An unsung prophet of our times

May 13, 2016

By Anil Netto
Few of us may have heard of him. The legendary peace activist, poet and nuclear weapons opponent Daniel Joseph Berrigan, SJ passed away on April 30 at the age of 94. Along with his brother Phil, Dan was one of the greatest anti-war prophetic voices over the last century, certainly in the United States. So effective was he that in the 1970s, he became the first Catholic priest to make it to the FBI’s most wanted list!

They say God never abandons his people during the darkest periods of human history. He always raises prophetic voices at a time when grave injustice, oppression or tyranny rules the land.

Indeed, great souls rose at at time when the world was plunged into world wars and entered the atomic age, when the United States pummelled Vietnam with napalm, and when the threat of nuclear annihilation stalked the world.

Famous names such as Dan, Phil, Catholic Worker movement founder Dorothy Day, Catholic monk Thomas Merton, people’s historian Howard Zinn and civil rights leader Martin Luther King rose to the occasion as prominent advocates of non-violence.

Referring to Dan, Georgetown University theology professor Chester Gillis once said, “If you were to identify Catholic prophets in the 20th century, he’d be right there with Dorothy Day or Thomas Merton.” This at a time when the US mainstream Catholic Church was largely silent about the Vietnam War.

According to the Jesuit writer John Dear, Merton was Dan‘s best friend, and both Phil and Dan, attended a retreat led by Merton. Dorothy Day was another great friend, more like Dan’s leader. Under Dorothy’s influence and guidance, Dan and Phil were transformed. They began to realise that to be a religious person is to serve the God of peace, and to be a Christian is to follow Jesus’ path of non-violence. So unusual was this, Dear says, that the Jesuits even kicked Dan out of the country for beginning to speak out against the war.

Dan hit the headlines on several occasions. Three of them are described below:

In 1968, Dan, Phil and seven others, took out 378 draft files from a draft office in Catonsville, Maryland, and brought them out to a parking lot. There, they poured napalm on the files — the US was dumping napalm all over Vietnam — and burned them in protest at the Vietnam War. These files contained records of youths to be drafted for war.

The Catonsville Nine, as they were later dubbed, were arrested and Dan turned into a fugitive for four months, embarrassing the FBI, turning up to give talks all over the place while, he was out, waiting appeal.

“We have chosen to be powerless criminals in a time of criminal power. We have chosen to be branded as peace criminals by war criminals,” he famously said.

In 1980, Dan and his colleagues got wind of a new first-strike nuclear weapon. Along with his brother Phil, he and six others, broke into a General Electric nuclear missile plant in Pennsylvania and damaged the fragile but unarmed MK12A nuclear warhead nose cones and poured blood (symbolising institutional violence) on documents and files.

Their actions were inspired by Isaiah chapter 2: 4

Then he will judge between the nations and arbitrate between many peoples. They will hammer their swords into ploughshares and their spears into sickles. Nation will not lift sword against nation, no longer will they learn how to make war.

For their efforts, Dan and his colleagues were arrested, charged with 10 different offences and spent time in prison.

But inspired by this verse and the activists’ actions, the anti-nuclear, anti-war Plowshares Movement was born and similar actions were carried out, by others, around the world.

On another occasion, in 1989, Dan was again involved in anti-war resistance, this time over US involvement in South America.

That year, US-trained Salvodoran army gunmen burst into a university campus in El Salvador and massacred six Jesuit scholars, their housekeeper and her daughter.

A call for civil disobedience sprung up in the United States. A group at Loyola University in New Orleans, including Dan, who was teaching there, decided to head towards the Federal Building downtown and block all the lifts so that it could not be business as usual.

A funny thing happened next, according to Dan’s lawyer Bill Quigley.

A prosecutor — ironically, he had studied in a Jesuit-run school and university — turned up and warned the protesters to disperse. But they refused to budge.

The prosecutor then threatened to contact the Jesuit provincial (leader) for the area and ask him to order the protesters to leave.

One of the protesters replied, “Well, you don’t have to call our provincial. Our provincial is right over here (in support of the protest).” Times had changed.

In the end, everyone was arrested!

The award-winning independent filmmaker Michael Moore, while studying at a Catholic school, credits Dan and Phil as being top among his list of teenage heroes.

But Dan himself had no heroes. “I don’t believe in heroes, I believe in community.” In resisting a culture of violence and death, he believed we had to live life to the full.

It is this potent mix of community, resistance toward a culture of death, and his activism for peace and justice rooted in spirituality that defined Dan's life. There’s a message in there for us in a world full of violence, injustice and tyranny.