Philip Berrigan

ALL BOLD TEXT NEEDS TO BE RE-WORDED AS IT IS ONLY A SOURCE Philip Berrigan (October 5, 1923 – December 6, 2002) was an internationally renowned American peace activist, Christian anarchist and former Roman Catholic priest. Along with his brother Daniel Berrigan, he was for a time on the FBI Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list for actions against war.

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Philip Berrigan was born in 1923, and after service in WWII, joined the Josephites, an order originally founded to minister to freed slaves. He was active in the civil rights movement and lectured extensively on race relations and poverty. Disturbed by U.S. Cold War policy in the early 60s, Berrigan began to speak out against militarism and the arms race. He was often at odds with the Church hierarchy over his peace activities, which ultimately became the focus of his life's work.

Berrigan was assigned to St. Peter Claver Church in Baltimore in 1965, and founded the Baltimore Interfaith Peace Mission. This group engaged in various protest activities before the two Baltimore area acts of resistance against the draft: the Customs House raid and the Catonsville Nine action.

Serving time in prison for these two actions, Berrigan secretly married Elizabeth McAlister, a nun. Excommunicated in 1973, the Berrigans founded Jonah House in West Baltimore, a community committed to nonviolent resistance to nuclear arms.

In 1980, Berrigan and other members of the community began the Plowshares movement, staging a protest at King of Prussia, PA. Since then, Plowshares members have continued to protest at weapons factories and nuclear facilities. Philip Berrigan died of cancer in December 2002. [1]

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On Friday, December 6, 2002 Philip Berrigan died at Jonah House, a community he co-founded in 1973, surrounded by family and friends. He died two months after being diagnosed with liver and kidney cancer, and one month after deciding to discontinue chemotherapy. For over 35 years Berrigan had been one of the nation's leading anti-war and anti-nuclear activists. He was the first U.S. Catholic priest to be jailed for political reasons and he was among the nation's first priests to participate in the Freedom Rides in the early 1960s. He helped found the Plowshares movement which took literally a line in the Book of Isaiah that calls for swords to be beaten into plowshares. He has spent over 10 years of his life in prison stemming from convictions for more than 100 acts of civil resistance to war. [2]

History

Philip Berrigan was born in Two Harbors, Minnesota, a Midwestern working class town, the younger brother of Daniel Berrigan. Their father, Tom Berrigan, was second-generation Irish-Catholic and proud union man.

In 1943, after a single semester of college, Berrigan was drafted into combat duty in World War II. He served in the artillery during the Battle of the Bulge (1945) and later became a Second Lieutenant in the infantry. He was deeply affected by his exposure to the violence of war and the racism of boot camp in the deep South.

Philip soon entered a Josephite seminary and became active in the Civil Rights movement. He marched for desegregation and participated in sit-ins and bus boycotts. He was ordained in 1955, but left the priesthood 18 years later, in 1973. He would marry late in life to Liz McAllister of Jonah House.

[3], in Baltimore, which they founded as a community to support resistance.

Protests against the War in Vietnam

Philip Berrigan, his brother Daniel Berrigan, and the famed theologian Thomas Merton founded an interfaith coalition against the Vietnam War, and wrote letters to major newspapers arguing for an end to the war.

The Baltimore Four

Soon, Philip Berrigan began taking more radical steps to bring attention to the anti-war movement. On October 17, 1967, the "Baltimore Four" (Berrigan, artist Tom Lewis; and poet, teacher and writer David Eberhardt and United Church of Christ missionary and pastor The Reverend James L. Mengel) poured blood (including Berrigan's) on Selective Service records in the Baltimore Customs House. Mengel agreed to the action and donated blood, but decided not to actually pour blood; instead he distributed paperback "Good News for Modern Man" to draft board workers, newsmen, and police. As they waited for the police to arrive and arrest them, the group passed out Bibles and calmly explained to draft board employees the reasons for their actions. Berrigan stated, "This sacrificial and constructive act is meant to protest the pitiful waste of American and Vietnamese blood in Indochina." He became the first priest in America to be arrested for an act of civil disobedience. He was sentenced to six years in prison.

The Catonsville Nine

In 1968, after his release on bail, Berrigan decided to repeat the protest in a somewhat modified form. A local high-school physics teacher helped to concoct homemade napalm. Nine activists, who later became known as the Catonsville Nine, walked into the draft board of Catonsville, Maryland, and burned 378 draft files. The Catonsville Nine, who were all Catholic, issued a statement:

"We confront the Roman Catholic Church, other Christian bodies, and the synagogues of America with their silence and cowardice in the face of our country's crimes. We are convinced that the religious bureaucracy in this country is racist, is an accomplice in this war, and is hostile to the poor."

Berrigan was again arrested and was sentenced to three and a half years in prison.

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The Catonsville Nine File On May 17, 1968, nine men and women entered the Selective Service Offices in Catonsville, Maryland, removed several hundred draft records, and burned them with homemade napalm in protest against the war in Vietnam. The nine were arrested and, in a highly publicized trial, sentenced to jail.

