I first met Father Daniel Berrigan at a poetry studying in 1965. I used to be 22. Writing, I sensed from him, could possibly be an act of worship. That concept defines me nonetheless. However that was solely the start. And that’s all you’ll hear about me. Like so many, the arc of my life took its form extra, maybe, from his instance, his phrases, and in the end his friendship than from every other determine. A private hero. A literary hero. A Catholic hero. An American hero. So why ought to I not be awed and honored to be right here at this celebration as Orbis Books pays its splendid tribute to Father Berrigan? That my accomplice on this valuable act is James Forest seasons the awe I really feel with pure pleasure at what, for me, is an extended overdue reunion. If Dan Berrigan gave form to my life, Jim Forest gave it a delicate if a lot wanted push at simply the best time. Jim, too, was a hero to me within the anti-war hey-day — his writing, his instance. And to have his stirring biography of Dan is a present past measure. Jim’s ebook will hold the epic Berrigan saga going – on into the long run. Orbis Books has lengthy been a treasure of Catholic and Justice publishing, and At Play within the Lion’s Den is a crowning jewel of the nice Orbis checklist. It strikes me deeply to be with Jim right here. I really feel doubly humbled as I attempt to provide a worthy phrase in honor of Father Daniel Berrigan, S.J.
James Carroll: photograph by Katharine Gilbert
You already know the story. However it’s price rehearsing. Our Church’s story. Our nation’s story. And Dan’s.Bear with me if I presume to recommend that the story started a thousand years in the past with the cry of a Pope. “God wills it!” declared Pope City II within the fall of 1095, the spark that ignited the primary campaign — the start of a 2 hundred year-long holy warfare that sacralized violence, demonized Islam, launched Europe’s first anti-Jewish pogroms, and put the Roman Catholic Church on the facet of those that maintain that the reply to killing is extra killing. Within the wake of that primal “God wills it!” got here heresy hunts, warrior monks, the Inquisition, and, in the end, the non secular wars that sundered Christendom.
Flash ahead a full millennium. “God wills it!” lastly had its rebuttal within the cry of one other Pope — Paul VI, who, on the United Nations in 1965, cried “No extra warfare! Warfare by no means once more!” That world-historic proclamation was dropped at life within the Catholic creativeness and within the American creativeness by no yet another than by Daniel Berrigan.
Alas, that story begins in tragedy. In November of 1965, solely weeks after Pope Paul VI’s resounding speech, a younger Catholic named Roger LaPorte set himself aflame throughout from the United Nations constructing the place His Holiness had spoken. LaPorte was pushed to this act by the savage American violence in Vietnam, the quickly to be notorious Operation Rolling Thunder that Lyndon Johnson had set unfastened within the far-away nation, like ravaging warfare canine. Johnson had been elected because the peace candidate the 12 months earlier than. Johnson had been surprised when the Pope, of all folks, as a substitute of denouncing Communism, as Johnson and New York’s Cardinal Francis Spellman had been sure he would, had denounced warfare, stirring the Catholic conscience.
Apparently stirring Roger LaPorte’s. “I’m a Catholic Employee,” he mentioned earlier than dying. “I’m anti-war – all wars. I did this as a non secular motion.”
Daniel Berrigan, too, was related to the Catholic Employee, and, like Jim Forest, he may effectively have known as the nice Dorothy Day his mentor. Dan had on no account inspired Roger LaPorte’s motion, had by no means accredited his self-killing. However Dan, additionally, refused to denounce LaPorte. Dan prayed on the younger man’s funeral, which was sufficient, as Dan understood, to carry down the wrath of Cardinal Spellman, who was, in actual fact, the godfather of America’s warfare in Vietnam. The Jesuits, agreeing with Spellman, banished Dan. That controversy remodeled Dan’s repute. From then on, he can be recognized extra for his dissidence than for his poetry, however, in reality, it was the mix of daring resistance and eloquence that made him the tribune of “Warfare No Extra!” Dan’s writing and work have been central to the transformation of the “Simply Warfare Church” into the “Peace Church,” whose popes have, throughout the final forty years, opposed each considered one of American’s many wars.
