What
a great service Murray Polner and Jim O'Grady have done for us! This impressively
researched double biography not only describes the lives and times of the notorious,
controversial, admired-and sometimes despised--Berrigan brothers, but also offers,
the pacifist community a record of its most turbulent times. For those of us,
who have been nonviolent activists during the last third of this violent century,
these pages are a romp through our lives in the movement from Vietnam days to
now. The words and deeds of friends and foes spring to life again, both reminding
us of victories and defeats, and enabling us to reevaluate (inevitably the skipped
step in every activist strategy) the campaigns, the protests, the plans that seemed
to succeed or go awry. This is a view of history that will not find a place
in most biographies of this particular period.Of course, the Berrigans were not caught up in every issue that has occupied the attention and energy of the peace movement, but they didn't miss many. Their participation, in some significant events, like the 1961 Freedom Rides, was prohibited by their respective religious orders, for Phil the Josephites (he has since left the order and married) and for Dan the Jesuits. Yet as Polner and O'Grady comment, "Dan and Phil themselves embodied the sixties early movement from fifties conformism to direct questioning of the purpose and premise of essential institutions."
The book takes Dan and Phil, the fifth and sixth of six boys born to a devout Irish-German Catholic family, from their childhood as sons of a father who demanded, "nothing short of perfection" from his offspring (as well as himself), through their lives as "unsettlers" who have left their mark on church and country, up until today. It is a story that examines the evolution of two very different personalities whose brotherly bonds sustained them as they developed their separate methods of expression toward one goal: stirring the conscience of their fellow religionists, their church and even the U.S. government and attempting to shift church and state from a death-driven to a life-affirming course. Whether the cause was civil rights (Phil was the first Catholic priest to take a strong stand on race relations), stopping the Vietnam War, or eliminating nuclear weapons, the grounding that has undergirded their every public action or utterance has remained constant: their total confidence in their interpretation of Biblical scripture. Both Dan and Phil consider their acts of dissent, which have often led to imprisonment, to be forms of Christian witness, methods of resistance inspired by the lives of the prophets, Jesus and the early Christians.
Their most celebrated and publicized action was probably the Catonsville raid, which Dan immortalized in his play, The Trial of the Catonsville Nine. In May 1968, nine activists invaded a Maryland Selective Service Board, snatched up draft records, carried them outside in wire mesh baskets, and set them ablaze with homemade napalm. During the trial, Dan's lawyer Harrop Freeman, a Quaker professor of law at Cornell University (and WRL member and benefactor), asked if what Dan had done was carrying out the "philosophy of the Jesuit order." Dan replied, " ...'[I]f that is not accepted as a substantial part of my action, then the action is eviscerated of all meaning; and I should be committed for insanity."
While the Berrigans' motivation has never been questioned, their methods have, by friend and foe alike. Even strong supporters and close personal friends, such as Trappist writer Thomas Merton, sometimes questioned their tactics. In response to the Catonsville raid, Merton wrote, "[Although] I don't agree with their methods of action ... I can understand the desperation which prompts them. They believe they have to witness in jail to the injustice of the war. That is their business. It is certainly not a necessary teaching of the Church."
As the Berrigans increasingly directed their attention to Plowshares raids--incursions into military camps, naval and air force bases, and war industry plants--prosecutors labeled them "fanatics," "terrorists" and "misguided anarchists." But pacifists, too, questioned their tactics. Some wondered whether the actions represented nothing more than exercises in personal martyrdom. When the Jesuit and longtime pacifist Richard McSorley asked whether those who were jailed could "do more for peace in jail than being outside," Phil answered that Plowshares had done more than Gandhi. Polner and O'Grady comment, "Others might respond by saying that to Gandhi, civil disobedience was a last resort, to be attempted after all else had failed, and that rather than resort to clandestine plotting, Gandhi had sent advance warning to his adversaries."
Over the years, friends and followers have come and gone. As one generation of radical Catholic activists felt the need for more conformity and security in their lives, rejecting the prison alternative, another small remnant took their place. Phil, who originated the Plowshares actions, has remained constant, as has his wife, ex-nun Liz McAlister. Dan's health no longer permits his participation, except for monthly 'vigils at the Riverside Research Institute in Manhattan. He has turned his energies more and more toward writing, and, as the authors say, "the less of a celebrity he became, the more he had become a holy man."
After Catonsville, the mass media ceased to be interested in the raids. So did writers and editors in the nonviolent movement. As editor of Fellowship magazine during the '80s, and as one of the doubters who questioned the style, effectiveness and wisdom of the Plowshares actions, I, too, grew tired of covering them. But I never tired of Daniel Berrigan's poetry, or doubted the sincerity of the brothers' intentions in whatever they took on.
Reading this book, I realized that I had lost track of the overwhelming number of initiatives and the boundless amount of energy the Berrigan brothers devoted, on behalf of all of us, to the cause of truth and justice. Polner and O'Grady's book, which so carefully documents the radical Catholic activist movement of the last thirty years through the lives of its unrivaled leaders, Daniel and Philip Berrigan, fills in many of the blanks in the jigsaw puzzle of where we've been and how far we still have to go in convincing the country of the need for nonviolent alternatives, whether our roots are religious or secular. This is not an idealized biography, nor is it a rout; the brothers Berrigan are presented with all their admirable qualities, flaws, and character contradictions intact, as objectively as one might imagine possible. One can hardly come away without a new appreciation for these two holy, but human, dissenters.
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