This act of civil disobedience intensified protest against the draft, prompted debate in households in Maryland and across the nation, and stirred angry reaction on the part of many Americans. It also propelled the nine Catholic participants - especially priest brothers Daniel and Philip Berrigan - into the national spotlight.

The Catonsville action reflected not only the nature of the Vietnam antiwar movement in 1968, but also the larger context of social forces that were reshaping American culture in the 1960s. [4]

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The Plowshares Movement

On September 9, 1980, Berrigan, his brother Daniel, and six others (the "Plowshares Eight") began the Plowshares Movement when they entered the General Electric Nuclear Missile Re-entry Division in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania where nose cones for the Mark 12A warheads were made. They hammered on two nose cones, poured blood on documents and offered prayers for peace. They were arrested and initially charged with over ten different felony and misdemeanor counts. On April 10 1990, after nearly ten years of trials and appeals, the Plowshares Eight were re-sentenced and paroled for up to 23 and 1/2 months in consideration of time already served in prison. Since this action over seventy Plowshares actions have taken place around the world against weapons of war, several involving Berrigan himself. Berrigan's final Plowshares action was in December of 1999, when he and others banged on A-10 Warthog warplanes in an anti-war protest at the Middle River Air National Guard base. He was convicted of malicious destruction of property and sentenced to 30 months. He was released December 14, 2001. In his lifetime he had spent about 11 years in jails and prisons for civil disobedience. [5] Howard Zinn, professor emeritus at Boston University, has said, "Mr. Berrigan was one of the great Americans of our time. He believed war didn't solve anything. He went to prison again and again and again for his beliefs. I admired him for the sacrifices he made. He was an inspiration to a large number of people." In one of his last public statements, Berrigan said,

The American people are, more and more, making their voices heard against Bush and his warrior clones. Bush and his minions slip out of control, determined to go to war, determined to go it alone, determined to endanger the Palestinians further, determined to control Iraqi oil, determined to ravage further a suffering people and their shattered society. The American people can stop Bush, can yank his feet closer to the fire, can banish the war makers from Washington D.C., can turn this society around and restore it to faith and sanity.

Death

Philip Berrigan died of cancer at the age of 79 in Baltimore, Maryland. He is buried at Jonah House.

In Celebration and Thanksgiving for the Life of Philip Berrigan October 5, 1923 — December 6, 2002

Editor’s Note: Shortly after Phil Berrigan’s death, his family issued a statement that includes words dictated by Phil to his wife Liz just before his passing. Along with that personal statement, they provided a press release and a brief chronology of Phil's life and works, both of which also appear below. Following those three items is a testimony to Phil’s life by Bill Stuart-Whistler, a long-time anti-nuclear activist in Philadelphia who works with the Episcopal Peace Fellowship and other peacemaking groups.

When I Lay Dying… of Cancer by Philip Berrigan with Liz McAlister

December 5, 2002

[Liz McAlister: "Philip began dictating this statement the weekend before Thanksgiving. It was all clear — he had it written in his head. Word for word I wrote…"]

I die in a community including my family, my beloved wife Elizabeth, three great Dominican nuns — Ardeth Platte, Carol Gilbert, and Jackie Hudson (emeritus) jailed in Western Colorado — Susan Crane, friends local, national and even international. They have always been a life-line to me.

I die with the conviction, held since 1968 and Catonsville, that nuclear weapons are the scourge of the earth; to mine for them, manufacture them, deploy them, use them, is a curse against God, the human family, and the earth itself.

We have already exploded such weapons in Japan in 1945 and the equivalent of them in Iraq in 1991, in Yugoslavia in 1999, and in Afghanistan in 2001. We left a legacy for other people of deadly radioactive isotopes — a prime counterinsurgency measure. For example, the people of Iraq, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Pakistan will be battling cancer, mostly from depleted uranium, for decades.

In addition, our nuclear adventurism over 57 years has saturated the planet with nuclear garbage from testing, from explosions in high altitudes (four of these), from 103 nuclear power plants, from nuclear weapons factories that can't be cleaned up — and so on. Because of myopic leadership, of greed for possessions, a public chained to corporate media, there has been virtually no response to these realities…

[Liz writes:] At this point in dictation, Phil's lungs filled; he began to cough uncontrollably; he was tired. We had to stop — with promises to finish later. But later never came — another moment in an illness that depleted Phil so rapidly it was all we could do to keep pace with it… And then he couldn't talk at all. And then — gradually — he left us.

What did Phil intend to say? What is the message of his life? What message was he leaving us in his dying? Is it different for each of us, now that we are left to imagine how he would frame it?

During one of our prayers in Phil's room, Brendan Walsh remembered a banner Phil had asked Willa Bickham to make years ago for St. Peter Claver. It read: "The sting of death is all around us. O Christ, where is your victory?"

The sting of death is all around us. The death Phil was asking us to attend to is not his death (though the sting of that is on us and will not be denied). The sting Phil would have us know is the sting of institutionalized death and killing. He never wearied of articulating it. He never ceased being astonished by the length and breadth and depth of it. And he never accepted it.

