loosie: words: Clanton's Rant

Clanton's Rant

The legacy of Father Berrigan.

by Clanton McNeese | 2002.12.03

Philip Berrigan, an ex-con and an ex-priest, died last week. He spent half a lifetime fighting for peace against a government that he condemned as “immoral and violent.” He used to be famous.

He and his brother Daniel briefly made the FBI’s most wanted list for fleeing imprisonment following a 1970 conviction for destroying government property. The two were among the “Catonsville Nine” who destroyed draft records at the height of the Vietnam War. As priests, the two carried a moral authority that made them stars of the peace movement. A former soldier with World War II battlefield experience, Philip Berrigan lent a tough guy image to pacifism.

He made institutional enemies easily, never hiding his contempt for politicians and church officials. To him, the Catholic Church in America was silent and cowardly when strong voices for peace were needed, and the government was a promoter of racism and murder. Father Berrigan would not follow the rules in his public life, and he broke them in his private life. After his 1973 marriage to a former nun, both were excommunicated.

As the Vietnam War receded into the past, the resistance movement withered, and radicals like Father Berrigan seemed anachronistic. But he lost neither his zeal for confrontation nor his ability to run afoul of the law. As a founding member of Plowshares, an anti-nuclear weapon organization, he took part in raids against military facilities, and did ten years total prison time.

Father Berrigan argued that a higher morality made law-breaking permissible, even honorable. Court decisions, stiff sentences and the eventual indifference of the public did not lessen his resolve to combat perceived evils of American society.

Today, Father Berrigan’s belief that law-breaking is permissible has finally been shared by Roman Catholic leadership. Of course, Cardinal Law and the rest of the molester protectors have been pursuing permissiveness in secrecy, taking their cue from America’s corporate leaders. But when the shit hits the collection basket and the bribes unbalance the diocesan budget, the ugly truth slips out.

Shamefully revealed are a procession of pederasts and the sympathy they received from heads of the church. So Law’s Boston diocese is poised to fly the United way, straight toward bankruptcy and protection of the church’s huge holdings from the victims crying for payback.

This is a scandal so demeaning that the presently constituted Catholic Church in America will not recover. When “parish priests” becomes the punchline to sleazy jokes, moral authority slips swiftly away, and the church is justly regarded as one more self-serving fraternity that nobody should trust. And that is good news. When Americans learn to doubt institutions, they are taking a critical step toward adulthood. To rely on some power structure to choose one’s enemies or create one’s heroes or guide one to heaven is to remain a child.

The essence of religion must be community, not heirarchy. The great cathedrals of America need not be torn down for an equality of faith to be achieved, but the military-style officialdom of the church must go. In an age when religions seem better designed to promote separation and warfare than communion and peace, there is little reason to mourn the demise of a church which has been more concerned with accumulating wealth than protecting its children.

Philip Berrigan was not a perfect man. He broke the law, he ignored the orders of his superiors, he married a woman, and he was kicked out of the church. He fought on the side of the weak and was beaten again and again by the powerful. Bernard Law was a perfect bureaucrat. He followed the rules, and he became a cardinal, a prince of the church. Then he used his office to work again and again against the victims of predatory priests.

This sad institution will not reform itself from the inside. Change must be
demanded by the parishioners who have so long supported the church. There is a great deal of talk among the Catholic clergy about shepherds and their flocks, a metaphorical reference to pastors and their congregations. It makes sense only if you think of people as sheep.