Hiding Daniel Berrigan
“Our apologies, good friends, for the fracture of good order. The burning of paper, instead of children.”
-From the prayer of the Catonsville Nine while burning stolen draft cards
The great rebel priest, Father Daniel Berrigan S.J. died on Saturday, April 30, just shy of his 95th birthday.
On May 17, 1968 he and eight other anti-Vietnam War activists, who became known as the Catonsville Nine, broke into the draft board office in that Maryland city, took several hundred A-1 draft cards while the startled employees stood watching. They put them in a wastebasket in the parking lot, and, using a recipe of kerosene and soap chips from the Green Beret handbook, poured homemade napalm on them and set them on fire, while saying the following meditation:
“. . . Our apologies, good friends, for the fracture of good order. The burning of paper, instead of children. . . . 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. For the sake of that order, we risk our liberty, our good name. . . . 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 . . . ”
Berrigan and the other protesters, including his brother, Josephite priest Philip Berrigan, were arrested and sentenced. The protesters received sentences of 3 years in federal prison, although Philip received a longer one due to his earlier conviction as a member of the “Baltimore Four.” In that action, Philip and three others had poured blood, some of it their own, over draft cards taken while occupying a draft board in Baltimore. Philip was out on bail when he joined his brother and seven others in Catonsville.
Fr. Dan was the Associate Chaplain of Cornell United Religious Works, the “department” that housed the campus religious ministries, at Cornell University at the time and had a close-knit group of supporters in Ithaca, NY. That group included my parents, Harvey and Bryna Fireside.
After the sentencing and appeals process had run out, Fr. Dan brought an unconventional challenge to the group: instead of following the traditional path of those practicing civil disobedience and voluntarily going to jail, he proposed not submitting to an authority so illegitimate that it had become a killing machine. He and four of the Nine, including his brother, would go underground rather than surrender. Their motivation was not to avoid prison indefinitely, which was inevitable, but to continue their activism and increase awareness to their just cause. A few in the group objected, but my parents and others saw the genius and humor of this strategy and Fr. Dan won the day.
In an interview from The Village Voice he did while a fugitive, he explained:
“I wanted to confront the mythology of the good guy whose goodness depends on his willingness to go to jail, the sort of idea that spread with the civil rights movement and Martin Luther King. All that’s over now. The important thing is to keep working.”
To decide to go underground when hunted by the FBI for federal crimes is well and good, but as a practical matter, you need a place to sleep. That first place, that safe house, was my house.
Technically, it wasn’t “my” house just yet, as I wouldn’t be born for another five months. My parents lived there, with my four-year old brother, Doug, and seven-year old sister, Leela. Also in the house were Shelley and Audrey, two undergraduates studying at Ithaca College, where my father was a professor of politics. Audrey and Shelley were living there in exchange for occasional babysitting (and would later be my babysitters as well).
A side note: we learned long afterwards that the standard FBI profile ruled out that Fr. Dan would hide out with a family with young children, because, well, can you trust any kid to keep a secret for more than ten seconds? Indeed, my sister Leela forgot our parents’ imploring to keep quiet about our house guest as soon as she arrived in school. “Guess who’s living in our house?” she asked excitedly, before revealing the answer to everyone in earshot. What the FBI didn’t count on was that she was attending East Hill School, a public John Dewey-inspired alternative educational experiment that our parents had a hand in starting. By the end of the day, the identity of our house guest was common knowledge, but no teacher, student, or parent ratted out Fr. Dan to the cops.
My father, a Jewish refugee from Nazi Austria who had a deep appreciation for providing shelter for people hiding from police, helped Fr. Dan set up in our basement on a cot while Audrey and Shelley were away in class. Dan looked around the dark basement and asked if he couldn’t move to the more comfortable sofa in our living room.
“Who else is here?” Fr. Dan asked.
“Just the two students upstairs,” my dad replied, explaining how they had been engaged in activist campus politics.
“Would they tell?”
“Not in a million years.”
While my dad was at the house harboring a federal fugitive, my mom was out shopping. On her list were the key items for Fr. Dan’s disguise: motorcycle helmet, riding goggles, leather jacket, fake beard and mustache. In Ithaca of 1970, this may not have raised much suspicion as you might imagine.
Several days later, Fr. Dan donned his disguise and hopped on the back of a motorcycle of another peacenik conspirator. Their destination was Barton Hall, the indoor Cornell gymnasium. Inside were fifteen thousand students and peace activists who had come to participate in a multi-day peace festival called “America Is Hard to Find,” in honor of Berrigan’s recent book of the same name.
(Joseph Palermo has written the definitive account of the event, its lead up, and its aftermath.)
When Fr. Dan arrived, the Bread and Puppet theater troupe was performing a Freedom Seder.He slipped past the FBI agents who had expected him to attend. The G-men, although dressed in hippie wigs, stood out like sore thumbs with their bulky radio gear and straight-laced looks amid the protesters. Fr. Dan hopped up on the main stage, where the Puppet troupe had begun acting out a version of the Last Supper. Hundreds of students moved towards the stage and formed a protective cordon to prevent a quick arrest by the cops.
After making a rousing speech, he had to figure out how to exit past the cops. On cue, a supporter tripped the fuse and Fr. Berrigan slipped into one of the fifteen foot tall Bread & Puppet apostle costumes (he later recounted that he never learned which apostle it was, but that he hoped it might be Judas).
From the puppet, Fr. Dan was led into a getaway van, and then on a Keystone Kops getaway chase from the FBI.
Suspecting that he would show up at another peace rally in New York City, the FBI raided a church and arrested Philip Berrigan and several other of the fugitive Nine. Soon after, Fr. Dan was the only one not in jail.
He spent four months traveling the country and showing up at peace marches until he was finally caught, thanks to a stool pigeon who befriended Philip in maximum security who learned Fr. Dan’s next hiding place: the Block Island refuge of a family friend. Posing as “bird watchers,” the feds raided the house and this chapter of the adventure was over.
When I was born my parents gave me his name. So that’s how this Jewish kid has a Jesuit priest for a namesake.
Postscript: I am one of 120 co-owners at Equal Exchange, a worker-cooperative that introduced Fair Trade to the United States. At our 30th anniversary celebration, I learned that the Catholic Worker house in New York City where Fr. Dan lived and died is a long-time and very important sales account. They serve our coffee to their homeless as well as house denizens. I can’t say for sure, but it seems quite likely that Fr. Dan was drinking Equal Exchange coffee or tea.
A second postscript: Between 1992 and 1996 I was the Coordinator for CUSLAR, the Committee on US/Latin American Relations. CUSLAR was founded by the Rev. Bill Rogers, one of Fr. Dan’s colleagues at Cornell United Religious Works. CUSLAR recently celebrated its 50th anniversary as the oldest continuously operating US-Latin America solidarity organizations. I’m not sure which was Fr. Dan’s office in Anabel Taylor Hall (pictured above), but if I wasn’t in the same one, I certainly walked the same halls he did years earlier.
