Of Law, Duty and Conscience

By T.E.K.

Even within the wide latitudes accorded drama at the present, Father Daniel Berrigan's The Trial of the Catonsville Nine is a play in name only. It is a documentary recital of evidence presented at the trial of Berrigan, his brother Philip and seven other Catholic defendants in connection with the napalm burning of draft records at Catonsville, Md. Insofar as it can be classified, Nine falls within the area of the theater of fact. The subjects discussed have particular pertinence for a U.S. audience: the maltreatment of blacks, the exploitation of the poor in Latin American countries, the war in Viet Nam. This is an appeal to the Christian conscience by people who have borne witness to their own.

The testimony is both graphic and moving, and it takes two forms. There is an outward and an inward questioning, both of which led to the self-proclaimed "radicalization" of the defendants. The outward questioning consists of an account of conditions in other countries for which the Catonsville Nine hold the U.S. morally culpable. For example, Defendant George Mische testifies:

Where it was most terrible your

Honor

was in the Dominican Republic

A man like Trujillo

ran that country for 32 years

When someone dared talk

about social change or social reform

they would go into his house

take the head of the family out of

the house

cut off his penis put it in his mouth

cut off his arms and legs

drop them in the doorway

The inward questioning concerns the duty of a Christian when he finds himself confronted by public evil. Father Daniel Berrigan speaks:

The world expects--these are the

words of

Camus--the world expects that

Christians will

speak out loud and clear . . .

The world expects

that Christians will get away from

abstractions

and confront the bloodstained face

which history has taken on today

The grouping we need is a grouping

of men

resolved to speak up clearly and

pay up personally.

Civil disobedience is scarcely a historical novelty in the U.S. One of Gandhi's heroes was Thoreau, and the Berrigan brothers and their co-defendants have undoubtedly joined a goodly company of history's righteously angry men. However, a less impassioned perspective than that of Daniel Berrigan requires one to say that the U.S. is simply not so criminally degraded and steeped in blood lust as the Catonsville Nine apparently take it to be. Some may wonder if a confusion of realms is not involved, as in the distinction that Shakespeare made in Henry V specifically concerning a war: "Every subject's duty is the king's, but every subject's soul is his own." In any event, the Christian does not live in the shadow of a calendar but under the aspect of eternity, and that is the judgment to which the Catonsville Nine have ultimately submitted themselves.

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