We’ve simply been by way of the D-Day commemorations, and as soon as once more the honoring of atypical troopers, sailors, and airmen for valor – and Omaha Seaside was rife with valor – has bolstered American myopia concerning the bigger evil of warfare, particularly warfare within the nuclear age. In 1953, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists put the doomsday clock at two minutes earlier than midnight – the midnight of nuclear apocalypse. It was round then that Dorothy Day – one other type of “D-Day” totally — started her marketing campaign of, as she known as it, “noncompliance” with legal guidelines requiring residents to take part in civil protection drills.
Dan Berrigan’s personal “noncompliance” started along with his arrest, with tons of of others, on the Pentagon in October, 1967. I used to be there, though not with Dan, and definitely not arrested. He later informed me, “I had no intention of getting arrested, however I noticed the brutality with which the protesters have been rounded-up.” He was in jail for per week. When he acquired out, he known as his mom. She mentioned, “You’re out of jail, however Phil is in.” On October 27, Phil and several other others ( within the press, it was at all times “the Berrigans and several other others” ) — poured blood on draft information in Baltimore. That was, by the best way, the very day on which a younger Lt. John McCain was shot down and captured in Hanoi.
Three months after Dan’s Pentagon arrest — because the well-known Tet Offensive was unfolding – he went with Howard Zinn to Hanoi to obtained launched American POWs. Whereas Dan and Howard have been there, a cruel American bomber power rained fireplace down on the North Vietnamese capital. Dan huddled in a bomb shelter with, particularly, youngsters. They obliterated from then on any capability he might need needed to cloak the realities of warfare in abstraction. His poem “Youngsters within the Shelter” marks his transformation:
I picked up the littlest,
a boy…
…In my arms, fathered
in a second’s grace, the messiah
of all my tears. I bore, reborn
a Hiroshima baby from hell.
It was youngsters who Dan had uppermost in thoughts when, 4 months later, on Might 17, 1968, he, Phil – “and 7 others” — burned draft information in Catonsville, Maryland. “Our apologies, good pals —“You already know these phrases, and we’ve simply heard them so movingly rendered by Jim. “—for the burning of paper, as a substitute of youngsters.”
, with the Berrigans and the noble firm they mustered, together with Jim Forest, the Catholic Church had a brand new picture of what religion requires. “No extra warfare! Warfare by no means once more!” The top, eventually, of “God wills it!”
If Dan was a Catholic witness, he was an American witness, too. “The important American soul” — that is D.H. Lawrence — “is tough, isolate, stoic, and a killer.” The nation that got here into being by way of genocide and slavery has a constitutional inclination towards warfare. That’s tragic sufficient in atypical time, however atypical time ran out in August of 1945. Since then, the frenzy towards warfare has been a rush towards the precipice of nuclear Armageddon. And no, that rush was not halted by the top of the warfare in Vietnam.
The peace motion to which Dan and his brother have been key didn’t, in actual fact, cease the Vietnam Warfare, nevertheless it stopped chilly the open-ended escalation towards nuclear use that was advancing contained in the Pentagon. However nuclear accumulation continued, like a Niagara present, in a picture Henry James utilized to the inexorable coming of World Warfare I. An irresistible power, a momentum towards world-destroying disaster. Henry David Thoreau wrote, “Let your life be a counter-friction to cease the machine.”
And so, sure, Dan and Phil — “and 6 others” — illegally entered the G.E, plant in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania to “beat” the noses cones of Trident nuclear missiles into ploughshares. The start of the Ploughshares Motion. That was 1980.
