I wrote a tribute to Daniel Berrigan (b. 1921) when he turned eighty, for a volume of tributes edited by Askold Melnyczuk, Howard Zinn being another contributor to it, and met Berrigan at a party in his honor, though I was too shy to speak with him. My tribute reflected on a phrase of Berrigan’s that Adrienne Rich had taken as the epigraph of “The Burning of Paper Instead of Children”: “I was threatened with verbalizing / my moral substance out of existence.” The phrase is exactly right for a poet who has also been an activist, an activist who has also been a poet; the poet wants and needs to verbalize, the activist knows the dangers of verbalizing in excess.
The phrase occurs in Berrigan’s play The Trial of the Catonsville Nine (1970), perhaps the greatest American antiwar play, and the only play represented in this anthology. Its subject is a famous act of radical nonviolence, namely, the burning with homemade napalm of some of the files of the Catonsville, Maryland, draft board on May 17, 1968, by nine Catholic pacifists, Berrigan’s brother Philip among them. The Trial of the Catonsville Nine distills the transcripts of the subsequent court proceedings to their essence, allowing the accused and the trial judge alike to reveal their humanity fully.
Berrigan was born in rural Minnesota, joined the Jesuits after high school, was ordained to the priesthood in 1952, began to teach theology in 1954, and won the Lamont Prize for a book of poems in 1957. A promising beginning for a mainstream clerical and intellectual career; but friendships with Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton, the promptings of his brother Philip, and above all the war in Vietnam made complacency impossible. He voiced his support for student antiwar activists, marched in Selma, founded Clergy and Laity Concerned about the War in Vietnam (with A. J. Heschel and others), and found himself increasingly out of favor with his conservative superiors. In the fall of 1965 he was “exiled” to the slums of South America, an act that had unintended consequences: his conscience galvanized and his public stature raised considerably, he was called home (after protests by liberal Catholics) ready for confrontation and civil disobedience. He marched on the Pentagon, spilled blood on draft records in Baltimore, traveled to Hanoi with Howard Zinn to receive POWs released by the North Vietnamese. Sentenced to three years for his actions at Catonsville, he went underground with Philip, making the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list and evading capture for four months before his eighteen-month stint in Danbury.
Some radicals get less radical as they grow older; Berrigan got more so. He spent time in France with Thich Nhat Hanh, then in 1980 with his brother Philip and some others founded the Plowshares Movement; members of that group walked into a nuclear weapons plant in Pennsylvania, damaged missiles, and poured blood onto files; after years of appeals he again found himself in prison. In 1989 he came to preach in Colrain, Massachusetts, in the house of Randy Kehler and Betsy Corner, seized by the IRS for its owners’ principled nonpayment of war taxes; in 2012 he was to be heard speaking on behalf of the activists of Occupy Wall Street.
DEFENSE
Could you state to the court what your intent was in burning the draft files?
DANIEL BERRIGAN
I did not want the children
or the grandchildren of the jury
or of the judge
to be burned with napalm
JUDGE
You say your intention was to save these children, of the jury, of myself, when you burned the records? That is what I heard you say. I ask if you meant that.
DANIEL BERRIGAN
I meant that
of course I mean that
or I would not say it
The great sinfulness
of modern war is
that it renders concrete things abstract
I do not want to talk
about Americans in general
JUDGE
You cannot think up arguments now that you would like to have had in your mind then.
DANIEL BERRIGAN
My intention on that day
to save the innocent
from death by fire
I was trying to save the poor
who are mainly charged with
dying in this war
I poured napalm
on behalf of the prosecutor’s
and the jury’s children
It seems to me quite logical
If my way of putting the facts
is inadmissible
then so be it
But I was trying to be concrete
about death because death
is a concrete fact
as I have throughout my life
tried to be concrete
about the existence of God
Who is not an abstraction
but is someone before me
for Whom I am responsible
In Hanoi I think we were the first Americans
to undergo
an American bombing attack
When the burned draft files
were brought into court yesterday
as evidence
I could not but recall
that I had seen in Hanoi
evidence of a very different nature
I saw not boxes of burned papers
I saw parts of human bodies preserved in alcohol
the bodies of children the hearts and organs and limbs
of women
teachers workers peasants bombed
in fields and churches and schools and hospitals
I examined our “improved weaponry”
It was quite clear to me
during three years of air war
America had been experimenting
upon the bodies of the innocent
We had improved our weapons
on their flesh
JUDGE
He did not see this first hand. He is telling of things he was told in Hanoi, about some things that were preserved in alcohol.
DANIEL BERRIGAN
French English Swedish experts doctors
testified
these were actually the bodies
whose pictures
accompanied the exhibits
The evidence was unassailable
The bombings
were a massive crime against man
The meaning of the air war in the North
was the deliberate systematic destruction
of a poor and developing people
JUDGE
We are not trying the air war in North Vietnam.
