Philip Berrigan and his brother Daniel Joseph Berrigan (right) seized hundreds of draft records and set them on fire with homemade napalm.
Gallery of Philip Berrigan
1968
The Catonsville Nine in a police station after their arrest in 1968. Top (left to right): George Mische, Philip Berrigan, S.S.J., Daniel Berrigan, S.J., Tom Lewis. Bottom (left to right): David Darst, Mary Moylan, John Hogan, Marjorie Melville, Tom Melville.
Gallery of Philip Berrigan
1975
Philip Berrigan, activist, priest, author.
Gallery of Philip Berrigan
1984
Philip Berrigan, activist, priest, author.
Gallery of Philip Berrigan
1989
Philip Berrigan, activist, priest, author.
Gallery of Philip Berrigan
1961
Father Philip Berrigan performing a sodalist communion. Father Berrigan stands at the extreme left of the photograph in a long dark robe.
Achievements
Membership
Society of St. Joseph
1950
Philip Berrigan was a member of the Society of St. Joseph.
The Catonsville Nine in a police station after their arrest in 1968. Top (left to right): George Mische, Philip Berrigan, S.S.J., Daniel Berrigan, S.J., Tom Lewis. Bottom (left to right): David Darst, Mary Moylan, John Hogan, Marjorie Melville, Tom Melville.
(A passionate protest against the betrayal by Church and S...)
A passionate protest against the betrayal by Church and State of the ideals of the peacemakers and he aspirations of the Blacks. "This much is becoming clear: If America continues to tear itself to pieces at home while continuing to export its violence abroad, such will have been possible because the Church had gone into a prosperous somnolence at the expense of the Gospel and the Cross."
(The journals and letters of activist priest, Philip Berri...)
The journals and letters of activist priest, Philip Berrigan, are presented here. From his arrest and more than two years in different prisons, Father Berrigan fights for inmate rights and personal exoneration of his dedication to nonviolent protest and plan to kidnap Henry Kissinger.
(In The Time's Discipline, Philip Berrigan and Elizabeth M...)
In The Time's Discipline, Philip Berrigan and Elizabeth McAlister offer us a chronicle of their community in Baltimore. They show us that for their nonviolent community, resistance to the nuclear arms race is not merely a political endeavor, but most profoundly a spiritual endeavor, rooted in fidelity to the Gospel.
Philip Francis Berrigan was an American activist, priest, and author. He was a famous anti-war protestor who was especially prominent for his activities during the Vietnam War. Berrigan devoted his life to breaking down "prison walls" in order to expose and oppose American militarism, the use of nuclear weapons, social inequalities, avarice, and police brutality.
Background
Philip Francis Berrigan was born on October 5, 1923, in Two Harbors, Minnesota, United States. He was the youngest of six sons of Thomas William Berrigan and Frida Berrigan, maiden name Fromhart, a German immigrant. Thomas Berrigan was a frustrated poet and a political radical whose labor organizing activities led to his dismissal as a railroad engineer, after which he moved to Syracuse.
Education
Philip Berrigan graduated from high school in Syracuse, New York. He studied at St. Michael's College in Toronto. In January 1943, after one semester, he was drafted. Berrigan studied to become a priest and graduated from the College of the Holy Cross in 1950. After studying at the theological school of the Society of St. Joseph, St. Joseph's Seminary in Washington, D.C., he was ordained a priest in 1955. He later went on to earn a Bachelor of Science from Loyola University of the South (1957-1960) and a master's degree from Xavier University (1960-1963).
After high school, Philip Berrigan was employed cleaning trains for the New York Central Railroad. He played with a semi-professional baseball team.
As a young man, Berrigan was not the protester he was in later life: he served courageously in the United States Army during World War II. He served in the artillery during the Battle of the Bulge (1945) and later became a Second Lieutenant in the infantry. But he was deeply affected by his exposure to the violence of war and the racism of boot camp in the southern United States.
Berrigan's first jobs also included being an assistant pastor in Washington, D.C., in 1955 and working as a high school counselor in New Orleans from 1956 to 1963. He was a director of promotion at St. Joseph's Society of the Sacred Heart and then an English instructor at Epiphany College in Newburgh, New York.
Berrigan witnessed further racial injustices while serving as curate of the St. Peter Claver Church in Baltimore. Berrigan became more vocal in his stance against war during the late 1960s. In Baltimore, he founded Peace Mission, whose operations included picketing the homes of Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara and Secretary of State Dean Rusk in December 1966. By the fall of 1967 Father Berrigan and three friends were ready to try a new tactic. On October 17, they walked into the Baltimore Customs House, distracted the draft board clerks and methodically spattered Selective Service records with a red liquid made partly from their own blood. For that action, Berrigan was sentenced to six years in prison.
Before he was sentenced, however, Berrigan and several other Peace Mission members, including his brother, the Reverend Daniel J. Berrigan, carried out another raid. They went to the draft board office in Catonsville, Maryland, and destroyed more draft records, an act that became the subject of a 2001 film. The Catonsville raid inspired Vietnam War protests around the country. Berrigan was put on trial, and, after a lengthy appeal process, sentenced to jail in 1970. He and his brother escaped authorities before actually being put in custody, and were briefly on the F.B.I.'s (Federal Bureau of Investigation's) Most Wanted list before being captured.
He got into more hot water in 1972 for writing letters in which he outlined his plans to kidnap government officials - specifically, Henry Kissinger - and sabotage government buildings. The letters were intercepted by an F.B.I. agent. However, a trial in which Berrigan was accused of conspiracy ended in a hung jury. After serving his sentence, he earned his living by giving lectures, painting houses, and writing. He also opened Baltimore's Jonah House, a commune and meeting place for anti-war activists, with his wife.
