Daniel Berrigan wrote me a letter 25 years before I was born.
The letter, written from prison in 1971, was addressed to “young Jesuits.” I was not a young Jesuit then, but I am now. His basic invitation in the letter is clear. Though to call it an invitation is generous, perhaps misleading. It is more like a demand, an indictment, an “if you know what’s good for you, then you will…,” a clarion call from one who is speaking from the office of prophet—and the urge was this: Go to prison.
“Resistance to the war-ridden, blood-shot state is the form that human life is called to assume today,” he writes in his typical black-and-white morality. And for Dan, it was clear what “resistance” meant. It did not mean a statement. It did not mean a class. It did not mean an article like this one I am writing right now. No.
For Dan, resistance meant something radical, like putting your body somewhere where the same authorities responsible for dropping bombs would have to pick your body up and drop it somewhere else. It meant real, obvious and serious disruption. Resistance meant putting your whole weight, the literal weight of your body behind, over, under, next to that of Leviathan. So, get to it, he suggested.
Daniel Berrigan, S.J., died 10 years ago today. The state is no less war-ridden, no less bloodshot. Maybe more so. What are we to do?
If Dan were alive today, he would likely head to prison again, a consequence of having made it very clear, not with words but with his body, how defiantly opposed he was to the ongoing murder of children, the starvation of families, the bombing of anyone at all. He would do so in the name of Jesus, and he would tell us to do the same.
Are we to do the same?
“[Resistance] is also the simplest, most logical way of translating the gospel into an argot that will be exact and imaginative at once,” he writes. “It is an occasion of rebirth…. We will either die in our old skins (with all that implies of violated promise, personal despair) or we will come to a second birth by giving our lives for others. (I plead guilty here to a fundamentalism that prison tends to hasten.)”
How to be reborn was an imperative question for Dan. It is a theme throughout that letter and other writings. For him, to be reborn was to live for others by defying, as dramatically as possible, anything that advances the death of our brothers and sisters.
In these months, as war continues to rev up, and, as Dan says, “war can only rev up,” I am often left thinking about him. I am aware of how far the Society of Jesus and I are from what Dan would have us be, at least in the face of war.
Yet, I am aware that Dan is one man, one Jesuit. While his strong, insistent vision is not what we all need to be measured against, I do consider his voice to be a prophetic one; his witness was a historical marker and a special gift to the American church and the Society of Jesus.
He might consider this dismissive. What I am trying to say, though, is that I cannot dismiss him. I cannot dismiss his witness or his writings. In fact, the more absurd and insistent his writings or his actions, the more compelling they are to me. Particularly because the more absurd he was, the more absurd his foil—the death-dealing state—appeared.
This seems to be precisely what he was trying to do with his life, to expose the absolute absurdity of war-making and violence, to be an imitation of Jesus—the forgiving victim, the exposer of violence, the nonviolent resister, our savior.
“Our apologies, good friends, for the fracture of good order, the burning of paper instead of children,” go the opening lines to his famous statement about the Catonsville Nine’s burning of draft files during the Vietnam War. “We could not, so help us God, do otherwise.”
I find myself having to contend with the follow-up question: What allows me to do otherwise?
At his funeral, our brother Steve Kelly, S.J., preached that Dan’s life asks us:
Are we to remain in a catatonic stupor, asleep, drunk, unconscious, or in flat-lined existence? In these United States of Amnesia? Will we arrive at perdition, dominion of death, with our freedom never used, intact? What good is it if paralyzed in fear? Liberated, but not loving.
The United States is plunged into yet another bloody war, to say nothing of its violence against its own citizens and residents or its propping up of the horrors in Gaza. We have a president who has openly called for the destruction of a whole civilization, an administration that sees dehumanization not only as a strategy but seemingly a priority, and a diatribe against the pope for continuing to call for peace.
Dan would not be shocked or scandalized by President Donald Trump’s attack on Pope Leo. Dan would say it is as it should be. It reveals the truth.
“The old comfortable arrangements between church and state are helpless to generate newness,” he writes in his 1971 letter. Speaking of the priests, nuns and lay Christians heading to prison in resistance to war, he observes: “Christians in America have struck free. We could once be counted on by Caesar—for the silence that kills, for bargains arrived at across the bodies of the victims, for a blessing on violence and a sanction on murder. No more of that.”
But Dan would not be satisfied with the actions of the pope and his fellow American Catholics. He was never looking for statements, exchanges of words, carefully drafted positions or clarifications of just war theory, at which he would scoff. He wanted us to be “summoned before grand juries” for our refusal to put up with the murder of friends.
