✣ Jesuit hero of peace movement dies aged 94
What happened? Anti-Vietnam war activist Fr Daniel Berrigan died last Saturday aged 94. Born in 1921 in Virginia, Minnesota, and growing up on a farm near Syracuse, New York State, he joined the Jesuits at the age of 18 and was ordained a priest in 1952. In the early 1960s he became a vocal opponent to the Vietnam war, beginning, “as loudly as I could, to say ‘no’ to the war”. One of his many protests was to use home-made napalm to set fire to hundreds of stolen American draft papers. What the British media are saying The Times described him as “an instant folk hero, breathing new hope into the civil rights struggle just weeks after it had been rocked by the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr”. It concentrated on his adventures on the run from the FBI for destroying US property, and his appearance in the Paul Simon song Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard as the “radical priest”. The Boston Globe said Fr Berrigan’s “arresting personal presence” – complete with “Joan of Arc haircut” – contributed to his celebrity status. The paper noted he acted in the 1986 film The Mission and appeared in an ad for Ben & Jerry’s ice cream in 1994. It quoted Thomas Merton, who described Fr Berrigan as “a man full of fire, the right kind ... He is alive and full of spirit and truth.” What Catholics are saying The Jesuit magazine America said: “Berrigan undoubtedly stands among the most influential American Jesuits of the past century”. It quoted the novelist Kurt Vonnegut: “For me, Fr Daniel Berrigan is Jesus as a poet. If this be heresy, make the most of it.” The National Catholic Reporter called him a “poet and peacemaker ... a prolific writer who achieved a remarkable lyricism and poetic force when writing about subjects that normally were explored in academic and military circles”. The Boston Globe, however, quoted the Catholic philosopher Michael Novak, who, in a review of Fr Berrigan’s autobiography Dwell in Peace, wrote that the Jesuit priest “chooses the role of grand simplifier, seeing the world as Good and Evil, with very little of the former”.
