Christian Soldiers
AN ESSAY
BY HAL CROWTHERUnder a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison . . . the only house in a slave state in which a free man can abide with honor.
—Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience
THE DEATH of Daniel Berrigan, a personal hero and one of the few men alive who was old enough to be my father, called up disturbing memories of a critical period in American history. One memory in particular. I was a fledgling journalist at Timemagazine in New York, newly wed, and freshly radicalized by the terrible events of 1968, when Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. were assassinated, Richard Nixon was elected president, and a misbegotten war in Vietnam divided this country as it has not been divided since—until, perhaps, at this moment of Donald Trump’s ascension. One of my colleagues was dating a tall, pretty young woman named Ann Berrigan. A few of us were drinking at her apartment one late-winter night in 1969. A guest looking for the bathroom started to open a door in the hall—and Ann jumped up almost screaming to warn him, “Don’t open that door—don’t!” Everyone was startled, and mystified when she made no effort to explain.
After her outburst, the evening ended on a note of embarrassment. Back in the street waiting for a cab, Ann’s boyfriend entrusted me with the story. Behind the bedroom door that night was her uncle, the Reverend Daniel Berrigan, S.J., a federal fugitive, a radical priest on the FBI’s most-wanted list for his part in the incineration (with homemade napalm) of Selective Service records in Catonsville, Maryland, the previous May. Ann was protecting not just her uncle, he explained, but her guests as well. Anyone who actually saw Father Berrigan or could confirm his presence was legally obligated to call the FBI or, like Ann, risk felony prosecution for harboring a fugitive.
I had covered the occupation of Columbia University buildings by the SDS, interviewed its militant war chief, Mark Rudd, and witnessed policemen with billy clubs assaulting tenured professors. In New York I’d undergone a rapid evolution from Rockefeller Republican to pacifist and Berrigan fellow traveler, all while the long black shadow of the draft board still lay across my future like a napalmed corpse. But Dan Berrigan hiding just down the hall, on the other side of a thin apartment wall—this was closer to the heart of civil disobedience and radical royalty than I had ever imagined I would be. Later I heard Ann talk about her Uncle Dan and Uncle Phil—Dan’s younger brother, a Josephite priest and a war hero—with pride in their exploits but anxious comprehension of the dangers to which these fugitives of conscience had exposed their friends and family. Every good Catholic family is proud of its priests, but the Berrigans had produced a fearless pair of militants the conservative Catholic hierarchy could never endorse or restrain.
Father Dan was the poet, the intellectual of the brothers Berrigan. His first book of verse, Time Without Number, had won the prestigious Lamont Prize in 1957, establishing him at thirty-six as a leading figure among Catholic poets. English poetry was my focus as an undergraduate, and for a draft deferment I had been teaching literature at a New England boarding school. As a federal fugitive, Dan Berrigan represented the confluence of serious poetry and nonviolent resistance to the government of the United States—to me, at that time, an irresistible combination. I read most of Berrigan’s work that was then in print. Impressed by his craftsmanship and passion, I was an unlikely candidate for his brotherhood of faith. His poem “The Face of Christ” begins “The tragic beauty of the face of Christ shines in our faces.” A pilgrim like me, from a family of agnostics, Unitarians, and hardheaded, freethinking Scots, is not instantly engaged. But what fascinated and haunted me was the life where his intellect and faith had led him, a life that in a few months would place him in a prison with felons who had never read a poem.
The Berrigan brothers’ crusade against the Vietnam War and imperial America was one of the first unqualified examples of “high seriousness” I encountered, outside of a book. What they were attempting opened a wider avenue of dissent for so many of us, still politically unformed, who were trying to refine and respond to our consciences. The “higher power” inspiring Dan and Phil Berrigan was so transparently, mountainously higher than the power represented by Nixon and Agnew (and the amoral, Machiavellian Kissinger) that it shamed a whole generation out of the adolescent patriotism we were raised on. Atheists or evangelicals, boys who followed the Berrigans’ example and burned their draft cards understood—in a way most of their fathers never had—that defying cynical politicians and bad laws was not the same as betraying your country. And that betraying your conscience was the worst crime of all.
Raised like the Berrigans in a rural, predominantly Catholic community in upstate New York, I grew up with a weakness for priests. Maybe it was their celibacy, freely giving up the one thing I desired most, that intrigued me. But I always knew one or two, and I used to play golf in the early morning, on the dew-drenched fairways most duffers avoid, with an Irish priest who cheerfully tried to convert me to some respectable form of Christianity. I called him Father though he asked me to call him Tom. He looked like Nick Nolte and died young, of cancer. From my secular viewpoint, priests carried an otherness about them that Protestant clergymen did not share. Most of them assigned to our rural parish came from exotic places like Manhattan, Buffalo, Albany. The nearest university, attracting the best Catholic students from my school, was St. Bonaventure, where Thomas Merton had once taught English literature among the brown-robed Franciscans I regarded with exaggerated curiosity and respect.
