Postscript: Daniel Berrigan, 1921-2016
By: Paul Elie
May 2, 2016
New Yorker, May 2, 2016
He was in the elevator when we got on, riding down from his rooms in the building on 98th Street that housed the priests known as the West Side Jesuits. His hair, thick and black in the old news photographs, had gone gray. Instead of a black turtleneck and suit coat—the outfit with which he had united clerical garb with Beat style—he had on a collarless linen shirt, untucked at the waist. His face was thin and lined. At the time, in the mid-nineteen-eighties, it seemed that the Roman Catholic Church and the gay men of New York City were at war, but he was spending his time ministering to AIDS patients at St. Vincent’s Hospital, in Greenwich Village. He stepped off the elevator, and, as we trailed behind, the Jesuit priest we were with said, a little boastfully: “Dan Berrigan—that was him. He lives with us.”
He was in the elevator when we got on, riding down from his rooms in the building on 98th Street that housed the priests known as the West Side Jesuits. His hair, thick and black in the old news photographs, had gone gray. Instead of a black turtleneck and suit coat—the outfit with which he had united clerical garb with Beat style—he had on a collarless linen shirt, untucked at the waist. His face was thin and lined. At the time, in the mid-nineteen-eighties, it seemed that the Roman Catholic Church and the gay men of New York City were at war, but he was spending his time ministering to AIDS patients at St. Vincent’s Hospital, in Greenwich Village. He stepped off the elevator, and, as we trailed behind, the Jesuit priest we were with said, a little boastfully: “Dan Berrigan—that was him. He lives with us.”
It was a significant sighting. At Fordham University, where I was a student at the time, the worldly accomplishments of the Jesuits were a point of pride, and the name Daniel Berrigan held an aura of both holiness and notoriety that was singular in the order. He had won the Lamont Poetry Prize. He had stood up against the war in Vietnam when doing so could have caused a priest to be silenced or worse. He had been one of the Catonsville Nine, whose members doused Selective Service files in Catonsville, Maryland, with napalm. After Catonsville, he’d gone underground, eluding the F.B.I. for four months before he was captured on Block Island in 1970. At the time, these actions had divided American Catholics as fiercely as Pope Paul VI’s renewal of the ban on contraception. But they led the Church toward its present position, set firmly in favor of peace and against war.
By the time he died, at Fordham’s Jesuit infirmary, on Saturday, at the age of ninety-four, Berrigan’s aura of holiness-and-notoriety had long since yielded to another, greater aura: that of the priest whose consistency of purpose had allowed him to face down immense forces, including this nation’s war machine and celebrity culture.
In the nineteen-fifties, the brilliant Trappist monk Thomas Merton, who would become a friend and mentor to Berrigan, published a book about St. Bernard of Clairvaux, the twelfth-century Trappist. In the book, Merton expanded on the idea of St. Bernard as “the last of the fathers,” the figure in whom the run of foundational Christian thought, which began with the apostles, came to a conclusion. Berrigan, in my opinion, was the “last of the fathers” of twentieth-century American Catholicism, the longest-surviving associate of a cohort of gifted and engaged Catholic writers, among them Merton, Dorothy Day, Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, and other lesser-known figures such as the Jesuit theologian John Courtney Murray and John Kennedy Toole, the author of “A Confederacy of Dunces.”
It’s often forgotten that Berrigan, who was born in 1921 and entered a Jesuit seminary in 1939, was a member of the Second World War generation, not the Vietnam generation with which he is associated. He was six years younger than Merton, who died in 1968, and four years older than O’Connor, who died in 1964. It’s also often forgotten that the actions of the Catonsville Nine divided and challenged the Catholic left, including Berrigan’s counterparts.* “These actions are not ours,” Dorothy Day, the co-founder of the Catholic Worker newspaper, said of the Nine’s napalming of draft files. And yet Day maintained her friendship with Berrigan, corresponding with him, hosting him at the Catholic Worker movement’s houses on the Lower East Side, and agreeing wholeheartedly with his wider stance against the Vietnam War.
