Bearing the Cross
By
Chris Hedges
May 10, 2016 "Information
Clearing House"
- "Truth
Dig" -
NEW YORK—I arrived early Friday morning,
after walking through the rain, at the
St. Francis Xavier Church in Greenwich
Village for the funeral of the Rev.
Daniel Berrigan. I stood, the church
nearly empty, at the front of the
sanctuary with my hand on the top of
Dan’s rosewood casket. It was adorned
with a single red carnation and a small
plaque that read: “Rev. Daniel J.
Berrigan. Born May 9, 1921. Entered S.J.
August 14, 1939. Ordained June 21, 1952.
Died April 30, 2016.”
The walls of the Romanesque basilica had
large murals, by German artist William
Lamprecht, of the stations of the
cross—Pilate’s condemnation of Jesus,
Jesus collapsing under the weight of the
cross, Jesus nailed to the cross and
crucified. Lamprecht had muted the
colors so each successive scene was
darker and more ominous than the
previous one. A Tiffany stained-glass
window, with its glints of light,
portrayed the Madonna and child. Over
the large sanctuary, with its rows of
wooden pews, hung soft, milky-white,
bulbous lamps. The blue-veined marble
altar, the graceful arches, the Carrera
marble floor and the towering organ with
its 3,323 pipes gave the moment
solemnity and grandeur, although Dan
relentlessly challenged the pomp and
power of all institutions, including the
church.
Dan, like his brother, Philip Berrigan,
and his close friends Dorothy Day from
the Catholic Worker Movement and
Trappist monk Thomas Merton, led a life
defined by the Christian call to bear
the cross. This is the central call of
the Christian life. It is one few
Christians achieve. The bearing of the
cross, in Christian theology, is
counterintuitive. It says that the “the
last shall be first, and the first
last.” It demands nonviolence. It holds
fast to justice. It stands with the
oppressed, those who Dan’s friend, the
Jesuit priest Ignacio Ellacuria, who was
murdered by the death squads in El
Salvador, called “the crucified people
of history.” It binds adherents to moral
law. It calls on them to defy through
acts of civil disobedience and
noncompliance with state laws, when
these laws, as they often do, conflict
with God’s law.
If
you bear the cross, you often go to jail
or, in Dan’s case, federal prison for 18
months, after he, his brother and seven
other religious activists in 1968 burned
378 draft files of young men—most of
them African-American—about to be sent
to Vietnam. The activists had
manufactured homemade napalm to set the
documents on fire in garbage cans in the
parking lot outside the building from
which they took the files.
In
her eulogy, Elizabeth McAllister, Dan’s
sister-in-law, read the statement Dan
wrote for the group, known as the
Catonsville Nine:
Our apologies good friends
for the fracture of good order the
burning of paper
instead of children the angering of
the orderlies
in the front parlor of the charnel
house
We could not so help us God do
otherwise
For we are sick at heart
Our hearts give us no rest for
thinking of the Land of Burning
Children …
We say: Killing is disorder
life and gentleness and community
and unselfishness
is the only order we recognize …
How long must the world’s resources
be raped in the service of legalized
murder?
When at what point will you say no
to this war?
We have chosen to say
with the gift of our liberty
if necessary our lives:
the violence stops here
the death stops here
the suppression of the truth stops
here
this war stops here …
The 2,000 mourners erupted in a
prolonged standing ovation.
Dan—whose 50 books of poetry, essays and
Scripture commentaries, as well as his
play, “The Trial of the Catonsville
Nine,” are as important a contribution
as his activism—was the bête noire of
senior church officials, including the
archbishop of New York, Cardinal Francis
Spellman. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover,
who loathed the peace activists,
fabricated a case accusing the Berrigan
brothers of conspiring to blow up
tunnels under federal buildings in
Washington, D.C., and kidnap Richard
Nixon’s national security adviser, Henry
Kissinger.
Dan, who took part in the Freedom Rides
and civil rights marches in the South,
was in and out of jail all his life.
With seven other activists, he illegally
entered a General Electric nuclear
missile plant in King of Prussia, Pa.,
in 1980. They poured blood and hammered
the fragile cones of Mark-12A warheads.
He had been, by the time he died a few
days short of his 95th birthday,
arrested hundreds of times. This, he
said, was the cost of discipleship.
“But what of the price of peace?” he
asked in his book “No Bars to Manhood.”
I think of the good, decent,
peace-loving people I have known by
the thousands, and I wonder. How
many of them are so afflicted with
the wasting disease of normalcy
that, even as they declare for the
peace, their hands reach out with an
instinctive spasm ... in the
direction of their comforts, their
home, their security, their income,
their future, their plans—that
five-year plan of studies, that
ten-year plan of professional
status, that twenty-year plan of
family growth and unity, that
fifty-year plan of decent life and
honorable natural demise. “Of
course, let us have the peace,” we
cry, “but at the same time let us
have normalcy, let us lose nothing,
let our lives stand intact, let us
know neither prison nor ill repute
nor disruption of ties.” And because
we must encompass this and protect
that, and because at all costs—at
all costs—our hopes must march on
schedule, and because it is unheard
of that in the name of peace a sword
should fall, disjoining that fine
and cunning web that our lives have
woven, because it is unheard of that
good men should suffer injustice or
families be sundered or good repute
be lost—because of this we cry peace
and cry peace, and there is no
peace. 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.