DANIEL BERRIGAN
I must protest the effort
to discredit me on the stand
I am speaking of what I saw
There is a consistent effort
to say that I did not see it
JUDGE
The best evidence of what some “crime commission” found is not a summary that you give.
DANIEL BERRIGAN
So be it
In any case we brought the flyers home
I think as a result of the trip to Hanoi
I understood the limits
of what I had done before
and the next step that must come
On my return to America
another event
helped me understand
the way I must go
It was the self-immolation
of a high school student
in Syracuse New York
in the spring of 1968
This boy had come to a point of despair
about the war He had gone
into the Catholic cathedral
drenched himself with kerosene
and immolated himself in the street
He was still living a month later
I was able to gain access to him
I smelled the odor
of burning flesh
And I understood anew
what I had seen in North Vietnam
The boy was dying in torment
his body like a piece of meat
cast upon a grille
He died shortly thereafter
I felt that my senses
had been invaded in a new way
I had understood
the power of death in the modern world
I knew I must speak and act
against death
because this boy’s death
was being multiplied
a thousandfold
in the Land of Burning Children
So I went to Catonsville
and burned some papers because
the burning of children
is inhuman and unbearable
I went to Catonsville
because I had gone to Hanoi
and I must be a man
and because
I knew at length
I could not announce the gospel
from a pedestal
I must act as a Christian
sharing the risks and burdens and anguish
of those whose lives were placed
in the breach by us
I saw suddenly and it struck with the force of lightning
that my position was false
I was threatened with verbalizing
my moral substance out of existence
I was placing upon young shoulders
a filthy burden the original sin of war
I was asking them to enter a ceremony of death
Although I was too old
to carry a draft card there were other ways
of getting in trouble with a state
that seemed determined upon multiplying the dead
totally intent upon a war
the meaning of which no sane man could tell
So I went to Hanoi
and then to Catonsville
and that is why I am here
DEFENSE
Did you not write a meditation to accompany the statement issued by the nine defendants at Catonsville?
DANIEL BERRIGAN
Yes sir
DEFENSE
Would you read the meditation?
DANIEL BERRIGAN
Certainly
“Some ten or twelve of us (the number is still uncertain)
will if all goes well (ill?) take our religious bodies
during this week
to a draft center in or near Baltimore
There we shall of purpose and forethought
remove the 1–A files sprinkle them in the public street
with home-made napalm and set them afire
For which act we shall beyond doubt
be placed behind bars for some portion of our natural lives
in consequence of our inability
to live and die content in the plagued city
to say ‘peace peace’ when there is no peace
to keep the poor poor
the thirsty and hungry thirsty and hungry
Our apologies good friends
for the fracture of good order the burning of paper
instead of children the angering of the orderlies
in the front parlor of the charnel house
We could not so help us God do otherwise
For we are sick at heart our hearts
give us no rest for thinking of the Land of Burning Children
and for thinking of that other Child of whom
the poet Luke speaks The infant was taken up
in the arms of an old man whose tongue
grew resonant and vatic at the touch of that beauty
And the old man spoke: this child is set
for the fall and rise of many in Israel
a sign that is spoken against
Small consolation a child born to make trouble
and to die for it the First Jew (not the last)
to be subject of a ‘definitive solution’
And so we stretch out our hands
to our brothers throughout the world
We who are priests to our fellow priests
All of us who act against the law
turn to the poor of the world to the Vietnamese
to the victims to the soldiers who kill and die
for the wrong reasons for no reason at all
because they were so ordered by the authorities
of that public order which is in effect
a massive institutionalized disorder
We say: killing is disorder
life and gentleness and community and unselfishness
is the only order we recognize
For the sake of that order
we risk our liberty our good name
The time is past when good men may be silent
when obedience
can segregate men from public risk
when the poor can die without defense
How many indeed must die
before our voices are heard
how many must be tortured dislocated
starved maddened?
How long must the world’s resources
be raped in the service of legalized murder?
When at what point will you say no to this war?
We have chosen to say
with the gift of our liberty
if necessary our lives:
the violence stops here
the death stops here
the suppression of the truth stops here
this war stops here
Redeem the times!
The times are inexpressibly evil
Christians pay conscious indeed religious tribute
to Caesar and Mars
by the approval of overkill tactics by brinkmanship
by nuclear liturgies by racism by support of genocide
They embrace their society with all their heart
and abandon the cross
They pay lip service to Christ
and military service to the powers of death
And yet and yet the times are inexhaustibly good
solaced by the courage and hope of many
The truth rules Christ is not forsaken
In a time of death some men
the resisters those who work hardily for social change
those who preach and embrace the truth
such men overcome death
their lives are bathed in the light of the resurrection
the truth has set them free
In the jaws of death
they proclaim their love of the brethren
in the world in our nation in the churches
and the stone in our breast is dissolved
we take heart once more”
DEFENSE
Nothing further.