Fatherhood Quote by Daniel Berrigan

A clergyman saying, flatly, "My father had very little formal education" is doing more than offering biography; it is setting a moral baseline. Berrigan, the Jesuit poet-priest who spent a lifetime needling American power, often spoke in a plain register that refused the usual prestige markers. The line works because it quietly shifts authority away from credentials and toward lived wisdom. In a culture that treats schooling as a proxy for virtue, he begins with a deficit on paper and invites you to watch it turn into a different kind of strength.

The subtext is class, and a particular Catholic sensibility about dignity. Berrigan came of age in an America where working-class fathers were expected to be stoic providers, not articulate narrators of their own lives. Naming "very little" formal education can sound like apology, but in Berrigan's mouth it reads more like an indictment of the system that withholds opportunity while still demanding obedience. It also foreshadows his later suspicion of institutional respectability: the polished rhetoric of officials, the expert justifications for war, the credentialed alibis.

Context matters because Berrigan built a public theology of conscience. In the era of Vietnam and the Catonsville Nine, he stood against the state and, at times, against his own Church's cautious bureaucracy. A father without formal education becomes a quiet origin story for that posture: the idea that moral clarity may arrive from the margins, and that the most consequential instruction often happens outside classrooms. The sentence is spare, but it plants a whole argument: don't confuse schooling with insight, and don't outsource your conscience to people with better resumes.