The Berrigans: Jail for the Christian Conscience

For much of the day, FBI agents had watched the red brick building on New York's Upper West Side that houses the Roman Catholic church, school and rectory of St. Gregory the Great. Toward the end of the afternoon they made their move. Inside, they prowled through the rectory, poking into closets ("Father Phil, are you there?"), peering under beds ("Father Dan, are you there?"). One passageway was locked shut, and an agent barked an order to break the door down. Minutes later, in a closet, they found Fugitive Priest Philip Berrigan, 46, and Poet Dave Eberhardt, 28, both overdue to begin federal prison sentences for destroying Selective Service files. The two were marched off in handcuffs. The agents were unable to find Philip's elder brother and fellow fugitive, Poet-Priest Daniel Berrigan, 48.

Thus last week, two of Christianity's happiest conspirators were separated, Philip Berrigan in a federal prison and Daniel Berrigan, for the moment at least, in hiding. Both had been scheduled to begin their sentences April 9 for draft board raids at Baltimore and Catonsville.* Both had decided, in Daniel Berrigan's words, "to resist this automatic claim on our persons" and to make at least one more public appearance before being jailed to protest the Viet Nam War, racism and the oppression of the poor.

Daniel Berrigan, a director of Cornell United Religious Work, succeeded. In a two-hour appearance at a "freedom Seder" held at Cornell over the pre-Passover weekend, he spoke to some 10,000 students gathered for an "America Is Hard to Find" festival. Apparently because federal agents wanted to avoid a student riot, he was allowed to slip away. The following Tuesday his brother was to appear with Dave Eberhardt at an "Up from Under" rally at St. Gregory the Great--until the FBI stepped in. Philip Berrigan had made a considerable sacrifice for that unrealized moment of final resistance: by failing to report as scheduled, he had seriously jeopardized his chances of a reduction of sentence suggested by an appellate court.

Such sacrifices come cheerfully to the Berrigans. They grew up during hard times in upstate New York, but their father, a pioneer union organizer, and their generous German mother laid out food and shelter for needy friends and strangers alike. Dan joined the Jesuits, Phil the Josephites, an order that works mainly in ghetto areas. Both priests deeply distrust private property because of the greed that it provokes in humanity. Phil, the polemicist, is gregarious and outgoing--a tall, brawny, bear-hugging Burt Lancaster of a man, given to warm laughter amid healthy belts of rye. Dan, the poet, is slighter--a cross between Charles Aznavour and Steve McQueen. In conversation, his eyes often seem to rest on some invisible distant mountain. Yet he, too, exudes wide good humor underlying the melancholy. To the fledgling activist, he recommends "the merciful final words: Enjoy. Enjoy."

The Berrigans rigorously believe in the unadorned Gospel of Jesus Christ, with all its austere demands. Christian life, they assert, was never lived better than in the days of the frontier Christianity described in Acts: life in common, to each according to his needs, Christian love as the necessary antidote to pagan society.

That kenotic vision colors their view of revolution, which they see much less as a rebellion of the many than as a saving personal revolution, based on conversion, of the dedicated few.

Though remarkably loyal to their church and their religious orders, the Berrigans do not expect perfection from either. Writes Phil Berrigan in A Punishment for Peace: "If one can qualify as a Christian--and one never does this fully--it is both because and in spite of the Church, which has ingeniously shared both Christ's bed and the world's throughout history. It is both a bride and a whore, like all of us." On some points, moreover, the Berrigans are quite traditional. Though both have supported optional celibacy, they see the celibacy rule as an invaluable help in leading an unencumbered revolutionary life. Those who leave the Jesuits for the world, Daniel cautions his colleagues, will find "ashes in their mouths." He and his brother have pledged to each other that they will remain in the priesthood. They will, in fact, take it with them to prison. The church has been decidedly more tolerant than the Government, and both Berrigans will officially retain their right to say Mass, even in jail.

A Subtler Hell. Neither of the Berrigans threatens hellfire to those who refuse the cross they offer. They offer, instead, a subtler, 20th century hell. Philip, a voracious reader of history, marshals well-reasoned arguments to face the reluctant sinner with simple historical complicity in mankind's most ignoble achievements: nuclear bombings, raped cultures, mass starvation. Daniel cherishes literary hells, and offers the estrangement parables of a Camus or Ionesco. Salvation? The modern human paradigm is Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who found his manhood in rebellion. The ultimate paradigm is Jesus Christ.

Like Christ, however, the Berrigans have their communications problems. Some of their admirers are more than ready to stray from the Berrigans' pointedly spiritual prescription for nonviolent revolution (see box, page 65). At the Berrigan-less rally at St. Gregory the Great in Manhattan, one speaker gave an inflammatory speech filled with the rhetoric of violence, in which he declared: "There are no other alternatives." But the Berrigan spirit prevailed: one lone, brave parishioner in the back shouted loudly, "Not true!"

In the face of what they see as a self-deceiving world, that is what the Berrigans have been saying all along.

* Philip Berrigan, Eberhardt, Baltimore Artist Thomas Lewis and United Church of Christ Minister James Mengel made up the Baltimore Four, who poured blood on draft files in Baltimore in October 1967. Six months later, Artist Lewis and Phil Berrigan led another raid, using homemade napalm to burn draft files in Catonsville, Md. Daniel Berrigan and six other Catholic activists were with them. Dan--who produced two books out of the experience, The Trial of the Catonsville Nine and Trial Poems--was sentenced to three years in jail, Phil to two concurrent terms of six and 3 1/2 years.

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