A Tribute To Philip Berrigan
Stack KennyMarch 25, 2003
August 6, 1971--Wellfleet, MA--
My family woke this hot and sunny morning to the sound of tent stakes being pounded into the sand of an empty lot next to our house. Our upcoming guests had warned us that something like this just might happen; still, we were surprised to witness these strange men in dark suits, with sunglasses and binoculars, blatantly perched over our property. J. Edgar Hoover was at it again. Our guests, Sister Elizabeth (Liz) McAlister and Sister Jogues Egan, both colleagues of my parents, soon arrived and scoffed at the presence of the FBI, joking about the likelihood of our phone being tapped. My mother picked up the phone in disbelief and heard a click. Liz motioned for the phone and laughed into the receiver: "Good morning, boys! How are you today? We made it here, safe and sound. Thanks so much for your concern." Click.
Sisters Liz and Jogues were two co-defendants in a trial case known as "The Harrisburg Eight." They were out on bail awaiting trial on vague charges of conspiracy to overthrow the United States government. The other defendants included Liz's soon-to-be-husband, Phil Berrigan, his brother, the noted theologian and poet Daniel Berrigan (both already in jail at the time for previous political actions), and four other priests, nuns and laymen from the radical Catholic movement that had been active in protesting the Vietnam War since the mid-1960s. Liz and Jogues were on Cape Cod to participate in a fund-raiser for their defense, which was being held as part of an annual memorial service protesting the atrocities of the nuclear bombardment of Hiroshima. The dual event took place on the dunes of Truro and speakers included Daniel Ellsberg and Faye Dunaway. After a successful fund-raiser, Liz and Jogues returned to New York. The following day, the FBI broke camp and evacuated the empty lot next to our house. Six months later, all twelve defendants in Harrisburg were acquitted. Three months after that, J. Edgar Hoover finally died, leaving unrealized his obsession to censor the Berrigan brothers forever and send them away for life.
December 6, 2002--Baltimore, Maryland--
Members of social consciousness movements around the world mourned the passing today of the great religious activist Philip Berrigan. Mr. Berrigan died of cancer after an intense life of battling the immorality of US military and social policies over the last fifty years. He will be remembered as an outspoken critic of American injustice and one of the most radical pacifists of the twentieth century. He was seventy-nine years old.
Philip Berrigan's friends and foes alike all agreed that his dedication to the practice of non-violent resistance was fearless and passionate. He was a man of deep personal integrity who possessed an unwavering conviction to principle and an open willingness to stand up to the consequences of his actions and beliefs. Because of this philosophy, Phil Berrigan spent over eleven years in prison, serving time for various convictions of political resistance over a fifty-year career in political activism. Throughout his incarcerations, he continued to hold a firm belief that victims of evil wrongdoings by unjust governments would not suffer and die in vain if others went forth in resisting violence and oppression in their wake. He and his brother Daniel maintained that this directive of self-sacrifice was the true message of the Christian Gospels. Philip Berrigan eventually became one of the great leaders and proponents of disciplined non-violence, following the practices of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, in attempting to convert an enemy's heart through the "redemptive power" of voluntary suffering.
Philip Berrigan followed his brother Dan into the priesthood in 1955, working passionately for ten years with impoverished ghetto communities in New Orleans, Washington, D.C. and Baltimore, Maryland. Reinterpreting his duties as a Catholic priest, he immersed himself in the urban issues of housing for the homeless, inner-city activism, racism and segregation, and distribution of food and clothing to the poor. As his work grew more intense, he began to view his efforts to remedy social and economic injustice as "like putting a Band-Aid on a disease." He felt that most of the problems stemmed from a deeper source, namely America's preoccupation with a military-industrial machine that took money for food out of the mouths of the starving poor.
By 1965, he had joined a group of religious clerics and helped organize the first major protest against the Vietnam War, which was held in New York City. He began to preach and speak out vehemently against U.S. foreign policy, asserting it was spiritually absurd that the government "pretended to help the poor at home while bombing the poor abroad." For the next two years, he put all his energy into mobilizing various legal protests against American military policy. And then, following his brother Dan's proclamation that it was now necessary "to be aroused from moral slumber, to bring peace into the world," Phil Berrigan took radical action on October 27, 1967. In his first totally defiant and illegal rebellious act, he and three other men broke into the US Customs House in Baltimore and poured fresh blood on draft record files, destroying government property in the process. After his arrest, Phil read a statement charging that "America would rather protect its empire of overseas profits than welcome its black people, rebuild its slums, or cleanse its air and water. We invite our friends of peace to move from dissent to resistance."
Seven months later, while out on bail for the Baltimore action, Phil, Dan and seven other clergy and former clergy members (most of whom had worked extensively with the poor of Latin America) raided the draft offices in Catonsville, Maryland and destroyed three hundred and seventy-eight selective service files, symbolically burning them with home-made napalm. As the police arrived, they prayed together and read a statement protesting the bombing of innocent children around the world and US military alliances with right wing dictatorships oppressing the poor peoples of Latin America, South America, Africa and Indo-China.
