The Push Of Conscience

On September 9, 1980, Father Daniel Berrigan and seven others were involved in a civil disobedience action at a General Electric plant in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, which makes parts for the Mark 12A nuclear missile. They were convicted on eight of 13 counts at their trial in Norristown, Pennsylvania, in March, 1981, during which they acted as their own attorneys. All the defendants are out of jail and appealing their convictions. Following is Daniel Berrigan's response to direct examination by Sister Anne Montgomery at their trial. --The Editors

Anne Montgomery: Father Berrigan, I'd like to ask you a simple question: Why did you do what you did?

Daniel Berrigan: I would like to answer that question as simply as I can. It brings up immediately words that have been used again and again in the courtroom--like conscience, justification. The question takes me back to those years when my conscience was being formed, back to a family that was poor, and to a father and mother who taught, quite simply, by living what they taught. And if I could put their message very shortly, it would go something like this:

In a thousand ways they showed that you do what is right because it is right, that your conscience is a matter between you and God, that nobody owns you.

If I have a precious memory of my mother and father that lasts to this day, it is simply that they lived as though nobody owned them. They cheated no one. They worked hard for a living.

They were poor; and, perhaps most precious of all, they shared what they had. And that was enough, because in the life of a young child, the first steps of conscience are as important as the first steps of one's feet. They set the direction where life will go.

And I feel that direction was set for my brothers and myself. There is a direct line between the way my parents turned our steps and this action. That is no crooked line.

That was the first influence. The second one has to do with my religious order. When I was eighteen I left home for the Jesuit order. I reflect that I am sixty years old, and I have never been anything but a Jesuit, a Jesuit priest, in my whole life.

We have Jesuits throughout Latin America today, my own brothers, who are in prison, who have been under torture; many of them have been murdered.

On the walls of our religious communities both here and in Latin America are photos of murdered priests, priests who have been imprisoned, priests under torture, priests who stood somewhere because they believed in something. Those faces haunt my days. And I ask myself how I can be wishy-washy in face of such example, example of my own lifetime, my own age.

This is a powerful thing, to be in a common bond of vows with people who have given their lives because they did not believe in mass murder, because such crimes could not go on in their name.

Dear friends of the jury, you have been called the conscience of the community. Each of us eight comes from a community. I don't mean just a biological family. I mean that every one of us has brothers and sisters with whom we live, with whom we pray, with whom we offer the Eucharist, with whom we share income, and in some cases, the care of children. Our conscience, in other words, comes from somewhere. We have not come from outer space or from chaos or from madhouses to King of Prussia.

We have come from years of prayer, years of life together, years of testing--testing of who we are in the church and in the world. We would like to speak to you, each of us in a different way, about our communities; because, you see, it is our conviction that nobody in the world can form his or her conscience alone.

Now, perhaps I don't even have to dwell on that. Most of you who have children know the importance of others--not just parents, but friends, relatives, those who are loved and who love, in helping us come to understand who we are.

What are we to do in bad times? I am trying to say that we come as a community of conscience before your community of conscience to ask you: Are our consciences to act differently than yours in regard to the lives and deaths of children? A very simple question, but one that cuts to the bone. We would like you to see that we come from where you come.

We come from churches. We come from neighborhoods. We come from years of work.

We come from America. And we come to this, a trial, of conscience and motive. And the statement of conscience we would like to present to you is this.

We could not not do this. We could not not do this! We were pushed to this by all our lives. Do you see what I mean? All our lives.

I would speak about myself, the others will speak for themselves. When I say I could not not do this, I mean, among other things, that with every cowardly bone in my body I wished I hadn't had to enter the G.E. plant. I wish I hadn't had to do it. And that has been true every time I have been arrested, all those years. My stomach turns over. I feel sick. I feel afraid. I don't want to go through this again.

I hate jail. I don't do well there physically. But I cannot not go on, because I have learned that we must not kill if we are Christians. I have learned that children, above all, are threatened by these weapons. I have read that Christ our Lord underwent death rather than inflict it. And I am supposed to be a disciple. All kinds of things like that. The push, the push of conscience is a terrible thing.

So at some point your cowardly bones get moving, and you say, "Here it goes again," and you do it. And you have a certain peace because you did it, as I do this morning in speaking with you.

That phrase about not being able not to do something, maybe it is a little clumsy. But for those who raise children, who go to work every day, who must make decisions in their families, I think there is a certain knowledge of what I am trying to say. Children at times must be disciplined. We would rather not do it.

There are choices on jobs about honesty. There are things to be gained if we are dishonest. And it is hard not to be.