Together with a loosely affiliated group that called itself the "Catholic Left," Philip Berrigan planned or inspired as many as 30 non-violent actions between 1968 and 1975 in protest of the Vietnam War and the government-military complex. Among these actions were the following:
The DC Nine: A group of seven priests and two nuns protested Dow Chemical's production of napalm that was used as a weapon in Vietnam. After serving time in jail for destruction of property and burglary, The DC Nine´s conviction was overturned by a Washington, D.C. court.
The Milwaukee 14: In the fall of 1968, fourteen men took 10,000 draft files from the Milwaukee draft board and burned them in a public square. After being arrested, bail was set at $415,000. Almost all spent time in jail.
The Boston Eight: Priests and nuns stole files from four Boston draft boards to prove that the State of Massachusetts was drafting a disproportionate number of Puerto Ricans and poor whites to fill their quotas.
The Camden 28 Group: This action against the Camden, New Jersey draft board, F.B.I. and Army Intelligence offices attempted to expose the methods used by J. Edgar Hoover and his agency against war protesters. Their trial against them resulted in a hung jury.
The Buffalo Five: These men, in coordination with the Camden 28, intervened in the Buffalo draft board.
The Harrisburg Seven: Led by Berrigan, this group planned to make a citizen's arrest of Henry Kissinger or waging an illegal war in Vietnam. Although they had only discussed the idea, Berrigan and his fellow plotters were arrested for conspiracy. Their prosecution was unsuccessful.
On September 9, 1980, Berrigan, his brother Daniel, and six others started what became known as the Plowshares Movement. Entering the General Electric Nuclear Missile Re-entry Division in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, where warhead nose cones were manufactured, the activists 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 close to two years in consideration of time already served in prison.
Since then there have been over seventy Plowshares actions against weapons of war around the world. Berrigan's final Plowshares action was in December 1999, when he and others banged on warplanes in an anti-war protest at the Warfield Air National Guard Base in Baltimore. Convicted of malicious destruction of property and sentenced to thirty months in prison, he was released on December 14, 2001. But his activities would never again draw as much attention as they did during the Vietnam era.
He was the author of several books, including Prison Journals of a Priest Revolutionary (1970), Of Beasts and Beastly Images: Essays under the Bomb (1978), Whereupon to Stand: The Acts of the Apostles and Ourselves (1993), and, with his wife, The Time's Discipline: The Beatitudes and Nuclear Resistance (1993).
The life of black sharecroppers in Georgia, where Philip Berrigan had basic training, and the treatment of black soldiers on his troopship to Europe made an indelible impression on his conscience. So did his own role in infantry and artillery battles that earned him a battlefield commission as a second lieutenant. He came to consider himself as guilty of murder as the Germans and Japanese. Along with this came the conviction that he had grown up on a diet of nationalistic propaganda in which the good - ''white Europeans'' - always triumphed over evil -''anyone else.'' It was while in New Orleans that Philip Berrigan first became incensed by the racism he witnessed in the schools and communities; he began to view the United States government as an active agent of this racism, and he became involved in the civil rights movement. He was involved in civil rights and antiwar activities, especially after the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. Berrigan became active in the Civil Rights Movement. He marched for desegregation and participated in sit-ins and bus boycotts. He was frequently in trouble with his superiors, whom he openly criticized for supporting the status quo, and occasionally with the law. He boasted that he was the first American priest jailed for a political crime. Berrigan did not mind being imprisoned; in fact, he considered it an honor to be jailed for his beliefs.
Quotations:
"The poor tell us who we are, the prophets tell us who we could be, so we hide the poor and kill the prophets."
''The Gospel the church preaches is a precise statement of the life it leads - a degenerate stew of behavioral psychology, affluent ethics and cultural mythology, seasoned by nationalist politics.''
"I see little difference between the world inside prison gates and the world outside. A million million prison walls can't protect us, because the real dangers - militarism, greed, economic inequality, fascism, police brutality - lie outside, not inside, prison walls."
"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." - Philip Berrigan in his last statement before his death.
Membership
Society of St. Joseph
,
United States
1950
Personality
Philip Berrigan spent many prison hours praying and filling journals with his trademark polemical writing, which over the years condemned everything from deceptive breakfast cereal advertising (a form of ''violence'') to the modern church.
Quotes from others about the person
Philip Berrigan's brother Daniel wrote of him: "From the beginning, he stood with the urban poor. He rejected the traditional, isolated stance of the Church in black communities. He was also incurably secular; he saw the Church as one resource, bringing to bear on the squalid facts of racism the light of the Gospel, the presence of inventive courage and hope."
Howard Zinn, Professor Emeritus at Boston University, paid tribute to Berrigan saying: "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."
Connections
Philip Berrigan had fallen in love with a nun, Elizabeth McAlister of the Religious Order of the Sacred Heart. In a ceremony without witnesses, the two had secretly declared themselves husband and wife in 1969. They smuggled love letters past the prison censors through a trusted young inmate, Boyd Douglas, who was allowed outside to attend college classes.
Philip Berrigan was paroled in December 1972. He and Elizabeth McAlister legalized their marriage in 1973. They issued justifications on personal, scriptural and political grounds - and were excommunicated. From then on the couple lived and worked in Jonah House, a small religiously oriented commune they founded in Baltimore. They had three children: Frida, Jerry, and Kate.