David E. Anderson: Dispatches from the Front
The Berrigan Letters: Personal Correspondence between Daniel and Philip Berrigan. Daniel Cosacchi and Eric Martin, editors. Maryknoll, New York, Orbis Books, 2016
In a letter he wrote from the penitentiary in Danbury, Connecticut, in 1971, Daniel Berrigan referred to the many letters already exchanged between himself and his brother Philip and asked, “Do you manage by the way to hang onto any of these immortal patchworks? They’re about the closest thing I get to a diary of sorts these days. I keep yours—it is all part of an ongoing record; as well as to read again and again.”
If patchwork is an apt description of this generous sampling from the over 2,000 letters and cards the Berrigan brothers exchanged over the course of some 70 years, then it could also be said that the stitching that transforms the patchwork into a luminous quilt is their unusually deep and abiding love for one another; their profound commitment to the Roman Catholic faith (if not always to the institutional church); and their unrelenting fidelity to the nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience they found in the gospel message of Jesus.
The Berrigan brothers—Daniel, a celebrated poet, teacher, and Jesuit priest who died this year on April 30 at the age of 94, and his brother, Philip, a one-time Josephite priest expelled from his religious order when he married, who died in 2002 at the age of 79—burst into the national consciousness on May 17, 1968, when they broke into the local draft board in Catonsville, Maryland, and using homemade napalm set fire in the parking lot to the draft board’s files.
The brothers were leaders and, to some, virtually the founders of the radical wing of the Catholic peace movement.
But as the letters make abundantly clear, the slow development of the brothers toward their vision of the Christian’s radical and nonviolent role in the church did not occur in isolation—or a vacuum. The Trappist monk Thomas Merton, a close friend and collaborator whose writings on spirituality and nonviolence were very popular in the 1950s and 1960s, was an important and ongoing influence and correspondent until his death in 1968. In addition, both brothers learned from and were encouraged by Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement. Dan, especially, remained close to her until she died, also in 1968. When he was released in 1972 from prison in Danbury, he headed for New York for mass at the Catholic Worker and offered to Dorothy Day the $50 bill given to all released prisoners. She first sprinkled it with holy water, telling him, “Now we can use this.”
Although the Catonsville action was not the beginning of religious resistance to the Vietnam War (both Philip and Daniel had already been arrested for committing acts of civil disobedience), it was a symbolically charged moment that galvanized the movement and led to a host of other similar actions, many including one or both of the brothers as well as other priests, nuns, and religious, and some Protestant clergy and laity.
At the end of the Vietnam War, the movement did not fade away but was transformed into the even more contentious and controversial antinuclear group known as Plowshares, in which activists sought to symbolically damage missiles and other war-related weapons by beating them with hammers and pouring their own blood on them.
The brothers’ more than 50 years of activism—including their imprisonments and the many books they wrote—made them, arguably, two of the most important Roman Catholics of the 20th century.
Often letter writers correspond with one eye on the recipient and the other eye on history. Not so with most of the exchanges between the Berrigan brothers. Many of these letters read like dispatches from the front lines, passionate words of encouragement and support dashed off between meetings or demonstrations, on trips, during preparations for court appearances, or while spending time in prison.
Yet the brothers also know they are, indeed, writing at times for the historical record, and as circumstances change there are moments of reflection on strategy as well the necessity of the proper method of resistance: nonviolent civil disobedience.
The correspondence begins in 1940 with a letter from Dan as he is in the middle of a two-year novitiate, wanting to know “everything about school, skating—everything in fact that was so common to us back a very short time ago.” The last is also from Dan, dated November 12, 2002, as Phil is approaching death and the brothers seek to resolve what to do with their letters and other papers.
In between these dates there are many gaps—no letters, for example, from Phil until 1962, and nothing from either brother between 1955 and 1962. Still, it is possible to see their growing political engagement, first in the civil rights movement and then in the antiwar movement, and their grappling with what is required of Christian witness in the face of racism and war.
“I often think that fidelity to Christ means more and more the outside stance for the sake of what remnant (of the Church) is kicking around,” Phil writes in 1964. Later, after the brothers joined the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr and others in the Selma-to-Montgomery voting rights march, Phil amplifies, saying he feels “eventually I will have to expose myself to the public eye through the press, and perhaps to go into civil disobedience and perhaps fastings, preferably in jail.”
Sometimes there was discouragement that needed to be countered. Phil wrote in 1975: “God has not turned from us—He’s just unusually soft-spoken.” And as Dan noted in 1984, “It’s a helluva world but not a bad Christ after all.” Yet, at the same time, the brothers also had the self-confidence to muse on what they would do if they received the Nobel Peace Prize.