Dan Berrigan revered Merton, author of the religious classic The Seven Storey Mountain, and always claimed him as an intellectual and spiritual father. I met Father Dan only once, many years after his imprisonment and rehabilitation, at a funeral attended by luminaries of the Left. I told him about the night at his niece’s apartment, which he found amusing as ancient history. I didn’t get a fair chance to sample his famous dry wit. It was his brother Philip with whom I made significant acquaintance, and from whom I received a late education in pacifism, commitment, and Christian sacrifice—a brief but not superficial glimpse of the singular mind of an individual who could live as the Berrigans lived.
In the eternal struggle between the flesh and the spirit, it was the weakness that I always understood. Phil Berrigan, as much as anyone I ever met, showed me the strength. In May 1994 he and two of his pacifist commandos were locked in the county jail in Edenton, North Carolina, awaiting trial for applying their hammers of justice to the nose cones of F-15E fighter planes at Seymour Johnson Air Force Base. Phil, then seventy, had already spent more years in prison than Mohandas Gandhi. A former semipro ballplayer and an infantry lieutenant at the Battle of the Bulge, he was still physically imposing—to carry out his symbolic assault on the F-15Es he climbed an eight-foot fence, forded a freezing knee-deep stream, and crossed three-quarters of a mile of pavement on his hands and knees.
A tough cookie, this warrior-priest, who talked about his eleven-plus years in prisons the way scholars talk about graduate school. Sympathetic to his cause, I hadn’t known what to expect from him or his fellow prisoners of conscience. I’m profoundly claustrophobic, and people who would give up their physical freedom for their beliefs, for any beliefs, stood well outside my experience. Maybe I anticipated some kind of feverish, hollow-eyed fanatics. What Berrigan showed me instead was the supernatural self-control, the peace and apparently impregnable calm that must come with a firm belief in a benevolent personal God. If I try to describe myself at that time—as my forties ended—disillusioned and skeptical are words that come to mind. I had not found a God like Berrigan’s, and doubted that I ever would—but only an idiot would have failed to recognize the power that it gave him. One of the things I remember best about this strange encounter in the Chowan County jail is that the deputies and jailers—none of them educated or Catholic, I would guess—seemed almost as impressed with their prisoners as I was. They were respectful, almost gentle with Phil Berrigan and big John Dear, a Duke-educated Jesuit, and their younger disciple Bruce Friedrich.
At least in my presence they were gentle, and it’s not as if I was Mike Wallace and the crew from 60 Minutes. A mild irony was that Philip Berrigan, for all his sacrifice and the transfiguring power of his faith, was not immune to the call of the flesh. He secretly married a former nun in 1970, when he was still a working priest, and later fathered three children. This was a weakness he shared with the great Thomas Merton. Merton (not unlike Saint Augustine) earned a reputation as a libertine in his student days at Cambridge and was forever susceptible to wine, women, and song—jazz, in the latter case. The Kentucky writer James Still, a friend of mine, used to sneak six-packs of beer into Gethsemani Abbey to share with this imperfect monk, whose (avowedly) platonic love affair with a student nurse in Louisville caused a scandal at the abbey when Merton was fifty and world famous.
Dan Berrigan seems to have been the true ascetic, the one best suited for the priesthood or the monastery. For most of his ninety-five years he owned virtually nothing, and according to the people who loved him he never noticed the absence of material things that most Americans take for granted. This was an ideal condition to which I always aspired—of all the monastic vows, poverty would have been the easiest for me—but never quite managed to achieve. (Chastity, silence, obedience—are you serious?) In a diseased consumer culture like America’s, uncontaminated citizens like Daniel Berrigan have been viewed as exotic aliens. Of all the quotes I’ve collected from compatriots whose wisdom was inadequately celebrated, my favorite is a premature self-epitaph from Patrick Hemingway, retired big-game guide and son of the famous Papa: “Say what you will about me, call me an underachiever, but I was never a consumer, and I was never a fan.”
