Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, August 29, 1993 TAG: 9308290309
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: D1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARY PEMBERTON ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: ELLICOTT CITY, MD. LENGTH: Long
\ He is spread-eagled against a police car, arms hand-cuffed behind his back, and a smile spreads across Philip Berrigan's face.
"It's a good day to be arrested," he says, a devilish glint in his blue eyes. "Any day is a good day to be arrested. I feel renewed."
At age 69, Berrigan is the peace movement's old warrior. Other activists fell from the front lines long ago, moved to suburbia and settled down, but not Philip Berrigan.
"War is a social curse," Berrigan said during an interview before his most recent arrest. "The role of the military is absolutely deranged."
The former Catholic priest and his brother, Daniel, a Jesuit priest in New York, grabbed the nation's attention on May 17, 1968, when as part of the Catonsville Nine they entered a Selective Service office near Baltimore, snatched some draft records and burned them with homemade napalm.
Berrigan was sentenced to 3 1/2 years at the Federal Penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pa. While in prison, he was charged with plotting to kidnap former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and blow up tunnels under federal buildings in Washington. Those charges were later dropped.
He's been arrested about 100 times, spending a total of about six years in jail. For some, he's the vanguard of the peace movement. For others, he's a nuisance.
Berrigan recently showed up in the office of Howard County Court Commissioner Nancy Pope after failing to appear for trial for trespassing at Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory, a favorite target because it does research work for the military.
Pope, who has dealt with Berrigan numerous times, became visibly angry when he asked whether he'd be arrested for failing to appear in court. "You do whatever you want to do. Why don't you do it with this too?" she said.
He walked out and moments later was arrested outside the courthouse and taken to the Howard County Jail. Within a couple of hours, he was back on the street.
"They act as if they have no options to what they're doing, and we show them some, and they jail us," Berrigan said.
Berrigan says he lucked out when as a condition of parole from federal prison he was ordered back to Baltimore in 1972 to continue his work with the church. Baltimore is only an hour away from his favorite protest spots - the White House and the Pentagon.
He rented a house and set up a "resistance community" with his wife, former nun Elizabeth McAlister, whom he married in 1967. He was excommunicated in 1973 when the church found out about the marriage.
"Our work has not changed since the time we married or before," Berrigan says. "We never considered doing anything different."
The Rev. Richard McSorley, director of the Center for Peace Studies at Georgetown University, remembers first linking arms with the Berrigan brothers during the civil rights marches of the 1950s and 1960s.
"When I saw those three - Martin Luther King, Phil and Dan, I thought they are the Christ figures of today, and that is how I picture both of them," McSorley says.
Peacetime or not, Berrigan is not deterred. For him, the threat of war still looms large.
"We're on a war footing," he says, leaning forward with elbows resting on his kitchen table. "The seeds of the next conflict are being sown right now."
Berrigan knows about war firsthand. In World War II, he fought with the Army field artillery and infantry in France and participated in some of the war's worst battles. The experience changed his life.
"Violence is destroying us," he says. "When you bury tens of thousands of Iraqi soldiers in a trench . . . just bury people alive, and do that to thousands of Iraqi soldiers, you know something is radically wrong."
Daniel Berrigan, 72, says his younger brother led the way into the peace movement and showed him how to live a more religious life.
"I kind of joined him," says Daniel, who lives in a Jesuit community and works with AIDS patients. "I think he is a towering figure for so many people."
Philip Berrigan traces his inspiration back to his parents.
"We were desperately poor and yet they shared everything," he says. "People were on the roads because of the Depression . . . homeless men would come down begging for a meal. My mother would cook them up something, whatever she had in the house."
The boys were born in Minnesota but grew up outside of Syracuse, N.Y., where their parents scratched out a living on a 10-acre farm.
Berrigan's father had been a railroad engineer but was forced from his job for being a Socialist, Berrigan says. His mother was a German immigrant.
"Both of them had a profound sense of social justice," he says. "They had an acute sense of the underdog."
In Baltimore, Berrigan formed a group, with five other activists, called The Good News Plowshares, playing out the same theme. Group members work as painters and carpenters four days a week, hold prayer sessions twice a week, and reserve Tuesdays for protest.
"We act on behalf of the whole human family," he says. "Because we try to protect the wretched and the poor, we are on the outs with any state that is trying to devastate them."
In April, three members of the group broke into the Newport News Shipbuilding & Dry Dock Co. in Newport News, Va., and threw blood on a submarine. The incident was similar to one on Easter Sunday in 1988 when Berrigan and three others got on board the battleship USS Iowa at the Norfolk Naval Base and beat cruise missile launchers with hammers. Berrigan received six months in jail for the crime.
"The cross of Christ means holding to accountability a state that is sometimes criminal," Berrigan says. "That's what it meant for Christ and that's what it means for us."
Berrigan is one in a long tradition of "religious radicals" who use protest to speak out against society's ills, says Burton Wechler, law professor at American University.
"There are so many of the 1960s radicals that are now stockbrokers, investment brokers, shoe store owners," Wechler says. That doesn't mean their politics have changed but their heads have changed. This is a man who continued to live it."
Berrigan concedes the peace movement is not what it used to be when thousands marched in the streets, but he's comfortable with the changes.
"I think it has strengthened and intensified," he says.
However, a few questions remain unanswered. When asked how he thinks God will judge him, Berrigan smiles.
"I think I might have some explaining to do," he says. "I don't think my salvation is assured at all."
by CNB