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Father Daniel Berrigan, Anti-War Activist & Poet, Dies at 94

“The legendary anti-war priest Father Daniel Berrigan died today at 94. He was a poet, pacifist, educator, social activist, playwright and lifelong resister to what he called “American military imperialism.” Along with his late brother, Phil, Dan Berrigan played an instrumental role in inspiring the anti-war and anti-draft movement during the late 1960s as well as the anti-nuclear movement.”

Break-In at Y-12

“In the fall of 1967, Philip Berrigan, a priest who frequently wrote for the Catholic Worker, went to the Baltimore Custom House with three other protesters, walked into the draft board, pulled open file cabinets, and poured bottles of their blood over draft records. While awaiting the legal resolution of that case, he and his older brother, the poet Daniel Berrigan, who was also a Catholic priest, turned the level of nonviolent resistance up a few notches. On May 17, 1968, the Berrigans and seven other activists entered a Selective Service office in Catonsville, Maryland. After a brief scuffle with two women clerks, the group grabbed hundreds of draft files from cabinets, carried them into a parking lot, and set them on fire with homemade napalm. Newspaper reporters and a television crew had been notified of the protest in advance. “We destroy these draft records not only because they exploit our young men,” a handout given to reporters said, “but because they represent misplaced power concentrated in the ruling class of America.” The recipe for napalm—a mixture of gasoline and soap flakes—had been found in a Green Beret handbook.

The actions of the Catonsville Nine elevated the Berrigan brothers to the pantheon of counterculture heroes, and their trial became an international media circus. Thousands of demonstrators marched through Baltimore to support the defendants, and hundreds of antiwar activists waited in line every morning for a seat in court. Philip Berrigan opposed the American-backed government of South Vietnam, and had even considered travelling there to fight alongside the Vietcong. Judge Roszel C. Thomsen allowed the Berrigans to discuss their motives on the witness stand, to tell the jury why the war in Vietnam was immoral, to explain why the foreign policy of the United States was illegal, not the burning of draft records. “We say: killing is disorder; life and gentleness and community and unselfishness is the only order we recognize,” Daniel Berrigan said. He later adapted the court transcripts into a play, composed in free verse, that was widely performed.”

Daniel J. Berrigan, Defiant Priest Who Preached Pacifism, Dies at 94

“Father Berrigan seemed to reach a poet’s awareness of his place in the scheme of things, and that of his brother Philip, who left the priesthood for a married life of service to the poor and spent a total of 11 years in prison for disturbing the peace in one way or another before his death from cancer in 2002. While they both still lived, Daniel Berrigan wrote:

My brother and I stand like the fences
of abandoned farms, changed times
too loosely webbed against
deicide homicide
A really powerful blow
would bring us down like scarecrows.
Nature, knowing this, finding us mildly useful
indulging also
her backhanded love of freakishness
allows us to stand.”

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