O Christ, where is your victory? It was back in the mid-1960s that Phil was asking that question of God and her Christ. He kept asking it. And, over the years, he learned

that it is right and good to question our God, to plead for justice for all that inhabit the earth that it is urgent to feel this; injustice done to any is injustice done to all that we must never weary of exposing and resisting such injustice that what victories we see are smaller than the mustard seeds Jesus praised, and they need such tender nurture that it is vital to celebrate each victory — especially the victory of sisterhood and brotherhood embodied in loving, nonviolent community. Over the months of Phil's illness we have been blessed a hundred-fold by small and large victories over an anti-human, anti-life, anti-love culture, by friendships - in and out of prison — and by the love that has permeated Phil's life. Living these years and months with Phil free us to revert to the original liturgical question: "O death, where is your sting?"

PRESS RELEASE

Baltimore, MD — Phil Berrigan died December 6, 2002 at about 9:30pm at Jonah House, a community he co-founded in 1973, surrounded by family and friends. He died two months after being diagnosed with liver and kidney cancer, and one month after deciding to discontinue chemotherapy. Approximately thirty close friends and fellow peace activists gathered for the ceremony of last rites on November 30, to celebrate his life and anoint him for the next part of his journey. Berrigan's brother and co-felon, Jesuit priest Daniel Berrigan officiated.

During his nearly 40 years of resistance to war and violence, Berrigan focused on living and working in community as a way to model the nonviolent, sustainable world he was working to create. Jonah House members live simply, pray together, share duties, and attempt to expose the violence of militarism and consumerism. The community was born out of resistance to the Vietnam War, including high-profile draft card burning actions; later the focus became ongoing resistance to U.S. nuclear policy, including Plowshares actions that aim to enact Isaiah's biblical prophecy of a disarmed world. Because of these efforts Berrigan spent about 11 years in prison. He wrote, lectured, and taught extensively, publishing six books, including an autobiography, Fighting the Lamb's War.

In his last weeks, Berrigan was surrounded by his family, including his wife Elizabeth McAlister, with whom he founded Jonah House; his children Frida, 28, Jerry, 27, and Kate, 21; community members Susan Crane, Gary Ashbeck, and David Arthur; and extended family and community. Community members Ardeth Platte and Carol Gilbert, Dominican sisters, were unable to be physically present at Jonah House; they are currently in jail in Colorado awaiting trial for a disarmament action at a missile silo, the 79th international Plowshares action. One of Berrigan's last actions was to bless the upcoming marriage of Frida to Ian Marvy.

Berrigan wrote a final statement in the days before his death. His final comments included this: "I die with the conviction, held since 1968 and Catonsville, that nuclear weapons are the scourge of the earth; to mine for them, manufacture them, deploy them, use them, is a curse against God, the human family, and the earth itself."

Mourners may make donations in Berrigan's name to Citizens for Peace in Space, Global Network Against Nuclear Weapons, Nukewatch, Voices in the Wilderness, the Nuclear Resister, or any Catholic Worker house.

Sources and Further Reading

• Berrigan, Philip, No More Strangers, New York, Macmillan Corporation, 1965, OCLC 899292
• Berrigan, Philip, A punishment for peace, New York, Macmillan, 1969, OCLC 19294
• Berrigan, Philip, Prison Journals of a Priest Revolutionary, New York, Holt; Rinehart and Winston, 1970, ISBN 0030845130 - ISBN 9780030845130
• Berrigan, Philip, Widen the Prison Gates, New York, Simon and Schuster, 1973, ISBN 0671216376 - ISBN 9780671216375 - ISBN 0671216384 - ISBN 9780671216382
• Berrigan, Philip; Wilcox, Fred, Fighting the Lamb's War, Maine, Common Courage Press, 1996, ISBN 1567511007 - ISBN 9781567511000 - ISBN 1567511015 - ISBN 9781567511017
• Berrigan, Philip; McAlister, Elizabeth, The Time's Discipline: The Eight Beatitudes and Nuclear Resistance, Marion, SD, Fortkamp Publishing Co., 1989, ISBN 9999230121
• Johnson, Becky, Philip Berrigan, Anti-War Activist, Dies at Home in Baltimore, MD, Common Dreams; Progressive Newswire, Retrieved February 14, 2007
• Polner, Murray; O'Grady, Jim , Disarmed and Dangerous: The Radical Lives & Times of Daniel & Philip Berrigan, New York, Basic Books; Westview Press, 1997; 1998, ISBN 0465026907
• Baggarly, Stephen; Wilcox, Fred; Prince of Peace Plowshares Group, Disciples & Dissidents : Prison Writings of the Prince of Peace Plowshares, Massachusetts, Haley's, 2001, ISBN 1884540422

See also

• Christian anarchism

External links

• Philip Berrigan, 1923-2002, Democracy Now!, Accessed February 14, 2007
• Jonah House, Community - Nonviolece - Resistance , Jonah House Website, Accessed February 14, 2007
• Documentary flim on the Catonsville Nine., Program for Media Artists, Accessed February 14, 2007
• Plowhshares, Plowhshares Movement Chronology, Accessed February 14, 2007

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