Thanks so much for this Carl!
----- Original Message -----
From: "Carl Jarvis" <carjar82@xxxxxxxxx>
To: "blind-democracy" <blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Cc: "Alco Canfield" <amcanfield@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Monday, May 02, 2016 10:17 AM
Subject: [blind-democracy] Peace Activist Father Berrigan dies
"I do not believe in heroes, I believe in Community".
So said Father Daniel J. Berrigan.
The Reverend Daniel J. Berrigan, a Jesuit priest and poet whose
defiant protests helped shape the tactics of opposition to the Vietnam
War and landed him in
prison, died on Saturday in the Bronx. He was 94.
His death, at Murray-Weigel Hall, the Jesuit infirmary at
Fordham University,
was confirmed by the Rev. James Martin, editor at large at
America magazine,
a national Catholic magazine published by the Jesuits.
The United States was tearing itself apart over civil rights and the
war in Southeast Asia when Father Berrigan emerged in the 1960s as an
intellectual
star of the Roman Catholic “new left,” articulating a view that racism
and poverty, militarism and capitalist greed were interconnected
pieces of the same
big problem: an unjust society.
It was an essentially
religious position,
based on a stringent reading of the Scriptures that some called pure
and others radical. But it would have explosive political consequences
as Father Berrigan;
his brother
Philip,
a Josephite priest; and their allies took their case to the streets
with rising disregard for the law or their personal fortunes.
A defining point was the burning of Selective Service draft records in
Catonsville, Md., and the subsequent trial of the so-called
Catonsville Nine,
a sequence of events that inspired an escalation of protests across
the country; there were marches, sit-ins, the public burning of draft
cards and other
acts of civil disobedience.
group start media
Photo
Father Berrigan, right and his brother Philip Berrigan seized hundreds
of draft records and set them on fire with homemade napalm in 1968.
CreditUnited
Press International
group end
The catalyzing episode occurred on May 17, 1968, six weeks after the
murder of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the outbreak of new
riots in dozens
of cities. Nine Catholic activists, led by Daniel and Philip Berrigan,
entered a Knights of Columbus building in Catonsville and went up to
the second
floor, where the local draft board had offices. In front of astonished
clerks, they seized hundreds of draft records, carried them down to
the parking
lot and set them on fire with homemade napalm.
Some reporters had been told of the raid in advance. They were given a
statement that said in part, “We destroy these draft records not only
because they
exploit our young men but because they represent misplaced power
concentrated in the ruling class of America.” It added, “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.”
In a year sick with images of destruction, from the Tet offensive in
Vietnam to the murder of Dr. King, a scene was recorded that had been
contrived to
shock people to attention, and did so. When the police came, the
trespassers were praying in the parking lot, led by two middle-aged
men in clerical collars:
the big, craggy Philip, a decorated hero of World War II, and the
ascetic Daniel, waiting peacefully to be led into the van.
Protests and Arrests
In the years to come, well into his 80s, Daniel Berrigan was arrested
time and again, for greater or lesser offenses: in 1980, for taking
part in the Plowshares
raid on a General Electric missile plant in King of Prussia, Pa.,
where the Berrigan brothers and others rained hammer blows on missile
warheads; in 2006,
for blocking the entrance to the Intrepid naval museum in Manhattan.
“The day after I’m embalmed,” he said in 2001, on his 80th birthday,
“that’s when I’ll give it up.”
group start media
Photo
Father Berrigan being handcuffed in 2001 after he and others blocked
an entrance to the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum in Manhattan.
CreditRichard
Drew/Associated Press
group end
It was not for lack of other things to do. In his long career of
writing and teaching at Fordham and other universities, Father
Berrigan published a torrent
of essays and broadsides and, on average, a book a year.
Among the more than 50 books were 15 volumes of poetry — the first of
which, “Time Without Number,” won the prestigious
Lamont Poetry Prize
(now known as the James Laughlin Award), given by the Academy of
American Poets, in 1957 — as well as autobiography, social criticism,
commentaries on
the Old Testament prophets and indictments of the established order,
both secular and ecclesiastic.
While he was known for his wry wit, there was a darkness in much of
what Father Berrigan wrote and said, the burden of which was that one
had to keep trying
to do the right thing regardless of the near certainty that it would
make no difference. In the withering of the pacifist movement and the
country’s general
support for the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, he saw proof that it
was folly to expect lasting results.
“This is the worst time of my long life,” he said in an interview with
The Nation in 2008. “I have never had such meager expectations of the
system.”
What made it bearable, he wrote elsewhere, was a disciplined,
implicitly difficult belief in God as the key to sanity and survival.
