Philip Berrigan

Howdy, this is my page dedicated to the late Philip Berrigan. For those of you that don't know him, he was a fiery American (Josephite) priest of Irish descent who became a staunch anti-war activist and then a leader of the Swords to Plowshares movement (due to which he spent a large part of his later life in prison). He was fiercely against nuclear weapons proliferation, but also lived a somewhat controversial lifestyle (he, an ordained priest, secretly married a Catholic nun and was excommunicated).

Although i don't believe in everything he did, or that he was necessarily right, i really do admire his dedication to the cause of nuclear disarmament. Some of his methods were extreme, and he seems to have been a rather extreme individual himself (read his "apology" below), but he was fighting what he thought to be the worst menace mankind has ever seen. and i can't really imagine that he was wrong about that.

Fighting the Lamb's War: Skirmishes with the American Empire

The following are quotes from Philip Berrigan's autobiography (co-authored with Fred A. Wilcox), published by Common Courage Press. I don't repeat them here as an endorsement, only as food for thought--which they certainly were, for me:

"The church is a major bureaucracy, and major bureaucracies are disobedient to the gospel." (p. 38)

"Wars are waged in defiance of all international laws, with bestial ferocity... In practice, then, it will never be lawful to declare war." (p. 42)

"Christ drove the usurers from the temple. He didn't write a dissertation on the devious practices of moneychangers." (p. 53)

"Thomas Merton was at Gethsemane and couldn't travel to those meetings [planning the Catonsville action]. He was a student of Gandhi, and he always felt that the spirituality of the movement, and the accent on nonviolence, ought to be emphasized...

I'm sure that many of the people who visited Merton at Gethsemane realized that the monastic tradition is not true to the gospel. The monks in Egypt fled to the desert to shake the dust, or the corruption, of the cities off their feet. This was a passive protest, conducted far from the corruption they were denouncing. Jesus was an activist, not a monk. He lived among the poor. He drove the moneychangers from the temple, criticized the rich and powerful, ridiculed government officials. He would not have remained in a monastery while his own government was slaughtering the Vietnamese." (p. 98)

"The Catholic priest in America--and in the West generally--is more of a cultural phenomenon than he is a Gospel man. He is nationalistic, white supremacist, and uncritical toward affluence and its source. His training reflects nuances of these cultural fixations, but, beyond that, it schools him merely in neutrality toward life. By that I mean, he tends to take a purely institutional view of threats to life, whether they be its abuse or destruction." (p. 144)

"If it means the outlawry of the Church, persecution... the Lord spoke of that too: 'The time will come when those who kill you will think they are doing a service to God.'" (p. 144)

"Prison is designed to silence dissent. We savage people in order to make them better citizens. We torture men and women to make them kinder and more productive. We execute human beings, in order to teach our children respect for human life." (p. 164)

[on living in Jonah house] "My confusion, egotism, competitiveness, and impatience led to eruptions and quarrels within our community. Feelings were hurt, there were painful silences, bitter recriminations. We were experimenting with human interaction, and we discovered that we were loving, jealous, caring, bossy, cooperative, and competitive. After 23 years of living within community, I'm a good deal mellower. I've discovered something about forgiveness, mercy, and tolerance. Not as much, perhaps as I should have learned, but more than I knew before. I can accept the deficiencies of other people, just as I can live with my own deficiencies, which, believe me, are legion." (p. 169)

"The Biblical view of the law, the courts, and the state is profoundly radical. The Bible looks upon the state as a kind of rebellious artifice; it is spurious, a human creation in rebellion against God.

In the Old Testament, when the first state is proposed in the person of Saul, the first King of Israel, God tells the prophet Samuel that this project spells rejection of God. The state and its legislature are in rebellion against, or rejection of, God. Its courts are a human fabrication, cannot promote justice and peace; they are founded in violence, and legalize violence.

The state holds together through police power, against the citizenry.

The state, conceived in violence, and backed by violence, will never achieve true peace." (p. 202)

"Peter wanted a fellowship with Christ without consequence--official reprisal, ostracism, torture, execution. We want citizenship in the empire and its attendant goodies--a 'deterrent' nuclear blanket and the 'right' to consume seven times our share of the world's output, without consequences--war, ecological devastation, death in the Third and Fourth Worlds.

We Christians forget (if we ever learned) that attempts to redress real or imagined injustice by violent means are merely another exercise in denial--denial of God and her nonviolence towards us, denial of love of neighbor, denial of laws essential to our being. 'I do not know the man' takes many forms, suffers many translations. But all end the same--a denial of our humanity, our daughtership or sonship in God." (p. 204)

"According to a University of South Carolina study, violence in America rose 42 percent during the Vietnam War. This is hardly surprising. Our leaders are lawless, so why not we? If the government threatens other countries with the bomb, why not threaten one another with handguns? If our leaders are raping the planet, why not our neighbors? Our leaders create a climate of fear and violence. Why do they appear shocked when Americans kill, rob, and maim one another?" (p. 217)

Links

InternationalA.N.S.W.E.R.'s web site memorial to Philip Berrigan.

Swords to Plowshares web site.

Life of Resistance - interview (.pdf)

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