The Brothers Berrigan: their life, witness & work

A blog dedicated to Daniel and Philip Berrigan, Catholic priests and committed pacifists, as well as their various ministries and projects.

[berrigans]

Until ten years ago I had calmly accepted the idea that renewal of the clerical state had to do with a renewal of the energies that go with compassion and understanding and human diversity. I believed that to be a good cleric was to be more available, more understanding... one was a good man in one's life if one's life was more and more available to others. I think that was right, that was sound — for the times. And then suddenly I began to realize something else which I still don't realize very well, but which I find verified again and again. I keep going back to Bonhoeffer and to my brother and to Martin King and to all those breakthroughs in consciousness which I have seen in people I respect, breakthroughs which had to do with something we really don't have a good word for. But I can describe something that binds the three men I have just mentioned and others like them all over the world: They have dared accept the political consequences of being human beings at a time when the fate of people, of the world, demanded that one not be merely a listener, or a good friend, but yes, be in trouble. So in a way I can only be thankful that my life has edged over to the point that I am now simply, publicly, churchwise, society-wise an outsider, a troublemaker, a condemned man.

Daniel Berrigan, The Geography of Faith: Conversations Between Daniel Berrigan, While Underground, and Robert Coles.

[berrigans]

The analogy that I think I am drawing upon is again the only one I know — the biblical experience of a man, Jesus. How does one really raise ethical and political questions and explore those questions in a real way — as contrasted to an academic or an intellectual way? Can someone question gross and blatant injustice from a life-situation that is tied in dozens of ways, often subtle ways, to that injustice? That is to say, it wouldn't have meant much to many of us if Jesus had raised questions of conscience and of God and man from the position of a Pharisee, from the dead center of his society. I can only mention a conviction, one I have tried to follow out, sometimes clumsily and incompletely — a conviction that one's position in relationship to a given society is terribly important, and bears constant watching... My point is a very simple one: That we, as active and concerned individuals, are historically valid and useful for the future only in proportion as our lives are tasting some of the powerlessness which is the alternative to the wrong use of power today; and that's where I am.

Daniel Berrigan, The Geography of Faith: Conversations Between Daniel Berrigan, When Underground, and Robert Coles.

[berrigans]

My purpose in life is not to set up an alternative to the United States Government. We in the underground are trying to do something else. We want to say no to everything that is antihuman, and to suggest new ways for human beings to get on with each other.

Daniel Berrigan, The Geography of Faith: Conversations Between Daniel Berrigan, When Underground, and Robert Coles.

[berrigans]

Judge: Father Berrigan, you made your points on the stand, very persuasively. I admire you as a poet. But I think you simply do not understand the function of a court.

Daniel Berrigan: I am sure that is true.

[gospelofthekingdom]

"I wish I hadn’t had to do it. And that has been true every time I have been arrested, all those years. My stomach turns over. I feel sick. I feel afraid. I don’t want to go through this again. I hate jail. I don’t do well there physically. But I cannot not go on, because I have learned that we must not kill if we are Christians. I have learned that children, above all, are threatened by these weapons. I have read that Christ our Lord underwent death rather than inflict it. And I am supposed to be a disciple. All kinds of things like that. The push, the push of conscience is a terrible thing. So at some point your cowardly bones get moving, and you say, “Here it goes again,” and you do it. And you have a certain peace because you did it, as I do this morning in speaking with you. One remains honest because on has a sense, “Well, if I cheat, I’m really giving over my humanity, my conscience.” Then we think of these horrible Mark 12A missiles, and something in us says, “We cannot live with such crimes.” Or our consciences turn in another direction. And by a thousand pressures, a thousand silences, people begin to say to themselves, “We can live with that. We know it’s there. We know what it is for. We know many thousands will die if only one of these exploded.” We believe, according to the law, and the law of the state of Pennsylvania, that we were justified in saying, “We cannot live with that,” justified in saying it publicly, saying git dramatically, saying it with blood and hammers, as you have hard; because that weapon, the hundreds and hundreds more being produced in our country, are the greatest evil conceivable on this earth. There is no evil to compare with that. Multiply murder. Multiply desolation. The mind boggles. We we went into the death factory, and in a modest, self-contained, careful way, we put a few dents in two missiles, awaited arrest, and came willingly into court to talk to you. We believe with all our hearts that our actions as justified.”

