[Peace-discuss] Fwd: Philip Berrigan, Apostle of Peace Dies .. [Baltimore Sun]

[Margaret E. Kosal]

fyi -  in addition to the Common Dreams piece 
(http://www.commondreams.org/news2002/1206-01.htm), which was distributed 
to the CU IMC list.

Namaste,
Margaret

>Baltimore Sun
>
>Philip Berrigan, apostle of peace, dies at age 79
>Josephite father called protests 'prophetic acts'
>By Jacques Kelly and Carl Schoettler
>Sun Staff
>
>Originally published December 7, 2002
>
>Philip Berrigan, the patriarch of the Roman Catholic anti-war
>movement whose conscience collided with national policy for more than
>three decades, died last night of liver and kidney cancer. He was 79
>and had lived at Jonah House on the grounds of a West Baltimore
>cemetery for much of the past decade.
>
>He led the Catonsville Nine, who staged one of the most dramatic
>protests of the 1960s. They doused homemade napalm on a small bonfire
>of draft records in a Catonsville parking lot and ignited a
>generation of anti-war dissent. More recently he helped found the
>Plowshares movement, whose members have attacked federal military
>property in anti-war and anti-nuclear protests and were then often
>imprisoned.
>
>Mr. Berrigan died at 9:30 p.m. at the Jonah House, a communal living
>facility of war resisters.
>
>In a final statement released by his family, he said, "I die with the
>conviction, held since 1968 and Catonsville, that nuclear weapons are
>the scourge of the earth; to mine for them, manufacture them, deploy
>them, use them, is a curse against God, the human family, and the
>earth itself."
>
>Though Mr. Berrigan was an Army veteran - he was a second lieutenant
>in the infantry - who fought across Western Europe in World War II,
>he persistently and publicly criticized the Vietnam War and U.S.
>foreign and domestic policy. He first gained national attention
>during part of the 14-year period during which he wore the Roman
>collar and clerical garb of a Josephite priest.
>
>He eventually served some 11 years in jail and prison for his actions
>challenging public authority and repeated bashing of the military
>budget.
>
>Howard Zinn, professor emeritus at Boston University who maintained a
>friendship with Mr. Berrigan through the years because they had
>similar views, called him "one of the great Americans of our time."
>
>"He believed war didn't solve anything," Mr. Zinn said. "He went to
>prison again and again and again for his beliefs. I admired him for
>the sacrifices he made. He was an inspiration to a large number of
>people."
>
>Mr. Berrigan saw his protests as "prophetic acts" based on the
>Biblical injunction to beat swords into plowshares, and that included
>the "symbolic" destruction of Selective Service records in raids on
>draft board offices in the Baltimore Customs House in 1967 and in
>Catonsville in 1968. He was also convicted of smuggling letters in
>and out of the federal penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pa., while an
>inmate there in 1970, though the conviction was later thrown out. The
>end of the Vietnam War failed to silence him; he continued his
>missions of dissent until the end of his life.
>
>In his most recent clash in December 1999, Mr. Berrigan and others
>banged on A-10 Warthog warplanes in an anti-war protest at the Middle
>River Air National Guard base. He was convicted of malicious
>destruction of property and sentenced to 30 months. He was released
>Dec. 14 last year.
>
>Mr. Berrigan's brother Daniel, a Jesuit priest and poet who
>participated in the 1968 Catonsville protest, later wrote the play
>The Trial of the Catonsville Nine, which ran on Broadway for 29
>performances in 1971 and was made into a movie a year later. It
>recounted verbatim episodes from the trial and the moral dilemmas of
>the Vietnam War era.
>
>"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," said a statement Philip Berrigan and his eight
>fellow protestors issued that day in Catonsville. "We are convinced
>that the religious bureaucracy in this country is racist, is an
>accomplice in this war and is hostile to the poor."
>
>He expanded those views to include opposition to almost any form of
>established government that would wage war, deploy nuclear weapons or
>even use nuclear power. Neither he nor any member of the Jonah House
>community had voted for years because of their dismissal of
>government.
>
>"We don't know whether we're qualified to vote because we're all
>felons," he said recently. "But we intend to pursue it for the
>elections in 2004 because it's pretty important to get Bush out of
>there."
>
>Philip Francis Berrigan was born Oct. 5, 1923, in Two Harbors, Minn.,
>then a thriving mining town on the Mesabi Iron Range.
>
>According to a 1976 Current Biography profile, Mr. Berrigan stressed
>the influence of his father, Thomas, a trade unionist turned
>Socialist who lost his job as a railroad engineer. Mr. Berrigan later
>characterized his father as a "tyrannical" man. He said he father's
>treatment left him apt to "bristle against authority."
>
>"Our mother (Frida) was a mild woman, dedicated to her six sons and
>to her religion," said his brother, Jim Berrigan, a retired
>electrical engineer who lives in Salisbury.
