I HAD tea with Daniel Berrigan. That was back in the seventies when the Vietnam war was waning and ours was taking a stronger hold.
The 94-year-old American Jesuit died this week. He is best remembered for burning draft cards against the Vietnam war and spending time in prison for his anti-war protests. The generals in the Pentagon saw him as a traitor and the American Catholic hierarchy were equally antagonistic to his stance against the just war theory, still proposed as the Christian response to violence.
I am not sure if it was ironic or maybe appropriate that the only acknowledgement I saw in the media, in this part of the world, to Berrigan’s death came from Gerry Adams.
Berrigan was a pacifist who believed that a stance against violence was a primary responsibility of a follower of Jesus Christ. In one of his books he wrote: “we have assumed the name of peacemakers but we have been, by and large, unwilling to pay any significant price. And because we want the peace with half a heart and half a life and will, the war, of course, continues because the waging of war, by its nature, is total – but the waging of peace, by our cowardice, is partial… There is no peace because there are no peacemakers. There are no makers of peace because the making of peace is at least as costly as the making of war – at least as exigent, at least as disruptive, at least as liable to bring disgrace and prison and death in its wake”.
In the sixties, Berrigan was a bit of a Pope Francis for idealistic Catholics and others who took some interest in what was happening in the world of politics and religion. It was a time of change and passion and possibility. Berrigan was attractive to many because of his message and his stance against the military and the politicians who saw violence and war as a legitimate political weapon.
The fact that he wrote poetry, was good looking and wore black turtleneck sweaters added greatly to his charm. Not that his campaigns for justice and peace gained much traction in the US. Vietnam was not the war to end all wars and the Americans are only recently showing some hesitation in believing that they can bomb the world into a better place (Trump and those who might elect him are still not so hesitant).
Where is all that idealism now? The Christian message is almost inevitably doomed to failure, so the pertinent question is not about failure but about passion and conviction. Where has all the passion gone? Where are the campaigns that were common in the sixties? In this part of the world the only visible and noisy political/religion one is the pro-life, abortion campaign. It seems to be the only one that hands out leaflets to churchgoers, that protests outside of clinics, that enters into the heat of political and media debates. The Catholic manifestation of that, Precious Life, is well supported by the Catholic bishops. The bishops’ recent letter about the election contained much that was good, things that were theologically questionable and overall weighted on the abortion issue.
So it might come as news to some that many practising Catholics are uncomfortable with the abortion campaign. It is not because they are pro-abortion. It is because they see the campaign as far too strident and somewhat distorted in the face of the reality.
Their view is that there is no substantive political campaign to introduce abortion into Ireland, north or south. They also believe that at the edges of this issue there are grey, complex and difficult cases that will arise every so often and that the dogmatism and the stridency of the pro-life campaigns gets in the way of the understanding and compassion that they believe to be appropriate.
They would also be more comfortable if they saw the same commitment and organisation going into the other child killing force in modern society – war. As napalm burned the children in Vietnam and Cambodia, Berrigan used napalm to burn the draft papers, writing: “Our apologies, good friends, for the fracture of good order, the burning of paper instead of children. We could not, so help us God, do otherwise… thinking of the land of burning children. How many must die before our voices are heard, how many must be tortured, starved, maddened… When, at what point, will you say no to this war?”
