the legendary antiwar priest, activist and poet Father Daniel Berrigan, who has died at the age of 94. “I just always considered Dan to be in the league with Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King and Dorothy Day and our greatest people,” recalls Father John Dear, a Catholic priest and longtime peace activist. “He was the first priest arrested in U.S. history against war, maybe the world. … [I]t was so groundbreaking.”
John Dear talking:
I just always considered Dan to be in the league with Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King and Dorothy Day and our greatest people. And he was the first priest arrested in U.S. history against war, maybe the world. He certainly changed the church in the United States and the world. We never had this before. That’s what’s so amazing about Dan and Phil, priests speaking against war. And now that’s kind of normal for a lot of people. But for then, it was so groundbreaking.
You know, for me, Dan spoke to me all along about resistance now as a way of life, that we, as people of peace and nonviolence, have to spend our lives saying no to the culture of war, and working for the abolition of war and poverty and nuclear weapons. And as Frida talked about, I remember one of the first things he said to me 35 years ago was talking about resisting death as a social methodology. If you’re going to spend your life resisting death, you learn to live life to the full. If you want to be hopeful, you have to do hopeful things. And he said, remember, “Don’t just do something. Stand there.” That’s what I hear Frida saying. He was faithful. Early on, he was saying, “Make the connections between all the issues as activists and uncover the spiritual roots of our work for peace and justice.” Very beautiful. And that we’re doing this as—you know, he said, “We’re trying to discover what it means to be a human being in an inhuman time.”
And then, lastly, I remember him talking, early on, too, about—about his learn from Howard Zinn, that, you know, things change by bottom-up, grassroots movements, from Jesus to Dr. King. And the movements need some people on the front lines. His phrase was: “Good people who break bad laws and accept the consequences for their actions to stop the killing and injustice done in our name.” So, he’s a great saint and a great prophet and one of the great peacemakers of our age, and we’re celebrating him. And it’s not the end of an era. We have to carry on the life and witness that he gave us and—into a new era to work to end war and nuclear weapons and poverty.
Bill Quigley talking:
Dan had a big history in New Orleans. He taught at Loyola. His brother Phil taught at the St. Augustine’s High School here. I represented him when he resisted after the Jesuits were murdered in El Salvador, part of a nationwide civil disobedience. Six Jesuit priests and their housekeeper and her daughter, murdered in November of 1989.
And he was a person at peace. He was a person calm. He actually was hilarious, as well, because he didn’t really accept the force that was attempted to be brought on him by the legal system. He was arrested, he was released, he refused to come back to court. He said—he wrote a letter to the judge, said, “This is ridiculous to come back for a little thing like this, blocking elevators.” And he was arrested. Ramsey Clark called me and said, “We have to get him out of jail and get him back here.” He came back to court here. Martin Sheen came as a character witness for him. And it was a beautiful event.
But the thing that I think for our listeners, for your listeners, the movement, is that I remember interviewing him once in front of an auditorium of people, and I asked him, said, “You’re the hero for so many people. Who are your heroes?” And he said, “I don’t believe in heroes, I believe in community.” And it is in the community, it is in the movement, it is in the Plowshares Movement, it is hundreds of people who are resisting around the world.
And there was a nationwide call for civil disobedience to resist U.S. policy in El Salvador. And I was called to a meeting at Loyola by a group of people who were going to engage in civil disobedience, they said. And I’ve been to many meetings like that over the years. And there in the group was Dan Berrigan, and I realized, because he was there, that this was a very serious group. He didn’t try to be the leader. He didn’t try to be outspoken or anything. He was quiet and a presence there as the group decided what they were going to do. And they decided they were going to go to downtown New Orleans into the Federal Building and block all of the elevators in the Federal Building so that business could not continue as usual on a Friday afternoon. He, along with other Jesuit priests, some students, some other antiwar activists in the community, sat in these elevators and just peacefully prayed and sang and stopped all the business in the Federal Building for some time.
The interesting thing was that the prosecutor, the U.S. attorney, was a Jesuit-trained lawyer. And he came blowing into the room, into the lobby of the place, and said, “Look, I was—I went to Jesuit high school. I went to Jesuit university. I went to Jesuit law school. I respect the Jesuits, but you have to follow authority. You have to follow the law. Obedience is one of the things that you have to do as a Jesuit.” And he was preaching to the Jesuits to follow his orders. And they said, “Well, no, we’re not going to do that.” And he said, “Well, I’m going to call your provincial and tell your provincial to order you out of these things.” He said, “I don’t want to arrest you. You’ve made your point. I don’t want to arrest you.” And they said, “Well, you don’t have to call our provincial. Our provincial is right over here.”