The prophet’s challenge
I never knew Dan Berrigan, though his memory and writings have played a formative role in my life as a Jesuit. In the middle of a pilgrimage I took as a Jesuit novice, I took a Greyhound bus from San Francisco to New York City to attend his funeral. I arrived at the Port Authority Bus Terminal in New York City just five hours before the funeral started, and walked in the rain to St. Francis Xavier Church in lower Manhattan.
I remember Dorothy Day’s granddaughter, Martha Hennessy, praying there for “those who use bed pans, and for those who clean them.” I remember Washington, D.C., Catholic Worker Kathy Boylan walking up to Communion holding a pillow case with some anti-war message painted on it. I remember just how similar the demographic at his funeral was to the one I was just with on the Greyhound—diverse, down and out, poor, some maybe a bit crazy.
Perhaps it is precisely because I never knew Dan that I call him a prophet and feel so challenged by his writing. I never had to eat dinner with him every night. I can read his calls to action without knowing of the cynicism and judgments he might have leveled at his brother Jesuits for never doing enough.
And yet, so many who did know him considered and still consider him a prophet. They feel equally challenged by his life and his writings. They loved him dearly.
Remembering Dan’s life is almost nauseating in the days we are living through, because it presents questions to us, to me, that I otherwise feel I can dodge. I know I have raised them already and I will again with no satisfying answer: What are we to do?
In a recent statement by the Jesuit leadership in the United States, our provincials condemned war and called for peace. “We ask all members of our network—Jesuit and lay alike—to work diligently for peace. All of us can and should be peacemakers!” they wrote, and then pointed out three ways forward.
First, work for peace in your local communities: “It is easy to denounce a conflict occurring halfway across the world,” they wrote, “but do we ever examine how we might be contributing to conflict and division here at home?”
Second, they encouraged us all to be diligent in pressuring the government “to oppose the escalation of any conflicts in which our countries are involved and to divert military spending toward nonviolent conflict prevention, diplomacy and peacebuilding.”
And finally, of course, they told us to pray for peace.
The statement may be less dramatic than the “radical priest[s]…on the cover of Newsweek,” as Paul Simon sang about the Berrigan brothers, or using homemade napalm to burn stolen draft files, like they did in Catonsville, but for those willing to hear the call, it is still convicting.
Dan would still not be satisfied. He would be asking where the call for resistance was. He would be making a fuss, again, about the Jesuit institutions that have R.O.T.C. programs.
He wrote in his 1971 letter, “If Caesar would make of the nation an abattoir, we refuse to be his executioners, his tourists, his do-gooders, his freeloaders. As Jesuits, we will disrupt the business of death as usual; in our own communities we will perhaps eventually stop playing our nuanced dance of the mind, whose tune is beautiful and seductive, but for which someone must pay—inevitably someone other than ourselves. We will stop making liturgy an excuse for inactions, the life of the mind a cul-de-sac, our communities a compound for cultural Brahmins.”
I cannot say this all came true since 1971. I know we are not disrupting the business of death as usual in the way Dan would. But I do know many Jesuits who are doing their best to confront the forces of evil, who are offering their lives and the best of themselves for the suffering, the displaced, the homeless, the migrant, the unborn, the imprisoned, the dying, the sick, the sinner—and Jesuits who are actively caring for the victims of war. I am proud, grateful, humbled to be in this Society of Jesus with them.
In the epilogue to his autobiography, Dan wrote:
What does a truly human life look like, in such times as we are enduring? In answering, I approached and reached a point at once dazzling and darksome. The point being the political and social consequences of the cross of Jesus. It is a point of sacrifice. I know that in its pristine rigor and crude innocence—even in its imperialized grandeur, the cross, (which is to say, the crucified One) invites the living to the heart of reality, in an embrace as guileless and self-giving as it is indifferent of consequence.
Perhaps 10 years after his death, we could be asking ourselves how indifferent we are to the consequences of the Gospel. How indifferent are we to the consequences of living utterly for others, in the name of peace, in the name of the Crucified One?
These are humbling and humiliating questions, if we are willing to be honest with our answers.
Alongside his urging of young Jesuits to resist the warmaking, he had another, perhaps even more vulnerable and costly invitation in that 1971 letter, one that is indeed prior to the stance of resistance. It was the urging of faith and of hope in the times and circumstances we are in:
We believe, at the edge of unbelief. Caesar may have created a situation in which faith comes into its own. He has nearly quenched the light. Does he serve to thrust us into the dark now, which is the proper atmosphere of faith? I believe the worst he can do is the prelude to the best which God will do…. If we are hopeful, patient, modest, inventive, and firm of heart, we will see great things. Even we.
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