On April 30, 2016, Catholic peacemaker and activist Daniel Berrigan entered life eternal. He was a teacher and friend to many in the Sojourners community. Read more reflections on Dan's life and legacy in the August 2016 issue.
"VIOLENCE ONLY EXISTS with the help of the lie!”
With these words Father Daniel Berrigan and I sealed our fate. It was summer 1995. August 6. We’d been invited to read at the Washington National Cathedral’s service commemorating the 50th year since the U.S. used atomic weapons on civilians in Japan.
The cathedral was full. I was supposed to read an adaptation from Thomas Merton’s scathing indictment of U.S. militarism, the poem “Original Child Bomb.” Dan was slated to read from Soviet-resister Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Nobel Prize lecture and from Maximilian Kolbe, the Polish priest who exchanged his life for a fellow prisoner in Auschwitz.
Minutes before the liturgy began, a member of the cathedral staff told us there was a change in the readings. Thomas Merton was too controversial; I should read from Deuteronomy. Dan should also read from scripture instead of from Solzhenitsyn and Kolbe.
They handed out a new order of worship. Inserted in it was a statement that included this sentence: “Washington National Cathedral has no official view on the history or morality of the first atom bombs or on any foreign or military policy.”
Dan and I exchanged glances: This could not stand. The opening hymn was beginning. We were pulled into the processional line.
I’ve rarely felt so sick to my stomach. Then it was my turn to ascend the altar steps to the pulpit. I looked at Dan again. He smiled, nodded, and wiggled his eyebrows.
Up I rose.
With the microphone booming, I opened my remarks by saying that it was a travesty for “America’s church” to say that it has no official view on the morality of the first atom bombs; it was a sin for a church to print such a thing. I asked forgiveness from Hisayo Yamashita, a survivor of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, and other hibakusha seated in places of honor in the front row.
Instead of reading from Deuteronomy, I read from the original text: Meditations on the Transfiguration with words from Thomas Merton’s poem “Original Child Bomb.”
I sat down. Eyes closed. Heart in throat. Face aflame. Silence.
Then came the voice of Daniel Berrigan: “‘Violence only exists with the help of the lie!’ Today in America, this church, to our great shame, has perpetuated the lie. What if Christians had taken no official view on the history or morality of slavery?” For the next 20 minutes, America’s finest poet-prophet-priest called down a litany of condemnation and conscience on the hubris of America’s religious leaders who had lost their way. The straight way had become crooked. Dan trued it in place again.
Following the service, Dan and I were both chastised and then banned from the cathedral grounds by the person whose “good order” we had “fractured.” Over time the ban was forgotten; but Dan’s prophetic speech lives on.
Berrigan concludes his book No Gods But One with this: “Perhaps it is with relief, sorrowful and secret, that Moses draws a last breath? The 40-year burden, carried with such nobility, is lifted from his shoulders. He dies in a good spirit ... Moses indeed can cry out, as a great descendant cried out in our lifetime, ‘I have climbed the mountain; I have seen the Promise. Free, great God, free at last!’”
The mantle is now ours.
Rose Marie Berger, a Catholic peace activist and poet, is senior editor of Sojourners magazine. She is author ofBending the Arch: Poems.
Got something to say about what you're reading? We value your feedback!