Obituaries: Philip F. Berrigan: 1923 – 2002

Most antiwar protesters of the Vietnam era never participated in a war, making it difficult for them to defend themselves from charges that they were merely cowards who were afraid to fight. This was not the case for Philip Berrigan, one of the most important players in the antiwar movement of the 1960s, who was drafted and served in World War II.

A northerner, born in Minnesota, Berrigan took his basic training in Georgia, where he witnessed the grim lives of black sharecroppers, then the treatment of black soldiers on the troop ship to Europe; experiences which were to help shape him into the person of conscience he was to become. So too did his role in infantry and artillery battles, where he earned a battlefield commission as second lieutenant, and where he began to perceive himself to be as guilty of murder as the Germans and Japanese.

Berrigan returned from the war to eventually become a Josephine priest and became passionately committed to both the civil rights and antiwar movements, especially after the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. He quickly became a thorn in the side of his superiors, whom he accused of defending the status quo. His activities also brought him trouble with the authorities, and he was known to boast that he was the first American priest to be jailed for political crimes.

But it was the U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia that brought Berrigan to the forefront as a pacifist. In 1966, while serving as priest for a poor black parish in Baltimore, he founded an antiwar group, Peace Mission, which picketed the homes of Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara and Secretary of State Dean Rusk. Then, in October of 1967, Father Berrigan and three friends entered the Baltimore Customs House and spattered draft records with a red liquid that was partly made from their own blood, an action which would get him a six year prison sentence.

Before he was sentenced for the Customs House incident, however, Father Berrigan was involved in another draft board raid, this time in Catonsville, Md., which would come to define him within the counter-culture of the late 1960s. In this case, Berrigan and eight others, including his older brother and Jesuit priest Daniel, took hundreds of files from the draft board office in May of 1968. Piling the documents in the parking lot, they set them on fire after dousing them with “homemade napalm,” a mixture of gasoline and soap chips.

When the police arrived, the “Catonsville Nine,” as they came to be called by the press, were praying in the parking lot and reporters were given the statement, “We destroy these draft records not only because they exploit our young men, but also because they represent misplaced power concentrated in the ruling class of America. We confront the Catholic Church, other Christian bodies, and the synagogues of America with their silence and cowardice in the face of our country's crimes.”

While the Catonsville incident endeared the Berrigan brothers to the ranks of the New Left, inspiring similar draft board raids across the country, moral majority types saw them as communists and traitors.

In 1970, Philip Berrigan was given a three-and-a-half-year term for his involvement at Catonsville. After being paroled in 1972, he married Elizabeth McAlister, a nun from the Religious Order of the Sacred Heart, who had been his lover since 1969, and was subsequently excommunicated from the Catholic church. The couple then began living and working at Jonah House, a small religious commune they founded in Baltimore.

While many Vietnam war protesters rejoined the establishment after the U.S. pulled-out of Southeast Asia, Berrigan spent the rest of his life fighting militarism and racism. In 1996, after serving time in North Carolina for vandalizing fighter bombers at Seymour Johnson Air Force Base, he told writer Matthew Rothschild, “...the only way you can get at the state is by dealing with its laws. That’s why Thoreau would say, 'Dissent without resistance is consent.' A very worthy statement. If you take it apart, you find that if you dissent without breaking the law then you are legitimizing the system that allows this kind of latitude. You have to break the law to touch the state.”

On December 6 of this year, two months after being diagnosed with liver and kidney cancer, Philip F. Berrigan died at Jonah House at the age of 79, surrounded by family and friends. In the days before his death, he wrote a final statement that included the words: “I die with the conviction, held since 1968 and Catonsville, that nuclear weapons are the scourge of the earth; to mine for them, manufacture them, deploy them, use them, is a curse against God, the human family, and the earth itself.”

©Copyright 2003 by AlternativeApproaches.com