Daniel Berrigan and the Catonsville Legacy
By Colman McCarthy
“Peacemaking is hard,” Daniel Berrigan has written, “almost as hard as war.” If anyone knows, it is this Jesuit priest--now 87, agile still as a teacher, writer and ever upright as a dissenter against war. To the appreciation of the nation’s peace community, he is marking the 40th anniversary this spring and summer of his plunging into the roiled waters of protest against the American invasion of Vietnam.
In late May 1968, Berrigan, along with his priest brother Philip and seven other pacifists, entered a Selective Service office in Catonsville, Md. Harming no one, they gathered some 600 1-A draft files, lugged them outside and with home-brewed napalm--kerosene and soap chips, a recipe from a Green Beret handbook--burned them to ashes. They were arrested, jailed and, in a five day trial in October 1968, days before Richard Nixon won the presidency, were found guilty.
Six hundred men, lacking Bush-like connections or Cheney-like deferments, had a Berrigan exemption from facing or inflicting death in Vietnam.
The Catonsville tumult, staged when earlier antiwar protests had done little to end the war, captured public attention in high places and low. Daniel Berrigan was not a scruffy rebel sticking daisies into gun barrels. He was a Jesuit priest, a cassocked and collar-wearing member of an order that ran 28 staid colleges and universities and whose fellow Jesuit--Republican John McLaughlin and now TV talker--would soon be in the White House counseling Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger.
Suddenly awash in national notoriety, Berrigan received scant support from the Catholic hierarchy and even less from the secular media, including the Washington Post editorial board which supported the war and dismissed actions like Catonsville as capers.
The judge gave Berrigan three years, half the stretch handed to his brother Philip who had been serially jamming the gears of war in earlier displays of civil disobedience. ‘We have chosen to be powerless criminals in a time of criminal power,” Daniel Berrigan wrote. “We have chosen to be branded peace criminals by war criminals.”
In 1970, after the appeals ran out, Berrigan, an unsubdued burner, left his teaching post at Cornell and went underground. Lamming safe house to safe house, an upstairs guest room here, a basement hideout there, popping up to speak in churches and campuses and hastily ferried to more podia, he spent four months dodging the FBI. J. Edgar Hoover’s supposed masters of the manhunt were more and more flummoxed that their mighty dragnets couldn’t collar an unarmed and undangerous Jesuit. Finally he was caught, false lead after false lead, on Block Island by daredevil G-men posing as birdwatchers. Dispatched to federal prison in Danbury, Conn., he was inmate #23742-125.
Months before Catonsville, Berrigan traveled to North Vietnam with Howard Zinn, the Boston University historian. Communist officials wanted to release three American POWs to the pair. In “Night Flight to Hanoi,” considered by some as a classic in resistance literature, Berrigan recalls being at the mercy of American bomber pilots: “An air-raid alarm. We went to sleep like children and awakened like adults to the boom! Boom!, the guns of an Indian summer, courtesy of our Air Force. Howard appeared at my door, disheveled and primary in the half light, like a runner awaiting the shot, without socks forsooth. In a few moments we had crossed the garden and ducked into the shelter….Later that day, and throughout the week, I could hear the chambermaids in the corridors, singing; the plaintive atonal music with which the meek of heart console themselves for life in the cave of ravening lions.”
Siding with Daniel Berrigan has been costly. Walter Sullivan, the retired Catholic bishop of Richmond who attended Blessed Sacrament elementary school in Northwest Washington, once thanked Berrigan “for converting me, for leading me to commit my life to seeking the peace of Christ.” Gratefully, Sullivan once invited Berrigan to spend time in Richmond. “Not everyone,” he writes, “was thrilled to learn that Dan was saying at the Bishop’s House. Some of them demonstrated their displeasure by refusing to contribute to the annual diocesan appeal for support of various charitable and missionary activities. Others…denounced me for harboring a criminal, a communist, an un-American traitor….What a paradox! How can this man be such a threat to the system: a quiet, loving person, a man of peace and nonviolence?”
In an outflow of poetry and prose flavored with sere and flexuous language, richly metaphorical, Berrigan, who lives in New York City, has written more than 40 books. His latest, published in April, is “The Kings and Their Gods.” His being at odds with the state has spilled over to his own religious order, one that he joined in 1939 as an 18-year-old novice. “The Jesuits,” he writes in “Ten Commandments For the Long Haul,” “are masters of invention. They come out of the culture, they know how to take its pulse, try its winds and trim their sails. Nothing extravagant, nothing ahead of its time, nothing too fast. Consensus! Consensus! And of course, the institutional connection. We’re not running the Little Brothers of Jesus, we’re not running the Catholic Worker. Manifestly. We’re running Georgetown University, the School of Foreign Service, we’re a nursery for the State Department, only the brightest and best get born here. So connections are everything, dollars are nearly everything.”
Not many Father Daniel Berrigans are on the faculties of Jesuit colleges, and least of all the many that welcome ROTC to their campuses.
One legacy of Catonsville is the Ploughshares movement, ongoing acts of nonviolent civil disobedience at military or weapons sites staged mostly by faith-based pacifists. Judges routinely see the disarmament-minded law-breakers as addled zealots needing to be socked with harsh sentences.
Deterrence doesn’t appear to be working. The courts have as much chance of stifling Ploughshares dissidents as they did of slowing Thoreau, Gandhi, Eugene Debs, Dorothy Day, A. J Muste , Emma Goldman, Elizabeth McAlister, Molly Rush or Martin Luther King, Jr. Or as Daniel Berrigan put it when speaking of the futility of violence: “I have never seen anyone morally improved by killing; neither the one who aimed the bullet, nor the one who received it in his or her flesh.”
Colman McCarthy, a former Washington Post columnist, directs the Center for Teaching Peace and teaches courses on nonviolence at six area schools.