>
>After graduating from high school in Syracuse, N.Y., Mr. Berrigan
>cleaned New York Central Railroad locomotives. A good athlete, he was
>a first baseman who played with a local semi-professional team. He
>also enjoyed golf and basketball in college.
>
>He spent one semester at St. Michael's College in Toronto before
>being drafted into the U.S. Army in January 1943 for service in World
>War II. He was an artillery man in some of the fiercest action from
>Normandy to the Battle of the Bulge, where he was chosen to go to
>infantry school near Paris. He served out the rest of the war as an
>infantry officer, a second lieutenant.
>
>He earned an English degree at College of the Holy Cross in
>Worcester, Mass. In 1950, he followed his brother Jerome into the
>Society of St. Joseph. The order, known as the Josephite Fathers,
>serves African-American communities. Ordained in 1955, he was
>assigned to New Orleans, where he earned a degree in secondary
>education at Loyola University of the South in 1957 and a master's at
>Xavier University three years later.
>
>While at Xavier, he began teaching English and religion and
>counseling students at his order's St. Augustine High School.
>
>"From the beginning, he stood with the urban poor," Daniel Berrigan
>wrote of his brother's years in the priesthood. "He rejected the
>traditional, isolated stance of the Church in black communities. He
>was also incurably secular; he saw the Church as one resource,
>bringing to bear on the squalid facts of racism the light of the
>Gospel, the presence of inventive courage and hope. He worked with
>CORE [Congress of Racial Equality], SNCC [Student Non-Violent
>Coordinating Committee], the Urban League, the forms of Catholic
>action then in vogue. He took Freedom Rides, did manual work of all
>kinds, begged money and gave it away, struggled for scholarships for
>black students."
>
>Philip Berrigan, in a recent Sun interview, said his first arrest of
>many came in 1962 or 1963 during a civil rights protest in Selma,
>Ala., at which point his name began appearing in newspapers. He would
>become quite adept at surviving in prison. He got along with the
>other prisoners, even murderers sometimes, and they accepted him. He
>led Bible study classes and helped prisoners with educational and
>legal matters. If he had extra money, he would buy items from the
>prison commissaries for down-and-out inmates.
>
>As an activist priest, Father Berrigan soon got in trouble with his
>church superiors. He was transferred to the faculty of Epiphany
>Apostolic College, a Josephite seminary in Newburgh, N.Y., where he
>again led protests on behalf of the poor.
>
>Rosalie Bertell, 73, of Buffalo, N.Y., an activist and member of the
>order of the Grey Nuns of the Sacred Heart, said she admired Mr.
>Berrigan for his "blunt honesty" and for
>the "choices he made in life."
>
>A longtime friend of the Berrigan family, Ms. Bertell is an
>internationally recognized expert on radiation and testified as an
>expert witness in trials where he was arrested for
>anti-nuclear demonstrations. "He knew the U.S. was becoming a killing
>machine, and he was willing to go to jail trying to stop it."
>
>As the United States expanded its presence in Vietnam, Father
>Berrigan became more outspoken and visible. In 1964, he organized the
>Emergency Citizens Group
>Concerned About Vietnam in Newburgh and co-founded the Catholic Peace
>Fellowship in New York City.
>
>Frustrated by the church's failure to speak out against the war, he
>compared its stance on Vietnam to "the German Church under Hitler."
>In another speech, he asked, "Is it
>possible for us to be vicious, brutal, immoral, and violent at home
>and be fair, judicious, beneficent and idealistic abroad?"
>
>Not long afterward, Father Berrigan's Josephite superiors transferred
>him again, this time to St. Peter Claver Church in West Baltimore.
>
>"He was an excellent curate, much respected in the community back in
>the 1960s," said the Rev. Michael Roach, a former Southwest Baltimore
>pastor who is now at St.
>Bartholomew's Church in Manchester.
>
>While at St. Peter Claver, Father Berrigan started the Baltimore
>Interfaith Peace Mission. He made frequent trips to Washington to
>lobby Congress and federal officials and
>lead vigils and other peace demonstrations.
>
>On Oct. 27, 1967, Father Berrigan and three others dumped blood on
>Selective Service records in the Baltimore Customs House, "anointing"
>them, he said. They waited to
>be arrested, as they would in subsequent protests. His arrest shocked
>the Catholic Church.
>
>In a statement to reporters, the Baltimore Four said that "this
>sacrificial and constructive act" was meant to protest "the pitiful
>waste of American and Vietnamese blood" in
>Indochina. It was a new kind of protest. The Baltimore chancery said
>the action was likely to "alienate a great number of sincere men in
>the cause of a just peace."
>
>Philip Berrigan and the three others were charged and convicted of
>defacing government property and impeding the Selective Service.
>While awaiting sentencing, Mr.
