Abstract
Phillip Berrigan, the stalwart peace activist who spent eleven years of his life behind bars, left behind a trove of writings: journal entries, speeches, press releases, essays, and seven books. These writings have been brought together in this three-part volume: “A Catholic Trying to be a Christian, 1957–67,” “Resisting the Vietnam War, 1967–73,” and “Community, Plowshares, and the Bomb, 1973–2002.” This is a peace movement book: foreword by Bill Wylie-Kellerman, preface by Frida Berrigan, afterword by John Dear—all of whom were involved in the Plowshares Movement that B. was instrumental in starting.
Four features stand out. First, it includes an autobiographical essay on B.’s experience in World War II, telling of his enthusiastic military service which contrasts so dramatically with his conversion to nonviolence. Second, it shows that B. spent many years combating anti-Black racism, a phase overshadowed by his later peace activism that received more notoriety. Third, it tracks his relationship with Liz McAlister, from their controversial clandestine marriage to the decades of mutual commitment not only to marriage and family but to the resistance community at Jonah House in Baltimore and to the wider anti-nuclear movement. Fourth, it shows that B.’s activism was squarely rooted in the Gospel and Catholic doctrine, which, he noted, the Church often neglected or contradicted.
One drawback of this volume is its lack of an index, making it hard to look up such figures as Dorothy Day, Malcolm X, and others. It also lacks footnotes explaining the significance of names from the past, e.g., Hughie Newton, Ralph Nader, Lt. Calley, and others. Some texts are left undated. Nevertheless, this volume testifies to B.’s consistent condemnation of injustice and violence in his characteristically direct and blunt prose—and matched by his equally direct and blunt actions. The portrait by his daughter Frida is especially vivid, with its description of B.’s desk and bookshelves—a door placed on file cabinets, wood planks held up on cinder blocks—serving as symbols of his roughly hewn words, work, and witness, all answering (as Wolf notes) one question: “What does Christ ask of me?” (xxxvi).