The provincial is like the local leader of the Jesuits. So they were—he was going to call their boss, who was going to tell them to get out of the elevators and stop the civil disobedience. Well, the provincial, the boss, was there, and he was there in support of the activities that they took. And so the prosecutor threw up his hands, arrested everybody. They were processed and the like. And then, the semester ended not long after. And it came time for the trial, and Dan Berrigan said, “I’m not coming back for the trial. It’s ridiculous to come all the way back from New York just for a trial for, you know, this sort of thing, compared to what the government did.” And so he didn’t come. He wrote a nice letter to the judge just saying, “I’m not coming, I just want to let you know.” And a couple weeks later, he was arrested in New York City.
I received a call from Ramsey Clark, The former U.S. attorney general, who represented him on many things. I’m one of dozens, if not hundreds, of lawyers for Daniel Berrigan, because of his activities over the years. And he had been arrested and kept in jail in New York, because he had skipped the trial in New Orleans. He agreed to come back. Somebody posted a bond for him. He came back a few weeks later to face this horrifying contempt of court charge for, you know, skipping out on court and the big threats of going to jail. And, of course, he was not intimidated whatsoever by going to jail. He took the courts very gently. You know, they had a job to do. Do whatever you want to do; we’ll do whatever we have to do.
And so, when he came to court, people were afraid that he was going to be kept in jail in New Orleans for a while. So, his good friend, the president of the United States on our TV show, Martin Sheen, came down as a character witness for him. And the two of them, when they came into the courthouse, essentially, shut down the entire courthouse, because everybody wanted to see Martin Sheen and Daniel Berrigan. So all the other courts closed, a lot of the Federal Building. People streamed in to see him. And they were charming, and they were light, and they were laughing. And they told how serious it was and what they had done and the like. And the judge ultimately gave him some community service hours that he had to follow through on, which, of course, his life was made up of community service. But he was a very quiet but forceful leader with people. He would speak when asked to, and when he did speak, he was powerful. But he didn’t go out of his way to make a lot of speeches.
hundreds of thousands of people, I think, considered him a hero. And so I asked him on the stage, and we had not rehearsed, so I didn’t know what the answer was. And I asked him, you know, “Who are your heroes? Because you’re a hero to so many.” And he said, “Bill,” he said, “I don’t believe in heroes. I believe in community. And it is in community, it is in movements, it is in people gathering together, that courage is displayed, that inspiration happens, that sacrifice happens and the like.” And we have seen, and celebrate, even after his death now, the hundreds of activities and communities across not just the United States, but Europe and around the world, who have adopted many of the activities and the actions that he has done, the Plowshares Movement. There is a young woman in Omaha this month who is going to trial—I’m representing her, standby counsel—Jessica Reznicek, who broke out the windows of Northrop Grumman in—outside a Air Force base there and to resist the next generation of weapons of mass destruction that they are making so much money off of. The Sister Megan Rice, who’s been on your show before, Michael—[Greg] Boertje-Obed, John Dear, Frida—there’s just hundreds and hundreds of people and hundreds and hundreds of actions of this community of peacemakers. And that is really, I think, his legacy to us, as a prophet, as a truth teller, but also as a community builder and inspirer and as an activist himself.
Father Dan was involved with, was protesting the killing of six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her daughter in El Salvador. he was, as so many were—felt terribly bad about the murder of these folks. But the problem was that they were really murdered by the United States government, not directly, but indirectly. The people who threatened the Jesuits, who had threatened and murdered and assassinated people all over Latin America and South America, had been trained by the U.S. Army School of Americas, which was originally in Panama, has since been moved to Fort Benning and renamed other times, but it was United States policy that pushed, funded, trained and activated the people who killed these Jesuits, their housekeeper, other sisters, other peasants, other activists, labor organizers and the like.
So, it was an act of remembering their sorrow, but also an act of resistance and challenge to the United States government, which, as—which Dan Berrigan would always remind us that Martin Luther King said the United States is the world’s greatest purveyor of violence. So it was to fight against our government and say, “No more, not in our name, ” again and again. It wasn’t the first time. So it was the essence of the fight in Central America that he was involved with, obviously in Vietnam, obviously Iraq—all over the world. And so, it was to try to hold our government accountable, try to witness and say, “Not in our name will we allow this to happen.”
John Dear talking:
we’re talking about Dan as this great resister. But, you know, he was famous in the early ’60s as a poet, so he was a—he was actually a great literary person, as well, I think one of the great poets of the time. And he was also a very serious religious leader as a Catholic priest. And so, Dan entered the Jesuits in 1939. He and his family were very much pro-war. In the ’50s, Dan is very involved in the church and is a teacher. What happened—and I pressed Phil on this, and Dan later—is that the FOR reached out to him around 1960, and to Thomas Merton and to Thich Nhat Hanh, and got them really involved—the Fellowship of Reconciliation—in beginning to speak out against war and nuclear weapons. And then they went through this transformation, with Thomas Merton, kind of under the guide of Dorothy Day, Dan’s great friend, and she was really Dan’s leader, if you will. And Dan was in Europe in 1964.
