Father Daniel Berrigan, 1993

Daniel Berrigan and his daring life of nonviolence

“One is called to live nonviolently,” Daniel Berrigan once wrote, “even if the change one works for seems impossible. It may or may not be possible... but one thing favors such an attempt: the total inability of violence to change anything for the better.”

In unpublished notes for a 1964 or 1965 talk, Dan spoke creatively, poetically about “the nonviolent mystique” and “the nonviolent mystique in action.” He was a person of nonviolence within the history of violence, who through ‘mystique in action’ helped transform history toward nonviolence. “Nonviolence... is a way of life that is simply human... so you always note among responsible people both a profound spiritual root and a profound political responsibility.”

Daniel Berrigan was born on May 9, 1921 the fifth of six boys. He grew up in Syracuse, entered the Jesuits in 1939, was ordained a priest in 1952 and published his first book of poetry, “Time Without Number,” in 1957, which won the Lamont Poetry Award. Dan quickly became well known as a poet, and published some 50 books of poetry, essays, theology and scripture studies, journals and plays. At Dan’s 85th birthday party, Kurt Vonnegut said, “For me, Daniel Berrigan is Jesus as a poet.”

By the mid-1960s, with his brother Phil, Dan became a leading voice against the war in Vietnam. On October 22, 1967, there was a massive mobilization on the Pentagon. Dan took a busload of Cornell students to the protest. The students spontaneously marched forward to face arrest—so he joined them. He was the first priest in U.S. history arrested in the cause of justice and peace, and with that act, opened up a new tradition in the Catholic Church that continues to this day.

In February 1968, he traveled to North Vietnam with Howard Zinn. While there, the United States bombed Hanoi. Dan and Howard hid out in a shelter for a week as U.S. bombs fell above them. After experiencing the violence of war firsthand, Dan was compelled to up the ante.

On May 17, 1968, a month after the killing of Martin Luther King Jr., Dan and Phil Berrigan and seven others entered a draft board house in Catonsville, Maryland, took some 300 draft files out to the parking lot and, in front of the press, poured homemade napalm on the draft records and burned them. Dan then distributed one of the greatest statements in resistance literature: “Our apologies, good friends, for the fracture of good order, for 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.”

Though there is scant historical mention of the Berrigan’s, their nonviolent action attracted massive press coverage around the country and the world, which eventually led to over 300 similar demonstrations that systematically ended the draft and hastened the end of the war.

The draft board raids were the key to thwarting the war in Vietnam. The destruction of pre-computer paper records throughout the Northeast meant that thousands of young men could not be drafted to kill for the United States!

Dan and his friends were found guilty, and Dan spent the summer of 1969 writing his popular play, “The Trial of the Catonsville Nine”. Yet the war intensified, so instead of reporting to prison in April 1970, he went “underground,” traveling, speaking, appearing on national news, and writing articles against the war. “We have chosen to be powerless criminals in a time of criminal power,” he told a Philadelphia congregation that summer.

In August 1970, Dan was arrested on Block Island, Rhode Island, and sent to Danbury prison. His health and spirit deteriorated over the next two years until he suffered a near-fatal reaction to novocaine. He was released shortly after, because the authorities feared he might die in prison.

Dan became one of the most well-known priests in the world. He consistently called upon the Church to abolish the “Just War” theory and return to the nonviolence of Jesus. “The death of a single human being is too heavy a price to pay for the vindication of any principle, however sacred,” he wrote. He was featured on the cover of Time magazine, interviewed by Dick Cavett, and referred to in songs by Paul McCartney* and Paul Simon**

Even when the press grew bored, the crowds dwindled, the movement died and the world further deteriorated, Dan and Phil Berrigan kept at it. That is one of their greatest legacies.

On September 9, 1980, Dan, Phil and six friends, walked in to the General Electric headquarters in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania and hammered on unarmed nuclear weapon nosecones. The Plowshares Eight were arrested, convicted and faced up to 10 years in prison. Theirs was the first of some 100 “Plowshares actions”.

Dan was fearless. He believed in God and Jesus. He acted as he believed, as the instrument of God’s daring, universal, nonviolent love—paying the price, dearly. During his famous 1981 trial Dan said: “We are not allowed to kill innocent people. We are not allowed to be complicit in murder. We are not allowed to be silent while preparations for mass murder proceed in our name, with our money, secretly... “Stop killing”... “We are back where we started. Thou shalt not kill. Everything comes down to that—everything.”

Throughout the 1980s and ’90s, Dan spoke around the country. “There is no cause however noble for which we will ever again support the taking of a single human life. We do not kill people. We do not support killing, and we will resist the military and its’ wars... The future is a world without war, a new culture of justice and nonviolence that we can barely imagine, but is within our grasp if we dare work for it.”