Yet one remains honest because one has a sense, "Well, if I cheat, I'm really giving over my humanity, my conscience." Then we think of these horrible Mark 12A missiles, something in us says, "We cannot live with such crimes." Or, our consciences turn in another direction. And by a thousand pressures, a thousand silences, people can begin to say to themselves, "We can live with that. We can live with that. We know it's there. We know what it is for. We know that many thousands will die if only one of these is exploded."

And yet we act like those employees, guards, experts we heard speak here; they close their eyes, close their hearts, close their briefcases, take their paycheck--and go home. It's called living with death. And it puts us to death before the missile falls.

We believe, according to the law, the law of the state of Pennsylvania, that we were justified in saying, "We cannot live with that"; justified in saying it publicly, saying it dramatically, saying it with blood and hammers, as you have heard; because that weapon, the hundreds and hundreds more being produced in our country, are the greatest evil conceivable on this earth.

There is no evil to compare with that. Multiply murder. Multiply desolation. The mind boggles.

So we went into that death factory, and in a modest, self-contained, careful way we put a few dents in two missiles, awaited arrest, came willingly into court to talk to you. We believe with all our hearts that our action was justified.

Montgomery: You mentioned work. Could you say something about how your work in the cancer hospital in New York influenced your decision?

Berrigan: Sure. I wouldn't want the jury to get the impression we are always going around banging on nose cones. We also earn a living. I have been doing, among other things, a kind of service to the dying for about three years now in New York. And I would like to speak shortly about that, because I come to you from an experience of death--not just any death, but the death of the poor, death by cancer.

I don't know whether you have ever smelled cancer. Cancer of the nose, cancer of the face, which is the most terrible to look upon and to smell, cancer of the brain, cancer of the lungs: We see it all, smell it all, hold it all in our arms.

This is not just a lecture on cancer. It is a lecture on those Mark 12A missiles, which make cancer the destiny of humanity, as is amply shown. This is another aspect of our justification.

We know now that in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, those who did not die at the flash point are still dying of cancer. Nuclear weapons carry a universal plague of cancer. As the Book of Revelation implies, after one of these missiles is launched, the living will envy the dead.

I could not understand cancer until I was arrested at the Pentagon, because there I smelled death by cancer, in my very soul. I smelled the death of everyone, everyone, across the board: black, brown, red, all of us, death by cancer.

So I talk to the dying. I take a chance on the dying, those that are still able to talk. And I say, "Do you know where my friends and I go from here?" Some of the patients know; and some of them don't. Some had read of our act in the papers. Some hadn't. I would talk about what I can only call the politics of cancer. The service the dying were rendering me was this: With their last days, their last breath, they helped me understand why I had to continue this struggle; because in them I was seeing up close the fate of everyone, and especially the children.

I have seen children dying of cancer. And we will see more and more of that as these bombs are built.

Justification and conscience. Could I mention briefly also that for two semesters I have been teaching at a college in the South Bronx, a college for poor people? It's a unique place, because only poor people who cannot pay are admitted. We have some one thousand students who are finishing degrees. You have undoubtedly seen pictures of the South Bronx; Carter and President Reagan have visited there. It's a required campaign stop by now; and when pictures appear one thinks of a president stepping on the moon, a lunar landscape, a landscape of utter desolation and misery and poverty and neglect.

This is also to our point of justification, because I have been led to ask, "Why are people condemned to live this way in a wealthy country?" Where is the money going? Why is there a culture of poverty? Why are people born into it? Why do they live outside the economy, never have a job, have no future, live and die that way, hundreds of thousands in the South Bronx?

I don't know what to call our college. It is like a center for survivors. I look at the faces of these marvelous people, my students. And I think with sorrow in my heart that for every one who sits in that room, twenty have died on the way, or are in prison or are on drugs or are suicides, have given up.

And I was led to ask, "Why must this be?" So the cancer hospital and the college lead me to the Pentagon. I discussed freely in class, why are we so poor? Where is the money? General Electric costs the poor three million dollars a day, not for housing, not for schooling, not for neighborhood rehabilitation, not for medical care--for Mark 12A; three million dollars a day stolen from the poor. A larceny of worldwide proportions. This is our justification. We could not be indefinitely silent.

The hospital, the college, and the Pentagon, this is the circuit of my life.

In each of these places I learn more about the other two. At the Pentagon I understand why cancer will befall everyone, and why so many are destitute now. Among the poor, I understand why the poor die in such numbers of cancer. And at the hospital I smell the death that is planned for all.

Montgomery: Getting to the King of Prussia action itself, would you describe something of the preparation for it?