>Berrigan began recruiting brother Daniel and seven others for a
>second "prophetic act."
>
>The Catonsville Nine chose Selective Service Board 33, housed in a
>Knights of Columbus hall on Frederick Road in Catonsville.
>
>According to a Sun account, the nine walked into the draft board
>office on May 17, 1968, moved and swept aside stunned clerks and
>emptied filing cabinets of 600 draft
>records.
>
>They set the records afire with homemade napalm in the parking lot,
>said a prayer and waited for arrest. They spent the night in the
>Baltimore County Jail in Towson.
>
>Charged with conspiracy and destruction of government property, Mr.
>Berrigan and his companions were found guilty in U.S. District Court
>in Baltimore on Nov. 8, 1968.
>They were free on bail for 16 months until the U.S. Supreme Court
>declined to reconsider the verdict.
>
>But on the day they were supposed to begin serving their sentences,
>the Berrigan brothers and two others went into hiding. Twelve days
>later, FBI found Philip Berrigan at
>the Church of St. Gregory the Great in Manhattan, and he was taken to
>the federal prison in Lewisburg.
>
>Mr. Berrigan and Elizabeth McAlister, a former nun, a member of the
>Religious of the Sacred Heart of Mary, had secretly married a year
>earlier, in, as they put it, "trust and
>gratitude." The marriage was not disclosed until 1973, when there was
>a ceremony at which a former monk officiated.
>
>A fellow inmate at Lewisburg, who was allowed to take courses at a
>local college, carried messages between Mr. Berrigan and his wife.
>Ms. McAlister kept Mr. Berrigan
>informed of what was being done and said in the peace movement. They
>were unaware that the inmate carrying their messages was a paid
>informer and that copies of
>everything they wrote were going to the FBI.
>
>The FBI's scrutiny led to the capture of Daniel Berrigan, to the
>arrest of draft resisters in Rochester, N.Y., and to the indictment
>of Philip Berrigan, Ms. McAlister and five
>others.
>
>The government indicted the Harrisburg Seven on 23 counts of
>conspiracy, including plots to kidnap presidential adviser Henry A.
>Kissinger and to blow up heating tunnels
>in Washington. Defense lawyers, including Paul O'Dwyer, Ramsey Clark
>and Leonard Boudin, saw the conspiracy indictments as a "gross
>caricature," and the charges
>were later modified.
>
>In April 1972, a jury in Harrisburg, Pa., found Mr. Berrigan and his
>wife guilty on the letter-smuggling charges but deadlocked on all the
>other counts. A mistrial was
>declared. Everything was later thrown out by a federal appeals court.
>
>
>Pulitzer Prize-winning author Garry Wills, who lived in Baltimore
>from 1961 to 1980, said he participated in the anti-war
>demonstrations with the Berrigans.
>
>"I've known them for decades and I've written about them, and Phil
>has always been an inspiration to me," Mr. Wills said. "Phil was a
>real pacifist. He always turned the
>other cheek." Mr. Berrigan and Ms. McAlister helped start the anti-
>war and anti-nuclear Plowshares movement in the three-story Reservoir
>Hill rowhouse on Park Avenue
>they called Jonah House, in which they lived in community with other
>activists for years before moving into the old St. Peter the Apostle
>Cemetery in West Baltimore.
>
>Mr. Berrigan was the author of several books, including No More
>Strangers, Punishment for Peace, Prison Journals of a Priest
>Revolutionary and Widen the Prison Gates.
>In 1996, he wrote his autobiography, Fighting the Lamb's War, and
>with his wife wrote The Times' Discipline, a work on their life
>together at Jonah House.
>
>The funeral will be held at noon Monday at St. Peter Claver Church in
>West Baltimore, 1546 N. Fremont Ave. A wake will be held at the
>church from 4 p.m. to 8 p.m.
>tomorrow, with a circle of sharing at 6 p.m.
>
>Memorial donations may be made to Citizens for Peace in Space, Global
>Network Against Nuclear Weapons, Nukewatch, Voices in the Wilderness,
>the Nuclear Resister,
>or any Catholic Worker house.
>
>Survivors include Ms. McAlister; two daughters, Frida, a prolific
>writer who is a research associate at the World Policy Institute and
>a member of the War Resister's League executive committee, of New
>York, and Kate Berrigan, a senior at Oberlin College in Oberlin,
>Ohio; a son, Jerry Berrigan, a member of the Catholic Worker who is
>also involved in anti-war, anti-nuclear and anti-death penalty
>movements, of Luck, Mich.; four brothers, the Rev. Daniel Berrigan, a
>Jesuit priest in New York, John Berrigan of Prescott, Ariz., Jim
>Berrigan of Salisbury and Jerome Berrigan of Syracuse, N.Y.
>
>Copyright © 2002, The Baltimore Sun