Daniel Berrigan: Essential Writings selected by John Dear.

via Gospel of the Kingdom:  

[berrigans]

Shortly, standing before audiences, I discovered something unexpected. The closer my explanation [for the burning of draft files at Catonsville] drew upon biblical instruction and source, the less palatable it became; and this to Catholics. It was as though in so speaking, one was by no means building bridges of understanding. One was putting up a wall, stone by stone, and mortising it tight. It was quite acceptable to talk "politics.” There was at least a nascent sense that the war was intolerable, granted the American system and its "normal” workings. One gained this small leverage. But the fact that the war might be inconsistent with the words and example of Christ, that killing others was repugnant to the letter and spirit of the Sermon on the Mount — this was too much: it turned living ears to stone.

Daniel Berrigan, To Dwell in Peace: An Autobiography

[berrigans]

It was only after the Catonsville action that I came on a precious insight. The knowledge thus came hardly, as perhaps real knowledge does. Something like this: presupposing integrity and discipline, one is justified in entering upon a large risk; not indeed because the outcome is assured, but because the integrity and value of the act have spoken loud.

Daniel Berrigan, To Dwell In Peace: An Autobiography

[berrigans]

There was shortly to be a spotlight on us: it was thin as a pencil slate, and would pierce us through and through; a testing light that touched on the very soul, and illumined and burned. The light of the adversary, light of the church, light of the eye of God? Light, perhaps, of self-knowledge: of all these together. But for a start, there was that opposite element, that darkness. l was in it, body and soul, blind, feeling my way, humiliated; but strangely exalted, freed.

Dan Berrigan, To Dwell In Peace: An Autobiography; reflecting on the moment he decided to participate in the burning of draft files at Catonsville, MD.

[berrigans]

I'm getting a lot from your blog and would like to get a couple books by Daniel and Philip Berrigan. What would you suggest as a good starting point?

You should definitely read Philip Berrigan's autobiography, Fighting the Lamb's War! After that, I just got A Punishment for Peace in the mail which I'm rather taken with. Be aware that Phil's writing tends to be more straightforward, blunt, and even angry than Dan's. Dan is more poetic, more cautious – he's the quieter one, while Phil has always been an instigator.

Dan was so prolific that it can be hard to get started with him, but John Dear's Daniel Berrigan: Essential Writings is a good overview. A general guide to Dan's writings looks somewhat like this:

Pre-1968, his books are primarily concerned with the nature of the church. You can absolutely see his ethical stance coming through, but he is less occupied with concrete politics. If you want a clearer, more theoretical exploration of sacraments and ministry, this is a good place to start.

In 1968, two incredibly significant events happened in Dan's life: In February took a trip to Northern Vietnam with Howard Zinn to negotiate the release of prisoners and to see what life was like there, and, in May, he burnt the draft files at Catonsville, Maryland (an action dreamed up by Phil).  As a result, his writings in 1968 and 1969 really do revolve around Catonsville and war; from this point on his works are very much focused on militarism as an aspect of the demonic.

He also wrote very prolifically while underground (on the run from the FBI, post-Catonsville trial) and in prison. This is where many of his most famous works were written, including letters to various revolutionary groups and a further articulated ethic of nonviolence.

After his release from prison and the end of the Vietnam War, he focused more on nuclear issues. He also wrote two books on working with the dying (We Die Before We Live, primarily attending to cancer patients, which he perceived as prefiguring the fate of the entire nuclear society; and Sorrow Built a Bridge, about his chaplaincy to gay men dying of AIDS).

Post-1990, he has mostly written commentaries on Biblical books. His latest works are particularly marked by a very meandering, paragraph-by-paragraph style. 

[berrigans]

When the chips are down, and the rhetoric is peeled away, the Church is only slightly more capable of conversion than is the state. I say this tentatively. But the ‘slightly’ is all the point. It has to do with that slight edge of wisdom, courage, continuity, and vision which Christ offers us, and through (even) us, others. But the lever or scalpel or whatever have to be operated with precision, delicacy and purpose. I cannot waver, even while I listen. I will not submit, even while I submit. I will be a man, even though I must be the last man.

Daniel Berrigan, in an unpublished letter to Philip Berrigan before the Catonsville trial.

