Divine Disobedience

Vintage Books, 322 pages. $1.95.

AMERICAN bookstores are so flooded today with studies in radicalism of one kind or another that most of these exercises invariably find their way to the scrap heap. Not that they are all pat rhetoric, it's simply that no real market exists for them. The political mood of the country is so staid and complacent that there is little interest in critiques which forcefully challenge American society or even go so far as to suggest unorthodox remedies for the evil of the Indochina war.

Had Francine Gray chosen a different radical subject, her two-year-old book-though well-written and informative-might by now be obsolete. But as it is , her central characters-Philip and Daniel Berrigan-have stirred more interest and controversy from prison than have almost all movement leaders who are still at large. And the Berrigans are only a small-though highly visible-part of a movement which has rapidly grown in strength and significance.

During the past three years, an ever-increasing number of people have departed from the conservative mainstream of the American Catholic Church to pose a highly convincing threat to the government's war machine. They have helped organize mass demonstrations, and they have destroyed thousands of draft files. The Baltimore Four, the Catonsville Nine, the Milwaukee Fourteen, the Flower City Conspiracy, and many more-each of these groups has made considerable impact through their practice of non-violent civil disobedience. And with the decline of large but flighty organizations purporting to represent the student Left, the Catholic groups have become the vanguard of the militant antiwar movement in America today.

TO BE SURE, many of the aims of this movement-especially among clerics-are oriented toward the Church itself. On one level, there is growing pressure for liturgical reform which would reflect present-day realities, and on another, there are concerted efforts to prod the Catholic hierarchy into positions of support for the antiwar movement and civil rights. And much of these activists' radical zeal has been a direct result of their own experience within the Church:

The Berrigans' belligerence, and the actions of the Catonsville Nine, are a strictly Catholic phenomenon. They are not only a protest against the Vietnam war; they are also a defiance of the heavy-handed authoritarianism, the blind nationalism that makes the American Catholic community the most war-mongering segment of the nation. Goaded by the silence of his Church's hierarchy and of its hawkish flocks, the Catholic radical can become a desperado.

The inner conflict of the American Church has curiously been played out in the Berrigans' own lives. Sons of a working-class Irishman whose parents migrated to America to escape the potato famine, the young Berrigans were torn between conflicting aspects of their own background. On the one hand, there was the immigrant's desire to prove himself a loyal American, combined with the Catholic's tendency to play the staunch, conservative counterpart to the renegade, insurgent Protestant tradition in which America was founded. On the other hand is the fact that their father, Tom Berrigan, was a progressive and a labor leader, a rarity when set against his own background. And yet Tom Berrigan was so loyal a Catholic that his worldly inclinations could be reversed when his creed was at stake; in 1949, a gravediggers' strike hit the archdiocese of New York City, and Tom Berrigan appeared shovel in hand to help Cardinal Spellman break the strike.

His sons' radical impulses ultimately prevailed, of course, but their introductions to political activity were vastly differing ones. Daniel, a Jesuit, was almost entirely immersed in a clerical viewpoint; the strictness and internal discipline of his order insured that he would relate to political events within the perspective of the Church. And he seems a more deeply religious man than does Philip, whose instincts and activities have always been more secular-and more militant-in tone. A member of the more worldly Josephites, Philip was more capable of involving himself in social problems than was his more heavily committed Jesuit brother. Philip got his experience not on pulpits and confessional booths, but on ghetto sidewalks and neighborhood storefronts. And Philip has been one step ahead of Daniel in escalating opposition to the war. While Daniel gave speeches in 1966, Philip led a group of clerics in picketing the homes of high government officials and in defying military police to demonstrate at Fort Myer, Virginia. As Daniel sat briefly in jail following the October 1967 march on the Pentagon, Philip was in Baltimore dousing draft files with blood. And it was at Philip's prodding that Daniel finally decided to join the group which burned draft files with home-made napalm in Catonsville, Maryland on May 17, 1968.

THEY ARE now the principal characters of the American antiwar movement, and while Francine Gray's account includes a discussion of the broader movement within the Church and a section on Ivan Illich, it necessarily centers on them. Hers is the most complete chronicle to date of the Berrigans' activity, and it is a particularly important book in view of the U. S. government's latest at tempt to discredit their movement and intimidate others who would join them.

One of Mrs. Gray's key points focuses aptly on the case of the Harrisburg Eight. In the Berrigans' view, protest must remain "nonviolent," but continually escalate if it is unsuccessful. Each of them-and particularly Philip, who was indicted by the grand jury-fears that once a form of demonstration has been tried, it will soon become assimilated into the mainstream of conventional political action, "part of the liberal bag." The Berrigans took part in each escalating stage of the antiwar protest in order to build the right kind of momentum in the developing confrontation with the U. S. government. With each new action, the bounds of nonviolence were thus broadened and re-defined.

That, more or less, was the substance of the exchanges between Philip and others which recently surfaced along with indictments by the Harrisburg grand jury. The possibility of temporarily kidnapping "someone like" Henry Kissinger was, it now appears, being considered. But the consideration was a painstaking one, one which was riddled with questions like: What does nonviolence mean? How can it be concretely applied? If this action is undertaken, then what next?

In fact, the truly significant import of the indictment is not that the discussion was taking place, because such deliberation is completely justified in terms of individual freedoms and in view of the failure of less drastic measures to end the war. The real message from Harrisburg is the extent to which the government is willing to abrogate even its own measly legal guarantees in order to prevent such discussion from taking place. The tapping of telephones, the surveillance of mail, the use of secret informers to record a discussion and then construe that discussion as a "conspiracy" is ample proof that the government is interested not in individual rights but in the suppression of antiwar discourse. If the United States is successful in framing Philip and the rest, it will also have intimidated others with similar objections to this war. In contrast, it seems clear that those involved in the discussion are more obedient to their own precepts than are U. S. officials to theirs, even in the pursuit of a higher law.