Merton, meanwhile, was made nervous by the borderline violence of Berrigan’s actions and by the personal righteousness that Berrigan brought to them: “He’s a bit theatrical these days, now he’s a malefactor—with a quasi-episcopal disarmament emblem strung around his neck like a pectoral cross,” Merton wrote in his journal, in August, 1968. And yet he struck notes of solidarity with the Catonsville Nine, and wrote an essay meant, in part, to help middle-class Catholics understand the action as “in essence non-violent,” even if it “frightened more than it has edified.” The previous October, Merton had advised Berrigan to keep clear of the peace movement’s lust for relevance—“now non-violent, now flower-power, now burn-baby, all sweetness on Tuesday and all hell-fire on Wednesday,” as he described it—and had posited an ideal of the Catholic radical as a person who strove “to give an example of sanity, independence, human integrity, against all establishments and all mass movements.”
By the nineteen-eighties, when I caught sight of him, Berrigan had taken Merton’s counsel to heart and become a figure of radical purity and apartness. Instead of cultivating followers, Berrigan developed mutually searching relationships with the next generation of figures in the Catholic peace movement: Robert Ellsberg, of Orbis Books; Carmen Trotta, of the Catholic Worker; Kathy Kelly, of Voices in the Wilderness. Instead of leading large rallies on college campuses, he sought out small protest actions, such as the Plowshares operation, in which Berrigan and several others entered a General Electric plant in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, and struck two nuclear missile nose cones with hammers. No longer the peace movement’s leader, he was its sage and celebrant, solemnly presiding over Catholic Mass on dozens of occasions, such as during a Pax Christi retreat at N.Y.U. and at the Catholic Worker after an action at the United Nations on Hiroshima Day.
In a moving portrait of Dorothy Day, written shortly after her death in 1980, Berrigan recalled reading a book about Day and the Catholic Worker not long after he was released from prison in 1972, after serving time for his role with the Catonsville Nine: “I stayed up all night, unable to put the book aside. What held me in thrall was an absolutely stunning consistency. No to all killing. Invasions, incursions, excusing causes, call of the blood, summons to the bloody flag, casuistic body counts, just wars, necessary wars, religious wars, needful wars, holy wars—into the fury of the murderous crosswinds went her simple word: no.”
Berrigan’s own consistency involved rejecting not just violence but also the media influence and the resources that his notoriety might have made available to him. He created no foundation, nonprofit, or N.G.O.; headed no pacifist think tank or Jesuit school of advanced study; gave no TED talk; engaged in no stagey dialogues offering equal time to the military point of view; and never reframed the ideals of nonviolence in any pocket-size manual for personal growth. When he wrote about Catonville in his 1987 autobiography, “To Dwell in Peace,” Berrigan characterized celebrity as something like a purifying fire: “There was shortly to be a spotlight on us: it was thin as a pencil slate, and would pierce us through and through; a testing light that touched on the very soul, and illumined and burned. The light of the adversary, the light of the church, light of the eye of God? Light, perhaps, of self-knowledge: of all these together.”
Berrigan kept clear of the trappings of fame so as to face down, as he put it, “the skeletal leer of war.” Always and everywhere, he rejected war as an evil in itself, and his opposition was a religious one, first and last. Celebrity, and the cultural power that came with it, loomed as a temptation that stood between him and the purity of his witness, which was rooted not in an idea but in the person of Jesus: his poverty, his blend of piety and righteous anger, his nonviolence and abhorrence of violence.
“I had come of age in a church that, for all its shortcomings, honored vows and promises,” Berrigan recalled in “To Dwell in Peace.” “I had examples before me in the people of the church, especially in laypeople and nuns, of those who lived to the hilt the life commended by the Gospel. Such were my people.” Such was Daniel Berrigan, Jesuit and peacemaker, who honored his vows and promises.
*A previous version of this post mistakenly identified Daniel Berrigan as a member of the Baltimore Four.
This article was originally published in the New Yorker.
In the nineteen-fifties, the brilliant Trappist monk Thomas Merton, who would become a friend and mentor to Berrigan, published a book about St. Bernard of Clairvaux, the twelfth-century Trappist. In the book, Merton expanded on the idea of St. Bernard as “the last of the fathers,” the figure in whom the run of foundational Christian thought, which began with the apostles, came to a conclusion. Berrigan, in my opinion, was the “last of the fathers” of twentieth-century American Catholicism, the longest-surviving associate of a cohort of gifted and engaged Catholic writers, among them Merton, Dorothy Day, Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, and other lesser-known figures such as the Jesuit theologian John Courtney Murray and John Kennedy Toole, the author of “A Confederacy of Dunces.”