(Some of my classmates got permission from Dan to publish his letters to Phil; they are currently talking to publishers, but sent us a few transcripts.)

[berrigans]

At the Pentagon we are dealing with the insane, the spiritually insane. We are dealing with irrational power. So we are not only relying on rational means of communication -- the leaflets, the conversations -- but the a-rational, the symbolic. The symbols are an effort to make death concrete. The generals never see the other end of their decisions. There is a huge gap between decision and consequence. It is horrifying to see human blood in the immaculate corridors of the Pentagon. Nothing is more dismaying to the people responsible for that enormous Greek temple. Suddenly the truth of the situation is in the air, and under your feet, and it is terrifying.

Daniel Berrigan, in conversation with the Fellowship of Reconciliation, 1980. Protests by antiwar activists including the Berrigans threw protesters' blood all over the Pentagon as a means of incarnating the violence, of overcoming the alienation that makes it easy for men in suits and quiet mechanic offices to proclaim death on unseen foreigners.

[berrigans]

It would seem that honesty requires one to underscore (at the risk of protesting the obvious) that the object of witness is man. Without man and his fallen state, there would be no reason for God's present order of things, for the Incarnation, or for Christ's redemptive plan. In spite of our theoretical acceptance of this truth, we often subscribe to a persistent and paradoxical Christian heresy which takes as the point of departure a witness to God without witness to man, which attempts to live Christian truth without communicating it, which claims love of God, but fears love of man. It is a heresy which has long cloaked itself as a religious and moral system, but which is, in reality, a selfish and pragmatic ethic. Its emphasis on worship at the expense of the works of mercy is evidence that we unconsciously seek in religion a divine sanction for personal pride, a climate suitable for sentiment, a philosophy that will pad and cushion one from the demands of life, or allow us to deal with only its more palatable forms, justifying a contact with life that is particularly detached and contemptuous.

Philip Berrigan, No More Strangers

[berrigans]

Paul's life is a reminder of something deeply true of human nature: no ideal can exert its full formative effect as long as men are unwilling to explore and experiment, working out its implications in life. And the principle remains true also of the religious life of man. Without a practical example before them, men are generally content to hear of an ideal as though it were merely a word, to ponder it as though it were merely a truth. They even grow content with a religion of inertia. They are willing to take part in their liturgy as though it were "pure" worship, uncontaminated by this world, deprived of historical implications, making no demands on them.

Daniel Berrigan, "St. Paul: Figure of Crisis," in They Call Us Dead Men

[berrigans]

Time after time the North Vietnamese insisted that our place, as Americans, was not in North Vietnam. Our visit could be no more than a kind of keyhole view of the horrors of the room, well hidden from the gaze of our fellow Americans. The real question for us, as they saw it, was our return to our own country. There, a long patient work of revolution and renewal must continue. An adequate peace movement could not satisfy itself with assuaging the sufferings of the victims, by medical help at the point of impact. The radical work consisted rather in staying with conditions at home, trying as best we might to work changes upon a society in which military victims were the logical outcome of a ruinous, power-ridden national ethos in the world at large.

Daniel Berrigan, Night Flight to Hanoi: War Diary with 11 Poems

Dan writes this reflecting on his time in Hanoi on a trip to retrieve American POWs. The Northern Vietnamese showed him a veritable museum of American weapons and their effects in the country; he was quite shaken, and found an increased immediacy to his antiwar convictions.

[berrigans]

I have seen the victims [of American militarism]. And the sight of the mutilated dead has exerted such inward change upon me that the words of corrupt diplomacy appear to me more and more in their true light. That is to say – as words spoken in enmity against reality. And that, of course, is a very old and carefully specified sin, especially in the biblical tradition.

Daniel Berrigan, "Night Flight to Hanoi"

[berrigans]

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 parlor of the charnel house. We could not, so help us God, do otherwise.

Daniel Berrigan.

Some of his most famous words, his statement about the Catonsville action.

[berrigans]

My brother Phil and I are interested in a kind of raw fundamentalism that has to do with the stance of the church before humankind; we want to help the church make that stance, we want to do what we can in that direction. We will join with other communities, Catholic or non-Catholic, religious or thoroughly secular — so long as their seriousness and passion are manifest.

Daniel Berrigan, in conversation with Robert Coles while underground (published in The Geography of Faith).