Berrigan Brothers

Two Catholic priests, Philip Berrigan (1923–2002) and Daniel Berrigan (1921–), were known as anti-war protestors. They are especially remembered as organizers and participants of the anti-Vietnam demonstration called the Catonsville Nine. On May 17, 1968, the brothers led seven others into a Catonsville, Maryland, draft board office, removed nearly 400 Selective Service records, and burned them in the parking lot with homemade Napalm. Encircling the blaze, these seven men and two women offered prayers and hymns as television and print journalists recorded images, although most pictures show only the Berrigans. All were arrested, tried, and found guilty the following October, and each sentenced to varying terms of federal imprisonment. Philip was given 3½ years to run concurrently with a 6-year sentence he was already serving for involvement in the earlier Baltimore Four raid. After appeal, Daniel served 3 years. Acts of civil disobedience and protest continued as the brothers turned their attention to the possession of nuclear weapons, racism, abortion, and the AIDS epidemic.

Philip was a World War II artillery officer and a 1949 graduate of the College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts. He was ordained a Josephite priest in 1955. Much of his priestly ministry was spent with inner-city black communities in New Orleans, Louisiana (1956–1963), and Baltimore, Maryland (1966). Between 1962 and 1963, he became the first Catholic priest to participate in a civil rights movement freedom ride. The Baltimore Four refers to events on October 27, 1967, when he and three others entered the Baltimore Customs House and poured blood on draft files. In 1970, he left the priesthood and married an activist nun, Elizabeth McAlister. Together they had three children: Frida in 1967, Jerry in 1975, and Kate in 1981. The family settled in Baltimore, and Philip, when not protesting or in prison, was a house-painter. Although never convicted, in 1971 J. Edgar Hoover named him a coconspirator in the Harrisburg Seven's plan to kidnap Henry Kissinger and bomb utility tunnels under U.S. capitol buildings. Between 1980 and 1999, he participated in five more actions that resulted in 7 years' imprisonment, including pouring blood on Mark 12A warheads. He cofounded Jonah Community in 1973, where he died in 2002 from kidney and liver cancer. The author of six books, his autobiography appeared in 1996.

Daniel was ordained a Jesuit priest in 1952. He studied at Woodstock College, Massachusetts; the Gregorian University, Rome; and did some postgraduate work in France. An intermittent teacher of Latin, English literature, and theology, in 1967 he took a campus ministry position at Cornell University, by then a northeastern hub of student anti-war sentiment. Daniel had a long correspondence with Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk who exerted a profound influence on the Jesuit. However, after many acts of civil disobedience, a prophetic turn and a renewed concentration on writing mark Daniel's later years. A prolific poet and essayist, he is the author of more [Page 234]than 40 volumes, including his 1987 autobiography. His prose and poetry register what he sees as the dissonant, purgatorial, and at times absurd reality of violence in the Americas.

...