Daniel Berrigan Biography Quotes 24 Report mistakes

Early Life and Formation

Daniel Joseph Berrigan was born in 1921 in Virginia, Minnesota, and raised in a devout Irish American Catholic family that later settled in upstate New York. Drawn early to prayer, literature, and public life, he entered the Society of Jesus as a young man and pursued the rigorous Jesuit course of studies. He was ordained a Jesuit priest in the early 1950s, committing himself to the intertwined vocations of preaching and teaching. The formation shaped his lifelong conviction that faith must be lived as a public witness, not only a private consolation.

Poet-Priest and Teacher

Before he became a household name for his resistance to war, Berrigan was known as a gifted poet and educator. He taught at Jesuit institutions and at universities where his classrooms blended literary craft, biblical prophecy, and the ethics of conscience. His early collection, Time Without Number, won the Lamont Poetry Prize, and he continued to publish poems, homilies, and essays that fused spare lyricism with an uncompromising moral vision. He cultivated friendships with fellow Catholic radicals, including Dorothy Day of the Catholic Worker movement, and corresponded with the Trappist monk Thomas Merton, whose own explorations of contemplation and resistance sharpened Berrigan's sense that prayer and public dissent spring from the same root.

Vietnam War Resistance

By the mid-1960s, Berrigan had concluded that U.S. policy in Southeast Asia violated the demands of conscience. He preached, wrote, and organized, urging Catholics and non-Catholics alike toward nonviolent resistance. In early 1968 he traveled to Hanoi with historian Howard Zinn to help receive released U.S. prisoners of war and to witness the human costs of the conflict. The journey produced his war diary and poems from that period, and it deepened his commitment to tactics that would dramatize moral stakes in unmistakable terms.

The Catonsville Nine and Going Underground

On May 17, 1968, Berrigan and eight others seized draft files from a Selective Service office in Catonsville, Maryland, and burned them with homemade napalm in the parking lot, an act intended to call attention to the destruction being wrought in Vietnam. The participants, among them his brother Philip Berrigan, Tom Lewis, Mary Moylan, David Darst, George Mische, John Hogan, and the former missionaries Thomas and Marjorie Melville, read statements, prayed, and submitted to arrest. The trial that followed became a public catechesis in civil disobedience; Berrigan later shaped the record into The Trial of the Catonsville Nine, a text that circulated widely on stage and page. After exhausting appeals, he declined to surrender for prison in 1970, went underground for several months, and continued to speak at churches and campuses. He was eventually arrested at the Rhode Island home of his friend, the Anglican writer and lawyer William Stringfellow. The federal sentence that followed did not blunt his voice; it amplified it.

Community, Family, and the Catholic Left

Berrigan's closest collaborator for decades was his younger brother Philip, a former Josephite priest who would later marry Elizabeth McAlister, a former nun and co-founder of Jonah House in Baltimore. The trio helped animate the Catholic Left, a network of communities that linked prayer, communal living, and direct action. Their circle included lay activists and religious such as Molly Rush, Anne Montgomery, John Schuchardt, Elmer Maas, Dean Hammer, and others who embraced public acts of witness, jail time, and courtroom testimony as extensions of their baptismal vows. Berrigan cultivated solidarities beyond Catholic boundaries as well, notably with the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, with whom he published dialogues exploring the call to peace across traditions.

Plowshares and Persistent Nonviolence

After Vietnam, Berrigan widened his focus to nuclear weapons and U.S. militarism. In 1980 he joined the first Plowshares action at a General Electric facility in Pennsylvania, where members of the Plowshares Eight used hammers to symbolically disarm components tied to nuclear warheads and poured their own blood as a sign of penance. The group included Daniel and Philip Berrigan, Molly Rush, John Schuchardt, Elmer Maas, Anne Montgomery, Dean Hammer, and Carl Kabat. Trials, convictions, and jail time followed, but for Berrigan the courtroom remained a pulpit. He argued that nonviolence was not merely a tactic but an anthropology, a way of telling the truth about human dignity under threat. In subsequent decades he joined campaigns against U.S. policy in Central America, spoke out during the first Gulf War and the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and was arrested multiple times in protests at military installations and symbols of American warfare.

Pastoral Work and Writing

Though widely known as an activist, Berrigan kept the daily rhythms of priestly life. He preached in parishes and campus chapels, led retreats, visited the sick, and offered pastoral care to people living with HIV/AIDS in New York during the years when stigma and fear were rampant. He wrote steadily, poetry, biblical commentary, memoir, and occasional pieces that braided the prophets with contemporary headlines. Books such as No Bars to Manhood, To Dwell in Peace, and later collections of scriptural reflections placed him in a lineage of American religious letters where conscience and craft meet. His style could be austere, aphoristic, sometimes playful, but always chastened by the conviction that hope must be practiced.

Conflicts with Authority and the Shape of Conscience

Berrigan's path brought friction with both church and state. He respected the Society of Jesus and the wider Catholic Church even as he pressed them to take clearer stands against war-making and nuclear deterrence. He urged bishops to speak with prophetic clarity and accepted internal restrictions when they came, but he also insisted that obedience could not absolve complicity in violence. His exchanges with superiors, correspondence with friends like Dorothy Day and William Stringfellow, and public debates with officials set a pattern for conscience-driven engagement that influenced a generation of clergy and laity.

Legacy and Final Years

In his later years, Berrigan remained a public presence, soft-spoken, wiry, quick with a wry phrase, appearing at readings, protests, and gatherings where veterans of the 1960s met younger activists. He continued to mentor writers and organizers, often pointing them back to scripture and to the hard disciplines of community life. He died in 2016 in New York City, having spent his adult life as a Jesuit priest, poet, and organizer whose witness joined the Beatitudes to the streets. Those who knew him, family, fellow Jesuits, activists, and students, remembered a man whose friendship steadied courage, whose words clarified stakes, and whose acts, undertaken with Philip Berrigan, Elizabeth McAlister, Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, William Stringfellow, Howard Zinn, Thich Nhat Hanh, and many others, made the language of peace feel irreducibly concrete. His biography is inseparable from the communities that formed him and that he, in turn, helped to form: prayerful, stubborn, and committed to nonviolence as a way of life.