DANIEL BERRIGAN, S.J. Philip Berrigan's book No More Strangers, which deals with racial strife, war and the effects of poverty, carries the dedication: "To my brother, Father Dan, S.J., without whom neither my priesthood nor this book would be possible." This is only one testimony to the kind of influence Father Daniel Berrigan can have, and since it is offered by his younger brother, probably not remarkable. But as I talked to people in the peace movement and his name kept cropping up, it was evident that he had an influence on many, and many different kinds of, people. One was as likely to hear of him standing with Norman Thomas or Dr. Spock on a platform in Washington protesting U.S. policy in Vietnam as leading a peace vigil the U.N. or giving a talk to some student group in the Midwest. He seems ubiquitous and, if current fashion has not pulverized the term out of meaningful existence, he has Daniel Berrigan is a poet, essayist and theologian and pres ently editor of Jesuit Missions magazine. He entered the Jesuits in 1939 and was ordained in 1952. He has studied at the Gregorian Institute in Rome and in France, where he also did parish work. His poetry and prose have appeared in a number of magazines such as The Atlantic, Poetry, Saturday Review and Commonweal. He has published three volumes of essays and five of poetry. His poetry is favorably regarded by a numberI 142 PROTEST: PACIFISM AND POLITICS Daniel Berrigan, S.I. When I ask Daniel Berrigan what were the most important factors in the development of his judgments about war and peace today, he separates out from the many which he edges three that seem most crucial. BERRIGAN: I think the first factor would be the civil rights movement. The light it shed upon, first of all, the human person himself, the new light it shed upon the creation of persons and the creation of community, the way this kind of new building of human life and the human person had to come about by way of the acceptance of suffering-I think that was -a kind of symbol of a universal attitude toward man, not just a national attitude toward a minority.Then, I can remember, really to the day, when I read a certain article by [Thomas] Merton which landed in mybrain like a bullet; it exploded there and really helped me very greatly to bridge the difficult gap between this national movement and an attitude of nonviolence toward man in general, man in the world. I remember being profoundly disturbed by the article and finally writing him, not really expecting an answer. But he did answer at some length and helped me to clarify what I had tried to say and suggested some reading and so on.And then, thirdly, I would mark the influence of the workerpriests, especially as they had gone through the Algerian experience and the French experience of colonialism and helped, I think, France understand herself as a post-colonial power. I think their contribution solidified my idea that perhaps we had accepted a kind of Marxist mystique without analyzing it, and that we ourselves were unconsciously and perhaps in a betraying sense dedicating our conscience to an ideal of warfare as inevitable. FINN: We, meaning which people? BERRIGAN: Christians, I would say. Especially, yes. And it was a great kind of purifying of my own mind just to see that men like that could be peaceable and sources of peace for not merely by talking but by the sort of life they had adopted. FINN: Did your experiences in the civil rights movement have much to do with your own ideas about the uses of violence or nonviolence, or did you even think of your actions at that time in these particular terms? 143 1 of poets, including Marianne Moore who has said that she reads "with reverence anything that Father Berrigan writes." Father Berrigan is an engaged person and his multiple activities have caused him to be described as "a leading voice of dissent in this country." At one point, apparently, that voice impinged upon the ears of his superiors in a way they found un-pleasant. The official story reads that their displeasure had nothing to do with his withdrawal from the national debate, that Daniel Berrigan was sent to Latin America as a part of a normal journalistic assignment. That story failed to convince a number of people who thought that he was being penalized for his activities in the Clergy Concerned about Vietnam. Students demonstrated outside Cardinal Spellman's office in New York, and over a thousand priests and laymen signed an advertisement which appeared in the New York Times demanding his return. When he returned he took up his activities where he had left them. It is a number of months after this that I visit Daniel Berrigan in the Jesuit Missions House on the Upper East Side of New York. The housekeeper shows me from the cool, quiet, cavern-ous foyer into the waiting room. Berrigan comes in brisk and lively from the chill outdoors, but as he responds to my ques-tions there is an air of reserve, of withdrawn inwardness, of self-communing, as if his statements were directed to himself as much as to me. His voice is low and intense with a slight quality. His own position on the war in Vietnam is clear. He has publicly referred to "the immorality of our current effort in Vietnam," and has said that it fails to satisfy Thomistic require-ments of a just war on three counts: (1) The United States has not explored every other means for a settlement; (2) United States forces have exceeded justifiable employment of force; they rely upon "torture of prisoners, execution without trial, defoliation of crops" and have practically erased the "crucial distinction between the nonviolent noncombatants and the guilty"; (3) We have not attended to the rights of self-determi nation of the entire Vietnamese people.* Quotations are taken from an interview printed in the National Catholic Reporter, September, 8, 1965, p. 2.[ 144 BERRIGAN: Well, my own experience in civil rights began in the North, which is of course a limiting and very specific factor. Meantime, my brother Philip was operating in the deep and we were able, I think, to share a great deal, mainly along student lines. I guess I learned a great deal from the university students who were just beginning nonviolent methods in the freedom rides and the picketing and sit-ins, North and South. And without reflecting a great deal upon it, I think it had great impact on me. FINN: Did you write to Merton