Word: berrigans
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...lived modestly in St. Joseph's rectory in the racially mixed Fox-point section of Providence. He was a strong supporter of open housing, fasted in support of Cesar Chavez's grape boycott, and was impressed by the "tremendous witness for peace" made by Philip and Daniel Berrigan. During the South Vietnamese campaign in Laos last February, Kelly declared that it was "scandalous that churchmen are so concerned about abortion and yet have nothing to say about the destruction of human life in Laos." In March, at Newport, R.I., he and 200 others protested the war in Southeast...
...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...
...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...
National Illness. When Berrigan is talking politics, he often sounds commonplace. In a significant concession -and a dangerous one for a poet-he writes: "The gesture that counts, today, is not the word at all." Even other protesters, he admits, "all look alike to me; they all say the same thing." He makes little apparent effort to speak differently himself as he turns on the old rhetoric of the New Left. "The conflagration is rising"-as ever. It is "a time to tear and pull down," a time to "resign from America in order to join the heart...
...Berrigan's political models are no more defined than slapped-up posters of Che and Ho. His political villains are opposite-and-equal cliches, crude, hasty caricatures of a "Brooks-suited investor" whose "manicured fingers" are "infinitely removed from the bloodletting." When it comes to the America he wants, Berrigan sidles into a vision of "Paradise Park"-a Utopia straight out of the pixiest moments of The Greening of America: "Let the people enter, grow, run, fly, perambulate, consume, pull corks from, spread jams and peanut butter on, swim and sun in, et cetera, as the day is long...