and his niece, Frida Berrigan, at the Witness Against Torture event held in NYC's Lower East Side on December 18, 2008
Although much of his later work was devoted to assisting AIDS patients in New York City,
Berrigan still held to his activist roots throughout his life. He
maintained his opposition to American interventions abroad, from Central
America in the 1980s, through the Gulf War in 1991, the Kosovo War, the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, and the 2003 invasion of Iraq. He was also an opponent of capital punishment, a contributing editor of Sojourners, and a supporter of the Occupy movement.
Berrigan has been considered by many to be a Christian anarchist.
In media
- Dar Williams' song "I Had No Right" from her album The Green World is about Berrigan and his trial.
- January 25, 1971: Featured on the cover of TIME along with his brother Philip.
- Adrienne Rich's poem "The Burning of Paper Instead of Children" makes numerous references to the Catonsville Nine and includes an epigraph from Daniel Berrigan during the trial ("I was in danger of verbalizing my moral impulses out of existence").
- It is frequently claimed that "the radical priest" in Paul Simon's song "Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard" refers to or was inspired by Berrigan
- Lynne Sachs's documentary film Investigation of a Flame is about the Berrigan brothers and the Catonsville Nine.
- Berrigan was interviewed about his life and activism for: Kisseloff, Jeff (2006). Generation on Fire: Voices of Protest from the 1960s, an Oral History. University Press of Kentucky. ISBN 0-8131-2416-6..
- Berrigan appeared briefly in the 1986 Roland Joffé film The Mission, which starred Robert De Niro and Jeremy Irons.
- Berrigan is named in a list of famous persons in a dialogue between Jack Lemmon and Laurie Heineman in the 1973 film Save the Tiger.
- Berrigan's play The Trial of the Catonsville Nine (1970) premiered at the Lyceum Theatre in New York City on June 2, 1971. The original cast featured the talents of Biff McGuire, Michael Moriarty, Josef Sommer, Sam Waterston, and James Woods, among others. Gordon Davidson received a 1972 Tony Award nomination for his direction of the play.
- The Trial of the Catonsville Nine was adapted in a 1972 film of the same name, produced by Gregory Peck and starring Ed Flanders as Berrigan.
- Berrigan is interviewed in Emile de Antonio's 1968 Vietnam War documentary In the Year of the Pig.
- Berrigan is featured in Emile de Antonio's 1983 film In the King of Prussia, also starring fellow activist Martin Sheen.
- Berrigan's involvement with the Catonsville Nine is explored in the 2013 documentary Hit & Stay.
- The character of Father Corrigan in the novel Let The Great World Spin (2009, by Colum McCann), was inspired by the life of Berrigan.
- Berrigan was interviewed for a television documentary called, "The Holy Outlaw," by National Educational Television aired September 1970.
- The Berrigan brothers were referenced in the novel The Man Without a Shadow (2016, by Joyce Carol Oates)pp. 140–141.
- Daniel and Philip Berrigan were noted among other social justice activists on a section on Fasting for Peace and Justice, "Exploring a Great Spiritual Practice: Fasting" by Carole Garibaldi Rogers (2004), p. 155.
Death
On 30 April 2016, forty-one years after the conclusion of the Vietnam War, Berrigan died in The Bronx, New York City, at Murray-Weigel Hall, the Jesuit infirmary at Fordham University. For many years, since 1975, he had lived on the Upper West Side at the West Side Jesuit Community.
Awards and recognition
- 1956: Lamont Poetry Selection
- 1974: War Resisters League Peace Award
- 1974: Gandhi Peace Award (accepted then resigned)
- 1988: Thomas Merton Award
- 1989: Pax Christi USA Pope Paul VI Teacher of Peace Award
- 1992: The Peace Abbey Foundation Courage of Conscience Award
- 1993: Pacem in Terris Award
- 2008: Honorary Degree from The College of Wooster
- 2017: Daniel Berrigan Center at Benincasa Community, 133 W. 70th Street, New York, NY 10023