I like to think the Berrigans read Hemingway’s boast somewhere, and shared it with satisfaction. The strength their neighbors squandered getting and spending, these brothers devoted to emulating Jesus, as they understood him, and pleasing God. I thought a lot about their faith after witnessing it in practice in the Chowan County jail. The essential work of their lives was conscience building—deciding (or learning, the scholarly Jesuit might have said) exactly what God expects of your conscience and obeying, without question, as long as you live. The voice of your conscience becomes the same as the voice of your God. A God I approved of, in their case, even if I couldn’t share him. Theirs was no soft, malleable, spongy sort of God who forgives us for everything or who can be molded to any desperate purpose—the worst examples of this all-too-human heresy would be the KKK using the cross of Dan Berrigan’s Jesus as a symbol of racist terrorism, or jihadists murdering Muslims (and others) in the name of a homicidal god. The Berrigans’ God was a harder God they followed down a hard road; the best consciences I ever witnessed under pressure weren’t half as strict as theirs.
Their brand of radical pacifism was too demanding to attract a host of disciples—Jesus barely managed double figures, after all—but the quality of their converts was very high. John Dear, the Jesuit from North Carolina who was jailed in Edenton with Phil Berrigan, has been arrested seventy times for nonviolent protests and served several years in prison. He was dismissed by the Jesuits in 2013 because his passion for peace, in the eyes of his superiors, had compromised his vows of obedience to the order. “Obedience to God comes first,” I remember Dear saying, in his jail cell in 1994. But many of us in North Carolina are extremely proud of him for sustaining the work of the Plowshares Movement, for keeping the faith as he inherited it from the Berrigans.
Phil Berrigan died in 2002. Now Dan is gone too, and John Dear, a vigorous young lion of a priest when I met him, is nearing sixty. The New York Times describes the peace movement as “withering”; the Pentagon and the Society of Jesus operate much as they did before the Plowshares priests took up their hammers. The secretary of state who once stage-managed America’s involvement in the Middle East carnage was narrowly defeated in the 2016 presidential election by a saber-rattling right-wing maniac who raves about bombing Arab countries until the sand glows. After thirteen years, at a cost of more than two trillion dollars and 4,500 American deaths, the United States of America—which defeated Hitler, Tojo, and Mussolini in less than four years—has failed to “secure” the single city of Baghdad or the highway to its airport. All Vietnam’s lessons remain stubbornly unlearned.
“This is the worst time of my life,” an eighty-seven-year-old Dan Berrigan said in 2008, the last year of the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld war machine. “I have never had such meager expectations of the system.” But he was in firm command of the irony involved in making great sacrifices for an apparently hopeless cause. He preached that believing in God and doing the right thing, regardless of consequences, were the imperatives that kept a decent person sane. “The day after I’m embalmed,” he vowed, “that’s when I’ll give it up.” His refusal to retreat or despair reminded me of the day I spent with his brother Phil in the Edenton jail.
“Is there a temptation to despair and quit, to fold up our tents and go back to normalcy, to our personal requirements?” Phil asked himself, and his comrades. “I suppose. But the consequences of withdrawal are reprehensible. Silence lends assent, doesn’t it? Jesus didn’t withdraw. I preserve a lot of hope.”
“We’re prey to discouragement,” he admitted when we were alone, the last thing he said to me before the cell door clicked shut on him again. “The public resists the lessons of history—it scarcely acknowledges history. Americans seem tired of perplexing social issues. It comes from the way we live in this country, I guess.”
Neither their country nor their church ever lived up to the Berrigans’ expectations, and nothing about the way we live in this country offers much hope that there will be another generation of radical priests to hold America’s feet to the spiritual fire. There are no schools that breed Christian soldiers of their unbending creed, to insist as they did that war, militarism, and gun violence are all one disease, and one linked inseparably to all the other diseases—oppression, poverty, starvation, racism, environmental degradation—that threaten to bring the human adventure to a premature conclusion. War is insane and disgusting, and it will be with us always, undermining most progress in the direction of civilization. Frustrated pacifists find consolation in the conviction that we’re on the right side of history. That consolation is more powerful, apparently, for those convinced that they’re on the right side of a righteous God.
Can traditional religion, burdened by its own history, disrespected by science, crowded almost into the shadows by conspicuous consumption and metastasizing technology, still inspire unusual individuals to live heroically, on a consistently higher moral plane? The answer, for anyone familiar with the Berrigan brothers, is a confident “Yes.” But there’s always my other question, which I’d never be rude enough to pose to a man of faith: If God made and loves us all, why did he make so many of us cruel and stupid?
I’ve never forgotten a prayer I learned in summer school from the Jesuits of Canisius College in Buffalo, where an Alsatian priest taught me more and better French in two months than several expensive schools had taught me in six years: “Mère de Dieu, priez pour nous, maintenant et à l’heure de notre mort.”
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