Out on appeal again, both brothers decided to jump bail and went on the lam, avoiding prosecution and initiating Hoover's obsession to put an end to the Berrigans' work. Between 1970 and 1971, Hoover spent millions of dollars trying to "get the Berrigans," placing them on the FBI's 10 Most Wanted list and grouping them with the "worst enemies of the American people: Henry Dillinger, the Rosenbergs and Martin Luther King." During those days, the FBI greatly accelerated surveillance and wiretapping practices throughout the country. In the manhunt for the Berrigans, phones were indiscriminately and illegally tapped, people were followed, questioned and threatened, friends and family members were under constant surveillance, and bank accounts were frozen in suspicion of funneling money to the brothers. Hoover, with Richard Nixon's paranoid blessings, convened over 100 federal grand juries to stifle domestic resistance to government policies. Cases were brought against members of the Black Panthers, Vietnam Veterans Against the War, Daniel Ellsberg and Anthony Russo (of the Pentagon Papers), Martin Luther King, Students for a Democratic Society, the Clergy and Laymen Group Concerned About War, and a host of other political groups and individuals, including of course, Philip and Daniel Berrigan. By the time Hoover died in 1972, it was estimated that FBI files had been initiated on several thousand Americans who showed sympathy to the anti-war movement.
But the Berrigans' radical ideas influenced many followers and continued even stronger after their capture and incarceration in 1970. Between 1969 and 1971, religious political action raids were made on selective service offices and military-connected industries in Washington, D.C.; Los Angeles; Silver Springs, MD; Chicago; New York City (four times); Akron, Ohio; Indianapolis; Boston; Rochester, NY; Auburn, NY; Philadelphia; Midland, Michigan; Providence, RI; Evanston, Indiana; San Jose, CA; and Camden, NJ. Many other sympathetic non-violent protests were made in the Berrigans' name throughout the country during the next few years.
Philip Berrigan was sentenced to nine years in prison and Daniel received a three-year sentence. After his release, Phil married Liz McAlister and with a handful of other members of their activist community set up Jonah House, a communal religious center in the heart of inner city Baltimore. This became the focal point of Phil's political actions until the end of his life. Defrocked as clerics, Phil and Liz had three children, supporting themselves and their work as house painters in Baltimore. Long into his seventies, between jail terms, one could find Phil at the top of a ladder, paintbrush in hand.
Since 1973 the Jonah House community has initiated over 100 political actions, mostly through Phil and Liz's Plowshare Movement, an international group of anti-nuclear weapons activists based on the call from the prophet Isaiah in The Bible to "beat swords into plowshares."
After the Vietnam War ended and America was eventually lulled into ambivalence by Ronald Reagan's false promise of economic materialism, modern culture (via the American press) became bored with political activism. But throughout the 1980s and 1990s Phil, Liz and their tiny fearless band continued to walk into military camps, onto Naval and Air Force bases, and into the industrial-military complexes that designed and produced the weapons of mass destruction sold throughout the world, protesting and symbolically destroying government property.
In the last two decades, to shrinking media attention, 100 Plowshare members have continued to hammer and pour blood on MX Missiles, Trident Submarines and B52 Bombers. After each action the protesters would pray, read a statement objecting to the manufacture and indiscriminate sale of such devastating killing weaponry, and then await arrest. Behind every action, Plowshares still maintains that their impetus originates from the Gospel and is based on a profound concern for the poor and most vulnerable. Much of their work relies on the creed, "Blessed are the peacemakers and blessed are the persecuted."
A series of raids on Air force bases in North Carolina and New Jersey in 1994 and 1995 sent Philip Berrigan to jail for the last time. He was still in jail only two months before his diagnosis and swift death of cancer at Jonah House this last Christmas season.
Phil Berrigan has been called "undaunted, bull-headed, courageous, earthly, heavenly, a prophet, a scoundrel, a rough and tough streetwise reformer and organizer." His influence on the 20th century is undeniable in its call for conscious action for peace. Bishop Charles Browell wrote of the brothers: "Phil and Dan Berrigan appear to many to be on the fringes of society, but really, they are the true prophets of peace in our time. To be put in prison is not unusual for a prophet."
Now, perhaps more than ever, as our planet teeters on the edge of nuclear destruction, and the poor and homeless and disabled struggle to maintain on the periphery of society, it seems imperative that we not allow complacency to take over the souls of a caring world. It is essential we all continue to work for peace, no matter how futile the task may appear. We will have to rely on the many sources of inspiration and strength that help us continue this fight for justice and peace. The life and dedication of Philip Berrigan is surely one of these inspirations.
As his brother Dan summarized: "We can't save the world. We can't do the big things...We can't do what we thought we could do in better times. Most of us will not live to see serious change in a pro-human direction take place in our country. But that is not the point. The point is the integrity and the consistency of our actions, the ability to concentrate and be refreshed by the quality of things to be done."
Amen.
Reprinted from Spare Change, Cambridge MA.
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