Dorothy Day co founder of the Catholic Worker Movement. Thomas Merton was one of the famous—most famous figures in Catholic Church history, a famous monk, who wrote hundreds of books, actually. But in 1960—this never happened before—he began writing against racism and against war and on nuclear weapons. We had never had this before. Literally, in the United States, no one had ever done that, except Dorothy Day. And to get such a prominent person, who was really Dan’s best friend, Thomas Merton, with Dorothy Day, then Phil, saying, “Wait a second. To be a religious person is to serve the god of peace. To be a Christian is to follow Jesus, who’s, like Gandhi, a hero of nonviolence.” But this has never been thought of like that before. But what was so bold was, they decided to do it, and then they did it. By ’64, ’65, Merton led a famous retreat for Dan and Phil. And then they got really involved. Dan was kicked out of the country for beginning to speak against the war.
For years, we thought it was the cardinal of New York, who was a very famous pro-war leader, Cardinal Spellman. He used to go to Vietnam and literally bless the troops. Dan always thought it was him, but research was done, and we discovered about 10 years ago it was secretly the Jesuits themselves. Cardinal Spellman didn’t do that. They kicked him out of the country to try to stop him from speaking out against war.
But there was such an outcry. Friends took out a full-page ad in The New York Times. Dan came back. And then he got invited with the Cornell students to go to the big mobilization at the Pentagon. We’re talking now October 1967, a week before Phil’s Baltimore Four action. Dan didn’t plan to get arrested. All his student friends got arrested, so he got arrested, and the first priest to do so. And then Phil did the action. And then, suddenly the invitation happened for him and Howard Zinn to go to Vietnam. We’re now talking January 1968. If you study the correspondence with Merton and Phil, none of this was planned out. It was unfolding as the war was getting worse. They are now prominent people, but they’re saying, “OK, students are speaking and marching, and young people are marching against the war. The war is clearly getting worse. The election is going to happen.” Bobby Kennedy hadn’t got—so forth and so on. “What are we going to do?” And being in Vietnam changed Dan’s life. And then the death of Martin Luther King kind of led Phil and Dan to take another step.
And, listening to that quote, it’s so hard and shocking to really imagine what they did, but when Dan said, “Our apologies,” “We apologize,” Sorry, dear friends, we can only burn paper instead of children,” you know, the whole country freaked out that priests were breaking the law in opposition to the war. But very few were quite upset, you know, about the bombing and dropping of napalm upon millions of people in Vietnam. And they—the symbolic action of pouring napalm on draft files, leading to 300 other draft board raids—ending the draft—we know historically it ended the draft. It changed the Catholic Church, and it inspired tens of millions of people to take to the streets. I would say that very seriously, having really studied it and talked at length with Dan and Phil about that.
And then you’d say, after prison, which was so horrible—Dan almost died in prison—well, they could rest on their laurels and be great heroes of the peace movement. Not at all. They kept going, addressed nuclear weapons. Phil founded Jonah House, and then they did the Plowshares Eight—at great cost. Dan’s health has never been that great. He faced a good 10 years in prison. He eventually did not go to prison for that. But they kept at it.
And Dan always continued his love of language. So powerful. That’s why he’s so interesting to listen to. And he was a great spiritual giant, certainly on the level of Dr. King and Gandhi, but—and Dorothy Day, his friend, but also his other friends, Thomas Merton; Rabbi Abraham Heschel, close friend of Dan’s; our friend Thich Nhat Hanh, the great Buddhist leader, who’s near death himself. They had a big celebration of Dan yesterday in Plum Village in France, and I’ve been in contact with him. So, Dan, as a religious figure, saying if you’re going to pursue the spiritual life, you have to work to end the killing of sisters and brothers around the planet, this is a great gift Dan has given all of us and a great hope and a symbol. And what a blessing, Amy, for all of us to have known him.
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John Dear
Catholic priest and longtime peace activist. He was one of Daniel Berrigan’s closest friends and worked with him for 35 years. He is Berrigan’s literary executor and the editor of five books of his writings, including Daniel Berrigan: Essential Writings as well the poetry collection And the Risen Bread.
Bill Quigley
professor and director of the Stuart H. Smith Law Clinic and Center for Social Justice, as well as the Gillis Long Poverty Law Center at Loyola University. He was one of Daniel Berrigan’s attorneys.
— source democracynow.org