A Dialogue With Radical Priest Daniel Berrigan

Presidential Aide Henry Kissinger recently met with three of the alleged co-conspirators in the Berrigan case--the plot to kidnap Kissinger and blow up Government buildings. For 75 minutes they engaged in a polite discussion of U.S. policy in Indochina, but neither side came close to converting the other. Another, more amicable dialogue took place last August between Harvard Psychiatrist Robert Coles, author of Erik H. Erikson, the Growth of His Work, and Father Daniel Berrigan, just before Berrigan was captured by federal agents. Berrigan was convicted in 1968 of burning draft records in Catonsville, Md., as an act of protest against the Viet Nam War; since then, he has been named a coconspirator, but not a defendant in the kidnap plot. In a series of articles copyrighted by NYREV, Inc., the New York Review of Books is currently printing excerpts from the Coles-Berrigan conversations, which are to be published in book form as The Geography of Faith. Some key exchanges:

Berrigan: I have never been able to look upon myself as a criminal and I would feel that in a society in which sanity is publicly available I could go on with the kind of work which I have always done throughout my life. I never tried to hurt a person. I tried to do something symbolic with pieces of paper. We tend to overlook the crimes of our political and business leaders. We don't send to jail Presidents and their advisers and certain Congressmen and Senators who talk like bloodthirsty mass murderers. We concentrate obsessively and violently on people who are trying to say things very differently and operate in different ways.

Coles: How would you apply your thinking to those on the political right who would like the same kind of immunity from prosecution and the same kind of right to stay out of jail?

Berrigan: Well, that subject came out very acutely at our trial; the judge and the prosecution asked me that same question. How would we feel about people invading our offices and burning our files? And our answer was very simple: if that was done, the people who did it should also present their case before the public and before the judiciary and submit themselves to what we went through.

Coles: Well, how about one of the chiefs of the Klan who was arrested a while back and went through the process you describe--and as a result went to jail? Would you argue that he perhaps should have taken to the underground?

Berrigan: Well, it seems to me what we have got to discover is whether nonviolence is an effective force for human change. The Klansmen, as I understand it, have been rather violent over the years; so their methods are not ours.

Coles: Are their methods any different from the Weatherman's methods?

Berrigan: Well, I look upon the Weatherman as a very different phenomenon because I have seen in them very different resources and purposes. I believe that their violent rhythm was induced by the violence of the society itself --and only after they struggled for a long time to be nonviolent. I don't think we can expect young people, passionate young people, to be indefinitely nonviolent when every pressure put on them is one of violence--which I think describes the insanity of our society. And I can excuse the violence of those people as a temporary thing. I don't see a long-term ideological violence operating, as in the case of the Klansmen.

Coles: This issue is a very important point, and I find it extremely difficult to deal with because--in my opinion and I'll say it--you're getting close to a position that Herbert Marcuse and others take: you feel that you have the right to decide what to "understand" and by implication be tolerant of, even approve, and what to condemn strongly or call "dangerous" at a given historical moment. You feel you have the right to judge what is a long-term ideological trend, and what isn't, and you also are judging one form of violence as temporary and perhaps cathartic and useful or certainly understandable, with the passions not necessarily being condoned, whereas another form of violence you rule out as automatically ideological. It isn't too long a step from that to a kind of elitism, if you'll forgive the expression--to an elitism that Marcuse exemplifies, in which he condones a self-elected group who have power and force behind them, who rule and outlaw others in the name of, presumably, the "better world" that they advocate. There is something there that I find very arrogant and self-righteous and dangerous.

Berrigan: O.K. Well, let's agree to differ on that, maybe from the point of view of a certain risk that I am willing to take in regard to those young people --a risk that I would be much less willing to take in regard to something as long-term as the Klan. But there is always danger in taking these risks, and the only way in which I can keep reasonably free of that danger is by saying in public and to myself that the Weatherman ideology (for instance) is going to meet up with people who are going to be very harshly and severely critical of it, as I have been and will be; in fact, at the point in which their rhetoric expresses disregard of human life and human dignity, I stand aside and I say no, as I will say no to the war machine. But I discern changes in our radical youth, including the Weatherman. And again I have hope for them, hope they will not be wedded to violence.

Coles: You mentioned a little while back that you especially have hope for our young who are university-educated and who have their ideals if not their actions grounded in certain values that you share. I strongly disagree--in the sense that I have not found that people in universities (or for that matter many others who in this century have proclaimed the brotherhood of man) are any more immune to arrogance and meanness and viciousness and snobbery than others of us are. Many of the people I work with (they are now called "middle Americans") are young people --and you don't talk about them . . . Some of these young people may not be as murderous as some of the young people you're talking about. -

Coles: You say you feel American power is uniquely dangerous to the world. I do not agree. I see American power as one element in the world, and one dangerous element. But I do not see American power as uniquely dangerous--not when we have before us the spectacle of Soviet power, and rising Chinese power, and falling British power. How can one overlook the murderous greed we have seen the Kremlin display? What is one to make of the outlandish iconography Mao's Peking unashamedly tries to impose on China, and maybe all Asia?

Berrigan: I am arguing that we are particularly dangerous as a nation--because of the nuclear resources and armaments we possess, and also because of the ideological frenzy induced in us by 20 years of a "cold war." I would never deny that other nations are also dangerous ... I never expect decent activity from great power, whether it be church power or state power.

Coles: You claim it is because I am a husband and a father that I am cautious. In another sense of the word I "husband" my resources and remain loyal to the system, the social system, the economic system, out of fear, out of trembling for my children ... So, I carefully, maybe semiconsciously, calibrate how far "out" I dare go politically. Is that what you're saying?

Berrigan: Yes. And I think marriage as we understand it and family life as we understand it in this culture both tend to define people in a far more suffocating and totalizing way than we want to acknowledge. There is a very nearly universal supposition that after one marries one ought to cool off with regard to political activism and compassion--as compared to one's student days, one's "young" days.

Coles: Married men to a degree lose their social compassion?

Berrigan: Yes.

Coles: You are saying that our institutions are not fit institutions and therefore have no right to exercise their authority as institutions and determine, for instance, how to deal with violence, whether it be from the Klan or from the Weatherman. But if those institutions don't have such authority, which institutions, which people do?

Berrigan: We do.

Coles: Who is we!

Berrigan: Well, we are that small and assailed and powerless group of people who are nonviolent in principle and who are willing to suffer for our beliefs in the hope of creating something very different for those who will follow us. It is we who feel compelled to ask, along with, let's say, Bonhoeffer or Socrates or Jesus, how man is to live as a human being and how his communities are to form and to proliferate as instruments of human change and of human justice; and it is we who struggle to do more than pose the questions --but rather, live as though the questions were all-important, even though they cannot be immediately answered.

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