He continued to publish a steady stream of poetry, essays, journals and a long series on the Hebrew prophets. He served as a hospital chaplain in a New York hospital for the poor, then at St. Vincent’s Hospital, ministering to AIDS patients. In 1984, he traveled to El Salvador and Nicaragua, and later published his journal from the experience, “Steadfastness of the Saints.” In 1985, he traveled to South America where he helped with the acclaimed movie “The Mission.”

Daniel Berrigan kept going, right until his last breath, trusting in the God of peace, cursing the false gods of war and violence, adhering to the nonviolent Jesus and doing what he could to spread the Gospel of Nonviolence. “The world is a kingdom of death, and into this world walks the great YES of God, the Christ, bringing trouble... unmasking, law-breaking and truth-telling.

The disarmed God and the disarming of God in Christ is the great scandal of history... God comes to us disarmed in Christ... Today, we are asked to live out the drama of the disarmed Christ in a world armed to the teeth. To confess Jesus these days is to work for disarmament, justice and peace.”Dan formed and participated in a Manhattan peace group, which he named “Kairos.” He met
with friends every other Tuesday night for 30 years. They planned nonviolent actions and got arrested against some injustice, usually at the military recruiting station in Times Square or the Riverside Research nuclear weapons laboratory (until they closed it!) or the U.S.S. Intrepid War Museum on the Hudson River. Along the way, Dan was supported by actor Martin Sheen and former U.S. Attorney Gen. Ramsey Clark.

By the mid-2000s, Dan was frail and tired. By 2010, he was actively declining. He was moved to the Jesuit infirmary in the Bronx until his death in April 2016. What people do not know is that he was resented by other Jesuits since the 1960s, because of his public stand for peace. However, his friends and relatives surrounded him with love, so he felt loved till the day he died.
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In his 1970 book No Bars to Manhood, Dan wrote: “We have assumed the name of peacemakers, but we have been unwilling to pay any significant price. And because we want the peace with half a heart and half a will, the war continues, because the waging of war, by its nature, is total—but the waging of peace, by our own cowardice, is partial... the making of peace is at least as costly as the making of war, at least as exigent, at least as disruptive, at least as liable to bring disgrace and prison and death in its wake.”

“Do the good because it’s good. Speak the truth because it’s true. Work for peace and justice because that’s what the God of peace and justice wants... our task is not to be popular or to be seen as having an impact, but to speak the deepest truths that we know... to live our lives in accord with the deepest truths we know, even if doing so does not produce immediate results.”

Dan taught that the resurrection of Jesus meant we were called to carry on his campaign of nonviolence, and live out the “slight edge of life over death.”

He preached: “Once there was a dead man, a criminal, a subject of capital punishment. And lo!

He refused to stay dead... Along come these crazies shouting in public, ‘Our man’s not dead, He’s risen!’” The first nonviolent revolution was, of course, the Resurrection. The event had to include death as its first act, and the command to Peter, “Put up your sword.” So that it might be clear, once and for all, that Christians suffer death rather than inflict it. This was the break-through of Daniel Berrigan in modern Christian history.

“All worldly systems and arrangements are simply by-passed by the Resurrection,” Dan said on another occasion. “If death has no hold over people, in the sense that they’ve exorcised their fear of death—then what’s left worth fearing, or worth hoping, from any worldly structure?”

Dan walked and talked and practiced Resurrection. He referred to all peace work as living in the Resurrection. Resurrection means total Nonviolence, and our survival was already guaranteed. “We need not be afraid, or violent or discouraged. We are heading toward resurrection!”

Since the Plowshares actions of the 1980s we continue to break the demonic ethos of wars, of inevitable wars, just wars, necessary wars, victorious wars. We say NO in our acts of hope. All the repeated arrests and interminable incarcerations, the life of our small communities, the discipline of Nonviolence have embodied an Ethic of Resurrection. We long to taste that event,to see if we might live in hope, instead of cultural despair, nuclear despair, a world of perpetual war. We want to taste the Resurrection. May I say we have not been disappointed.

This is the gauntlet that Daniel Berrigan threw down before us — to taste the Resurrection, to pursue the heights and depths and length and breadth of Creative Nonviolence.

Despite the insanity of the world and the times, we have been given a beautiful example in his nonviolent life, and so we have no excuse but to rise to the occasion and carry on. Like Dan, we too can stand up and say no to racism, war, greed, poverty, nuclear weapons and environmental destruction. We too can base our lives on loving kindness, building community, practicing nonviolence, speaking out publicly, advocating for a new culture of peace, and spreading the vision of a new nonviolent world far and wide. This is the mission, whether or not we make a
difference, and like Dan, we can go forward, knowing that we, too, will not be disappointed.

By John Dear

*”Too Many People”, ** “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard”