Led by two grey-haired Roman Catholic priests, a small band of antiwar demonstrators last month burst into the headquarters of local draft board 33 in Catonsville, Md. Telling the terrified women clerks on duty that they had come for the records, the invaders emptied the contents of four filing drawers into wire rubbish baskets. Then they carried them out the door and burned hem in a nearby parking lot, starting the blaze with napalm they had whipped up from a recipe in an Army manual. The Berrigan brothers— Daniel, 47 and Philip, 44— had struck again.
The Berrigans are beyond doubt the most revolutionary priests that the Cathollic Church in the U.S. has yet produced. And there is nothing very radical about their background. They grew up in Syracuse, the sons of a tough Irish railroad worker; their mother a gentle devout Catholic, was known as a soft touch for every passing hobo. Daniel, who entered the Jesuit order straight out of high school, is a poet and chaplain at Cornell University he favors turtleneck sweaters and admits to being a "hippie priest." Philip, an infantryman during World War II, was ordained in 1955 in the Josephite order, which principally serves Negro parishes. Also a writer, he has recently been serving as assistant pastor of a Baltimore ghetto-area parish.
Thorns in the Side. Both brothers long been thorns in the sides of religious superiors. In 1965 Dan was briefly banished to Latin America for helping to organize an antiwar group called Clergy Concerned About Viet Nam, and earlier this year undertook an unauthorized trip to Hanoi. In 1963, Philip was transferred from the New Orleans area largely because of his militant stand on civil rights, later was dismissed from a teaching post at Epiphany College in Newburgh N.Y., because of his strong antiwar stand. In opposing the Viet Nam wa, the brothers have openly violated the law out of conviction that other means of dissent have been exhausted. "I have tried all the conventional and legal forms of protest to little or no avail" says Philip, who argues that both Christ and Paul allowed the possibility of civil disobedience when man's law counters God's. The government, of course, could not agree. Priesthood or no, both the Justice Department and the State of Maryland indicted the unruly Berrigans on counts—including sabotage, robbery and assault—that could send them to prison for 54 years. Pending trial, Daniel Berngan was allowed to go free on bail. But not Philip. At the time of the Catonsville caper, he was already awaiting sentence for raiding Baltimore's central draft board and pouring blood on its files. As a "possible danger to the community," U.S. District Judge Edward Northrop ordered him held without bail m the Baltimore County Jail He also sentenced him to six years in a federal prison for the earlier raid. The Berrigans took the judgment in stride. "Maybe one way of getting free these days is going to jail," said Daniel. Added Philip: "Our church is slowly beginning to accept our consciences, if not our acts. The priesthood is demeaned infinitely more by silence and inaction than it is by what we have done."