Berrigan: I'm sure, dear friends, that others will speak of the great import to us of the spiritual life, our lives in God. I want to tell you a little about the immediate days preceding this action; indeed, about days that have preceded every arrest we have undergone.

We have never taken actions such as these, perilous, crucial, difficult as they are, without the most careful preparation of our hearts, our motivation, our common sense, our sense of one another. We have never admitted any person to our groups whom we could not trust to be nonviolent under pressure of crises.

This is simply a rule of our lives; we don't go from the street to do something like the King of Prussia action. We go from prayer. We go from reflection. We go from worship, always. And since we realized that this action was perhaps the most difficult of all our lives, we spent more time in prayer this time than before.

We passed three days together in a country place. We prayed, and read the Bible, and shared our fears, shared our second and third thoughts.

And in time we drew closer. We were able to say, "Yes. We can do this. We can take the consequences. We can undergo whatever is required." All of that.

During those days we sweated out the question of families and children--the question of a long separation if we were convicted and jailed.

I talked openly with Jesuit friends and superiors. They respected my conscience and said, "Do what you are called to."

That was the immediate preparation. And what it issued in was a sense that, with great peacefulness, with calm of spirit, even though with a butterfly in our being, we could go ahead. And so we did.

This enters into my understanding of conscience and justification, a towering question, which has faced so many good people in history, in difficult times, now, in the time of the bomb. What helps people? What helps people understand who they are in the world, who they are in their families, who they are with their children, with their work? What helps?

That was a haunting question for me. Will this action be helpful? Legally, we could say that this was our effort to put the question of justification. Will our action help? Will people understand that this "lesser evil," done to this so-called "property," was helping turn things around in the church, in the nation? Will the action help us be more reflective, about life and death and children and all life?

We have spent years and years of our adult lives keeping the law. We have tried everything, every access, every means to get to public authorities within the law. We come from within the law, from within.

We are deeply respectful of a law that is in favor of human life. And as we know, at least some of our laws are. We are very respectful of those laws. We want you to know that.

Years and years we spent writing letters, trying to talk to authorities, vigiling in public places, holding candles at night, holding placards by day, trying, trying, fasting, trying to clarify things to ourselves as we were trying to speak to others; all of that within the law, years of it.

And then I had to say, I could not not break the law and remain human. That was what was in jeopardy: what I call my conscience, my humanity, that which is recognizable to children, to friends, to good people, when we say, "There is someone I can trust and love, someone who will not betray."

We spent years within the law, trying to be that kind of person, a non-betrayer.

Then we found we couldn't. And if we kept forever on this side of the line, we would die within, ourselves. We couldn't look in the mirror, couldn't face those we love, had no Christian message in the world, nothing to say if we went on that way.

I might just as well wander off and go the way pointed to by a low-grade American case of despair: getting used to the way things are. That is what I mean by dying. That is what we have to oppose. I speak for myself.

The Jesuit order accepted me as a member. The Catholic Church ordained me as a priest. I took all that with great seriousness. I still do, with all my heart. And then Vietnam came along, and then the nukes came along. And I had to continue to ask myself at prayer, with my friends, with my family, with all kinds of people, with my own soul, "Do you have anything to say today?" I mean, beyond a lot of prattling religious talk.

Do you have anything to say about life today, about the lives of people today? Do you have a word, a word of hope to offer, a Christian word? That's a very important question for anyone who takes being a priest, being a Christian, being a human being seriously, "Do you have anything to offer human life today?"

It is a terribly difficult question for me. And I am not at all sure that I do have something to offer. But I did want to say this. I am quite certain that I had September 9th, 1980, to say.

And I will never deny, whether here or in jail, to my family, or friends, or to the Russians, or the Chinese, or anyone in the world, I will never deny what I did.

More than that. Our act is all I have to say. The only message I have to the world is: We are not allowed to kill innocent people. We are not allowed to be complicit in murder. We are not allowed to be silent while preparations for mass murder proceed in our name, with our money, secretly.

I have nothing else to say in the world. At other times one could talk about family life and divorce and birth control and abortion and many other questions. But this Mark 12A is here. And it renders all other questions null and void. Nothing, nothing can be settled until this is settled. Or this will settle us, once and for all.

It's terrible for me to live in a time where I have nothing to say to human beings except, "Stop killing." There are other beautiful things that I would love to be saying to people. There are other projects I could be very helpful at. And I can't do them. I cannot.

Because everything is endangered. Everything is up for grabs. Ours is a kind of primitive situation, even though we would call ourselves sophisticated. Our plight is very primitive from a Christian point of view. We are back where we started. Thou shall not kill; we are not allowed to kill. Everything today comes down to that--everything.

I thank you with all my heart for listening.