A 12 months later, greater than one million anti-nuclear protesters gathered in New York, the Freeze Motion, which was, over subsequent years, instrumental within the non-violent decision of the Chilly Warfare. However with stoic American hubris insisting that the US had “received” the Chilly Warfare, the US nuclear arsenal has been protected, glorified, and, these days, renewed. A horrible complacency is the Niagara present alongside which the nation nonetheless strikes towards Armageddon.
Means again in 1970, the federal authorities despatched a psychiatrist into Lewiston Jail to interview Phil Berrigan, hoping, in actual fact, to be taught the whereabouts of his still-fugitive brother. Pissed off, the psychiatrist mentioned to Phil, “You individuals are like salmon, attempting to leap Niagara Falls.”
Sure. Exactly. There have been throughout these many years greater than 100 Ploughshares actions — heroes, a few of whom are right here, who made from their very lives “counter-friction to cease the machine.” If Dan have been right here right now, he would insist that we elevate up the Kings Bay Ploughshares Motion that occurred on April 4, 2018, when seven folks intruded on the Kings Bay Submarine Base in St. Mary’s, Georgia, to take hammer and blood to, sure, the demonic Trident nuclear missile. The seven await trial now – three of them from jail. They face a few years in jail. This time, let their names be heard: Elizabeth McAlister, Phil’s widow and accomplice at Jonah Home; Fr. Steve Kelly, a Jesuit; Carmen Trotta of the New York Catholic Employee; Clare Grady of the Ithaca Catholic Employee; Martha Hennessy of the New York Catholic Employee and the granddaughter of Dorothy Day; Mark Colville of the New Haven Catholic Employee; and Patrick O’Neil of the North Carolina Catholic Employee.
I referred to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists setting its doomsday clock in 1953 at two minutes earlier than midnight – probably the most harmful alarm ever sounded. Over time, particularly after the Chilly Warfare, the fingers of that clock fell again — reassuringly. However solely this 12 months, the clock has been put again at two minutes earlier than midnight once more — an unprecedented return to mortal hazard. And no surprise.
The Ploughshares heroes refuse to faux that this jeopardy isn’t pressing and fast. The insanity of the present administration makes the purpose. Solely final month, B-52s have been despatched to the Center East. The US not way back deserted the INF Treaty, having already abrogated the ABM Treaty. With its present coverage of reinventing the arsenal with “usable” nukes, it’s burying the sacred NPT Treaty, guaranteeing a near-term cascade of nuclear proliferation.
The long-nurtured dream of nuclear abolition – even when solely given lip-service — has been deserted by the American authorities, and the American public takes no discover. However nonetheless there’s this college of salmon that refuses to stop leaping at Niagara Falls — by no means thoughts the peak, by no means thoughts the opposing present. On the heart of their reminiscence, their creativeness, and their hope is the determine of Daniel Berrigan.
As a result of the human future, for the primary time in historical past, is itself imperiled by the traditional impulse to answer violence with extra and better violence, even claiming that “God Wills it!”, there’s that different cry that may be heard coming again at us — not now from a Pope or from an anti-war priest — from time forward, the very future: Warfare No Extra! Warfare By no means Once more! The cry comes from the women and men who merely won’t come into existence if the important American soul doesn’t change.
Daniel Berrigan believed in God, which was his means of believing within the human future to which, in braveness, religion, and hope, he gave his total life. His life to Life. He died three years in the past, however, to paraphrase his beloved Edna St. Vincent Millay, that’s all that Dan Berrigan ever did for demise.,
Postscript: This dissertation was delivered by James Carroll, the featured speaker at Villanova College in 2019 at an occasion celebrating the lifetime of Jesuit priest and anti-war activist Daniel Berrigan.
James Carroll is an award-winning creator, historian, journalist, and former Catholic priest. Amongst his books are Home of Warfare and An American Requiem…God, My Father and the Warfare That Got here Between Us.
His late father, a local of Chicago, Illinois was U. S. Airforce Normal Joseph F. Carroll.