Bearing the cross is not about the
pursuit of happiness. It does not
embrace the illusion of inevitable human
progress. It is not about achieving
wealth, celebrity or power. It entails
sacrifice. It is about our neighbor. The
organs of state security—in Dan’s case,
the FBI—monitor and harass you. They
amass huge files on your activities.
They disrupt your life. And in Friday’s
homily, the Rev. Stephen Kelly, evoking
laughter, welcomed the FBI agents who
had been “assigned here today to
validate that it is Daniel Berrigan’s
funeral mass so they can complete and
perhaps close their files.”
“Daniel and Phil exposed the historical
alliance of religious leaders who
colluded with structures of domination,”
said Kelly, who has spent more than a
decade in prison for acts of nonviolent
protest.
“The imperial power of Pax Romana ran
aground on the shoals of Christian
steadfastness,” he went on. “But through
the centuries the circle of outcasts and
martyrs dissembled. They gained
ascendancy to the power they were meant
to resist. Daniel and Phil untied,
illegally, those held in power’s
captivity. They risked retaliation. They
touched the idol of the state.”
Dan, who went underground for four
months after burning the draft files,
was on the FBI’s most-wanted list—the
first Catholic priest in the country to
hold that distinction. But he and his
small circle of activists pushed the
clergy—including my father—out of their
pulpits and into the streets to denounce
the Vietnam War, especially after Dan
founded Clergy and Laity Concerned about
Vietnam in 1965 with Rabbi Abraham
Heschel. He traveled to North Vietnam
with Howard Zinn in 1968 on a peace
mission and returned home with three
U.S. Air Force personnel who had been
held prisoner. He and Zinn made the men
promise they would no longer take part
in the war. Dan spent time with church
communities working with the poor in
Latin America. He visited, unnoticed,
the activists at Manhattan’s Zuccotti
Park during the Occupy Wall Street
movement and walked through the crowd,
giving his silent blessing.
“This is the worst time of my long
life,” he said when I interviewed him
for The Nation magazine a few years ago.
“I have never had such meager
expectations of the system. I find those
expectations verified in the paucity and
shallowness every day I live.”
Yet he refused to despair. The cross, he
knew, is carried even in the face of
inevitable failure. This is the
absurdity of faith. Martin Luther King
Jr. repeatedly made reference to this
reality of Christian life, saying, “When
I took up the cross I recognized it’s
meaning … The cross is something that
you bear, and ultimately you die on.”
Dan’s worldly possessions, including his
small collection of threadbare clothes,
could barely fill two suitcases. He was
as opposed to abortion as he was to the
death penalty, a stance that did not
always endear him to many left-wing
activists. He denounced the violence
employed by the left during the Vietnam
War, especially the Weather Underground,
writing, “No principle is worth the
sacrificing of a single human being.” He
knew the poison of violence. He saw no
hope in the farce of managed electoral
politics, quoting Emma Goldman, who
said, “If voting was that effective it
would be illegal.” He feared dark and
disastrous times, especially as we
savaged the environment, and he told me
that all we may have left is the
“Eucharist and each other.”
Reinhold Niebuhr, a theologian whose
words are misinterpreted and misused by
conservatives and the powerful,
including Barack Obama, wrote about the
importance of being a “Christian
realist.” No one defined this concept
more than Dan. He saw the world for what
it was. He had no illusions about it. He
understood the power of evil. He knew
how seductive it was. As a solitary
individual, he could accomplish nothing
without community. His duty was to bear
the cross, even if it did not make
sense, even if it did not seem to make a
difference. He was sustained by others
and majestically sustained those around
him.
Dan provided, for me, the most cogent
definition of religious faith.
“The good is to be done because it is
good, not because it goes somewhere,” he
told me. “I believe if it is done in
that spirit it will go somewhere, but I
don’t know where. I don’t think the
Bible grants us to know where goodness
goes, what direction, what force. I have
never been seriously interested in the
outcome. I was interested in trying to
do it humanely and carefully and
nonviolently and let it go.”
A
bagpiper played as Dan’s casket was
loaded into the back of a silver and
black hearse outside the basilica.
Hundreds of mourners, their cheeks
streaked by rain and tears, filled the
street. I stood on the steps.
It
was a few blocks from here, at the
shrine of the Church of St. Anthony of
Padua, that Dan baptized my youngest
daughter five years ago. He cradled her
in his arms and spoke of faith as
resistance. He reminisced about marching
in Selma with Dr. King. He asked us to
each say out loud what qualities we
hoped my daughter would possess. Dan
said he wished for “a sense of humor.”
The hearse moved slowly down the vacant
street. A man held his fist in the air.
Some in the crowd sang a hymn. When the
hearse reached the end of the street,
its luminous red tail light began to
blink on and off in the drizzle,
signaling a right turn. Then it was
gone.
A
change is coming. I can feel it.
Chris Hedges, previously spent nearly
two decades as a foreign correspondent
in Central America, the Middle East,
Africa and the Balkans. He has reported
from more than 50 countries and has
worked for The Christian Science
Monitor, National Public Radio, The
Dallas Morning News and The New York
Times, for which he was a foreign
correspondent for 15 years.