The American Jesuit priest, Fr Daniel J Berrigan, who has died aged 94, was an author and poet whose protests helped shape the tactics of opposition to the Vietnam war and landed him in prison.
The United States was tearing itself apart over civil rights and the war in southeast Asia when 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 pieces of the same problem: an unjust society. It would have explosive consequences as Berrigan, his brother Philip, a Josephite priest, and their allies took their case to the streets.
A defining point was the burning of Selective Service draft records in Catonsville, Maryland, on May 17th, 1968, and the subsequent trial of the Catonsville Nine, events that inspired an escalation of protests across the US. After a trial that served as a platform for their anti-war message, the Berrigans were convicted of destroying government property and sentenced to three years each in federal prison.
Going underground
They were to begin serving their terms on April 10th, 1970, but instead they went underground. The men who had been on the cover of
Time
were now on the FBI’s most-wanted list.
Both were tracked down and sent to prison. Philip Berrigan had been the main force behind Catonsville, but it was mostly Daniel who mined the incident and its aftermath for literary meaning – a process already underway when the FBI caught up with him on Block Island, off the Rhode Island coast, in August 1970. There was The Trial of the Catonsville Nine, a one-act play in free verse drawn from the court transcripts, and Prison Poems, written during his incarceration. He was released in 1972.
Berrigan’s father was Thomas William Berrigan, a man full of words and grievances who got by as a railroad engineer, labour union officer and farmer. He married Frida Fromhart and they had six sons. Daniel, the fourth, was born in Virginia, Minnesota.
When he was a young boy, the family moved to a farm near Syracuse, New York, to be close to his father's family. In his autobiography, To Dwell in Peace, Daniel Berrigan described his father as "an incendiary without a cause," a subscriber to Catholic liberal periodicals and the frustrated writer of poems of no distinction.
‘Price of survival’
“Early on,” he wrote, “we grew inured, as the price of survival, to violence as a norm of existence. I remember, my eyes open to the lives of neighbours, my astonishment at seeing that wives and husbands were not natural enemies.”
At an early age, he wrote, he believed that the church condoned his father’s treatment of his mother. Yet he wanted to be a priest. He graduated in 1946 from St Andrew-on-Hudson, a Jesuit seminary in New York, and completed a master’s at Woodstock College in Baltimore in 1952. He was ordained that year. He was not to become a pastoral poet or live the retiring life he had imagined. At Le Moyne College in Syracuse, where he was a popular professor of New Testament studies from 1957 to 1963, Berrigan formed friendships with his students that other faculty members disapproved of, inculcating in them his ideas about pacifism and civil rights. (One student, David Miller, became the first draft-card burner to be convicted under a 1965 law.)
Berrigan was effectively exiled in 1965, after angering the hawkish Cardinal Francis Spellman in New York. Besides his work in organising anti-war groups, there was the death of Roger La Porte, a young man with whom Berrigan said he was slightly acquainted. To protest at US involvement in southeast Asia, La Porte set himself on fire outside the UN building in November 1965. Berrigan spoke at a service for La Porte and, soon thereafter, the Jesuits, widely thought to have been pressured by Spellman, sent him on a “fact-finding” mission among poor workers in South America.
An outcry from Catholic liberals brought him back after only three months, enough time for him to have been radicalised even further.
Poet-in-residence
At one time or another he held faculty positions or ran programmes at Union Seminary, Loyola University New Orleans, Columbia, Cornell and Yale. Eventually he settled into a long tenure at Fordham, the Jesuit university in the Bronx, where for a time he had the title of poet-in-residence.
Well into his 80s, he was arrested time and again, for greater or lesser offences: in 1980, for taking part in a Plowshares raid on a General Electric missile plant in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, 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. He also supported the Occupy Wall Street movement.
His brother Philip died in 2002 aged 79, while another brother Jerry died last July aged 95.