Berrigan, Daniel (1921–) and Berrigan, Philip (1923–2002)

Roman Catholic Priests and Peace Activists

The Berrigan brothers gained fame in the 1960s as vocal clerical foes of the Vietnam War. As leaders of the Catholic New Left, Daniel and Philip Berrigan attracted national news media attention for such actions as raiding Selective Service offices. They also stood trial in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in 1972 on charges of conspiring to kidnap Sec. of State Henry Kissinger, although the brothers denied that their kidnapping plot had progressed to the point of action. The Berrigans continued to protest U.S. foreign policy during the 1980s and 1990s, even after Philip Berrigan renounced his religious vows to marry Sister Elizabeth McAlister, a Catholic college professor, in 1969.

Daniel and Philip Berrigan were the youngest of six sons born on a Minnesota farm. Their father, Thomas, was a deeply religious Catholic of Irish descent, a strict disciplinarian, and a critic of political radicalism. Seeking escape from what they considered to be a drab, nonintellectual existence, Daniel went to study with the Jesuits while Philip excelled in collegiate sports at St. Michael's in Toronto.

Drafted into the U.S. Army in 1943, Philip served with an artillery battery in the European theater (Daniel, as a seminary student, was exempt). Philip later disparaged his military service and claimed that his exposure to southern [Page 76]white racism while in the Army led him to join the Society of St. Joseph (Josephites), a religious order devoted to missionary work among African Americans. Daniel was ordained a Jesuit in 1952 and Philip a Josephite in 1955.

Both the Jesuits and the Josephites were Catholic religious orders that advocated religious engagement with secular political issues. The Josephites had long been unambiguous defenders of African American civil rights. The Jesuits had many members who were avowed critics of international and domestic communism, and even some who regarded the United States as equally culpable in the Cold War and exploitation of the Third World. The bishops who led the American Catholic Church did not become politically engaged until the 1930s, when they began to champion the rights of organized labor. Not all church leaders, however, supported labor unions. The crisis of the Great Depression revealed a political schism within the church that widened in the 1960s with the escalation of the Vietnam War. Within this controversial context the Berrigans began their own social activism.

Taking their cue from the encyclical Peace on Earth (1963), in which Pope John XXIII condemned the nuclear arms race and urged the United States to coexist peacefully with the Soviet Union, the Berrigans flung themselves into the antiwar movement. In 1964 they joined with young members of the Catholic Worker Movement (established in 1933) to form the radical pacifist Catholic Peace Fellowship. A year later, Daniel helped found Clergy and Laymen (later Laity) Concerned About Vietnam (CALCAV). Given the paucity of Catholics and the abundance of mainline Protestant and Reform Jewish clerics in CALCAV, Daniel became a media sensation.

Responding to criticism from within the Catholic church, Daniel contended that white working-class Catholics—themselves once objects of Protestant discrimination—were now representing themselves as patriotic and anticommunist in order to be accepted as fully American. Catholic critics retorted that the Berrigans, and their predominantly middle-class, college-educated constituency, were simply seeking acceptance among the cultural elite. The Berrigans also found, to their chagrin, that radical members of other antiwar coalitions such as the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS; established 1962) harbored suspicions about nonviolent religious activists.

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