It’s often forgotten that Berrigan, who was born in 1921 and entered a Jesuit seminary in 1939, was a member of the Second World War generation, not the Vietnam generation with which he is associated. He was six years younger than Merton, who died in 1968, and four years older than O’Connor, who died in 1964. It’s also often forgotten that the actions of the Catonsville Nine divided and challenged the Catholic left, including Berrigan’s counterparts.* “These actions are not ours,” Dorothy Day, the co-founder of the Catholic Worker newspaper, said of the Nine’s napalming of draft files. And yet Day maintained her friendship with Berrigan, corresponding with him, hosting him at the Catholic Worker movement’s houses on the Lower East Side, and agreeing wholeheartedly with his wider stance against the Vietnam War.
Merton, meanwhile, was made nervous by the borderline violence of Berrigan’s actions and by the personal righteousness that Berrigan brought to them: “He’s a bit theatrical these days, now he’s a malefactor—with a quasi-episcopal disarmament emblem strung around his neck like a pectoral cross,” Merton wrote in his journal, in August, 1968. And yet he struck notes of solidarity with the Catonsville Nine, and wrote an essay meant, in part, to help middle-class Catholics understand the action as “in essence non-violent,” even if it “frightened more than it has edified.” The previous October, Merton had advised Berrigan to keep clear of the peace movement’s lust for relevance—“now non-violent, now flower-power, now burn-baby, all sweetness on Tuesday and all hell-fire on Wednesday,” as he described it—and had posited an ideal of the Catholic radical as a person who strove “to give an example of sanity, independence, human integrity, against all establishments and all mass movements.”
By the nineteen-eighties, when I caught sight of him, Berrigan had taken Merton’s counsel to heart and become a figure of radical purity and apartness. Instead of cultivating followers, Berrigan developed mutually searching relationships with the next generation of figures in the Catholic peace movement: Robert Ellsberg, of Orbis Books; Carmen Trotta, of the Catholic Worker; Kathy Kelly, of Voices in the Wilderness. Instead of leading large rallies on college campuses, he sought out small protest actions, such as the Plowshares operation, in which Berrigan and several others entered a General Electric plant in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, and struck two nuclear missile nose cones with hammers. No longer the peace movement’s leader, he was its sage and celebrant, solemnly presiding over Catholic Mass on dozens of occasions, such as during a Pax Christi retreat at N.Y.U. and at the Catholic Worker after an action at the United Nations on Hiroshima Day.
In a moving portrait of Dorothy Day, written shortly after her death in 1980, Berrigan recalled reading a book about Day and the Catholic Worker not long after he was released from prison in 1972, after serving time for his role with the Catonsville Nine: “I stayed up all night, unable to put the book aside. What held me in thrall was an absolutely stunning consistency. No to all killing. Invasions, incursions, excusing causes, call of the blood, summons to the bloody flag, casuistic body counts, just wars, necessary wars, religious wars, needful wars, holy wars—into the fury of the murderous crosswinds went her simple word: no.”
Berrigan’s own consistency involved rejecting not just violence but also the media influence and the resources that his notoriety might have made available to him. He created no foundation, nonprofit, or N.G.O.; headed no pacifist think tank or Jesuit school of advanced study; gave no TED talk; engaged in no stagey dialogues offering equal time to the military point of view; and never reframed the ideals of nonviolence in any pocket-size manual for personal growth. When he wrote about Catonville in his 1987 autobiography, “To Dwell in Peace,” Berrigan characterized celebrity as something like a purifying fire: “There was shortly to be a spotlight on us: it was thin as a pencil slate, and would pierce us through and through; a testing light that touched on the very soul, and illumined and burned. The light of the adversary, the light of the church, light of the eye of God? Light, perhaps, of self-knowledge: of all these together.”
Berrigan kept clear of the trappings of fame so as to face down, as he put it, “the skeletal leer of war.” Always and everywhere, he rejected war as an evil in itself, and his opposition was a religious one, first and last. Celebrity, and the cultural power that came with it, loomed as a temptation that stood between him and the purity of his witness, which was rooted not in an idea but in the person of Jesus: his poverty, his blend of piety and righteous anger, his nonviolence and abhorrence of violence.
“I had come of age in a church that, for all its shortcomings, honored vows and promises,” Berrigan recalled in “To Dwell in Peace.” “I had examples before me in the people of the church, especially in laypeople and nuns, of those who lived to the hilt the life commended by the Gospel. Such were my people.” Such was Daniel Berrigan, Jesuit and peacemaker, who honored his vows and promises.
*A previous version of this post mistakenly identified Daniel Berrigan as a member of the Baltimore Four.
This article was originally published in the New Yorker.
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