Throughout the correspondence the Berrigans’ mutual affection grows, despite occasional—no doubt inevitable—tensions and differences that arise during any long and close relationship.
Dan had been hurt when Phil waited more than two years to tell his brother that in 1969 he had married Elizabeth McAllister, a former nun and activist as committed to the radical resistance movement as the two brothers. She became as significant a leader in the Catholic resistance movement as Phil and Dan.
In a 1987 letter from Dan criticizing the direction of Plowshares, Phil responded sharply to what he called his brother’s “suspicions” of the group. He defended the movement and said, “I know the people and trust them. I think you ought to also. As far as I’m concerned, none of these groups that we had anything to do with have gotten off base. They went thru long, prayerful, exhausting preparation, and following that, knew pretty well what they were doing.” As for his brother’s letter, Phil concludes dismissively, “I don’t think it’s worthy of you.”
A 1989 exchange of letters demonstrates even deeper rifts between the brothers. Phil tells Dan he feels himself little more than “an appendage…your acolyte.” Nevertheless, he insists, “I approach working with you in reverence. Need I spell that out?” Then he pleads, “I would prefer being treated by you as equal. In my sight, perhaps not God’s, I have expended as much for peace as you have.” And finally, “You don’t listen that well to us, creating a frequent impression condescending and patronizing.”
Dan replies to Phil with a long epistle of his own, arguing that “your treatment of me and your letter does you small honor.”
The brothers could also be arrogant both about their actions and about the insufficient commitment of others: “There ain’t anybody much—you and me?—still speaking the truth,” Phil observes in 1975. After a visit to Philadelphia, where he saw “many friends,” Phil notes: “Of course, nobody is/does anything, but rather congratulate themselves on hearing one like us at bargain basement prices.”
But much more typical is Phil’s birthday greeting to Dan in 1966: “And so my love and respect for you grows with the years. I recall you remembering a few great priests in your life and how they influenced you. For me there has been but one, and it is graphically and emphatically you. If this were all the Lord chose to give me, it would be enough ….”
And there is Dan, writing to Phil in 1972 during the trial of the Harrisburg Eight: “My hours with you were precious beyond saying. I needed them so much. … It seems 2 B part of things that I am repeatedly saying goodbye 2 you in jail. This hits the flesh like a drop of acid on an eyeball, But I blink a few times + all is well. Another way of saying thank you + I love you + we’ll make it.”
There are some lacunae in the Berrigan letters, perhaps understandable given their sense of urgency, the necessity they felt for moral encouragement and morale building, and the large collection of essays and other writings that were being turned out by both of the brothers. Still, it seems odd there is only glancing recognition of the world outside the immediacy of the narrow realm of the Catholic resistance movement. There are few references, for example, to the wider peace movement, the mass demonstrations against Vietnam, the political peace movement sparked by Minnesota Senator Eugene McCarthy’s presidential campaign, and little acknowledgment of such influential organizations as the controversial Students for a Democratic Society, the rise of the violence-prone Weather Underground, or the involvement of Protestant leaders such as the Rev. William Sloane Coffin.
Indeed, there seems to be nothing in the letters but contempt for the mainstream political process. President Carter is dismissed as a “peanut vendor,’’ and the presidential campaign of Senator George McGovern is described by Phil as “warm and vapid—like baby vomit.’’ In a 1971 letter that is as alienated as any angry voter today, Dan writes, “I say a pox on all congressmen + their promises, roughly equivalent to their flatulence, which is awesome if consequential.”
Likewise their disillusionment with Catholic officialdom. Over time, while their faith in the gospel deepens and strengthens, they find themselves increasingly isolated from the institutional church, especially the Catholic hierarchy, although Dan remains a Jesuit until the end of his life. “Bishops have a use; mostly to deny Christ,” he writes Phil in 1971 with more than a touch of sarcasm. “It’s an old job; Peter saw its potential so brilliantly.” And on his way to speak to members of the Presbyterian Fellowship of Reconciliation during the denomination’s General Assembly in 1978, Dan writes disdainfully that the denomination is “in deep throes about gay ordination and other assorted non questions.”
Doctoral students Daniel Cosacchi and Eric Martin do yeomen’s editorial work providing background and context for the letters they have chosen from a large, rich, insightful correspondence. Their notes and prefaces go a long way to making clearer what would otherwise be obscure or private references to both people and events.
The Berrigan letters are an important, even essential addition to understanding a momentous era in the life of the US Roman Catholic Church and, indeed, the nation. At the same time, they need to be read alongside other works by the brothers, as well as memoirs, biographies, and histories of the last half to the 20th century to catch their full significance.
David E. Anderson is senior editor at Religion News Service.
