Fighting the Lamb’s War: Skirmishes with the American Empire by Philip Berrigan

Fighting the Lamb’s War: Skirmishes with the American Empire Reviews

• 
  Stefania Dzhanamova

  In his book, Philip Berrigan accounts for his life and his struggles, revealing more about himself in the process. 
  
  Berrigan, a tall, huge, handsome man with affectionate, but piercing, blue eyes and a radiant smile, has been described as "a compulsive leader of men," "a street-fighter with a paratrooper's daring," "a desperado obsessed by the Gospel," "the Gary Cooper of the Church." Impatient, energetic, free, and with great revolutionary zeal, he charmed people as much as his brother did. He wanted his followers to transform society as totally and as soon as possible. 
  
  His radicalism did not come from any philosophical theorizing, but from a literal reading of the Gospels. He and Daniel remained faithful to the teaching of the apostles, to the brotherhood, and to the prayers. They were men sworn to poverty by their religious orders, and a conversion to poverty was perhaps the only conversion that they desired to impose on others. The unequal distribution of wealth by people's greed for private property as the reason for the problems of racism, war, and most human suffering, they believed. "The next car," Philip said, "is every man's Dolce Vita." 
  
  Philip Berrigan dedicated many years of his priesthood to the struggles of the African Americans. He did not think that black people were children who should be guided by the whites. He considered them to be the race of superior wisdom, gentleness, and maturity, who could bring adulthood to the white man. "The Negro stands in perplexity and chagrin," he wrote, "at the inconsistency of the white man-child who rules his world . . . freedom for the Negro and maturity for us are reciprocal endowments." 
  
  Philip's respect for the black people made him capable of communicating with the most militant blacks in America. He inspired strength and confidence in black men and trust in black women. Even Stokely Carmichael is reported to have complimented him. "Phil Berrigan," he had allegedly said, "is the only white man who knows where it's at."
  
  Berrigan wanted to be the first Catholic priest to be arrested in a civil rights demonstration – he wanted to make his point by going to jail. In 1963, he almost joined a mass sit-in in Jackson, Mississipi. A news leak that resulted in the Bishop of Jackson's threatening to complain to Rome if Berrigan participated in the protest stopped him, though.
  
  What I like about Berrigan is that whether he was praying, protesting, or going to jail, he did it with joy. Friendly, proverbially generous, good-natured, and tender, he was known in every parish he worked for being the first priest to arrive at any scene of accident and the first to empty his pockets for men in need. According to those who knew him, he lacked Anglo-Saxon reserves. His greetings to friends, both men and women, were accompanied by powerful, back-breaking embraces. "Thank God for womenkind he's not married," says the wife of one of his close friends. "He puts my spine out of joint each time he just kisses me." Everything about him was a little extreme, most of all his devotion to his religious vocation. He and his brother had decided that they would never leave the priesthood. Their attitude toward the Church was one of cynical loyalty. "The Church is a sinner," said Daniel, "But She's my mother." "The guys who leave," Philip thought, "just don't have enough guts. It's our society that's evil, and the Church reflects the society. Staying in the Church gives you a chance to use the institution against itself."
  
  Politics was to Philip what poetry was to Daniel – an important second vocation. He read The Nation, The New Republic, World Report, Dissent, The Progressive, The Guardian, Liberation, The Civil Liberties Quarterly, Ramparts, The Wall Street Journal, and Business Week. Armed with extensive knowledge, he became a popular lecturer on progressive Catholic campuses in the early sixties. The threat of nuclear war converted him to a pacifist position. His expertise on the nuclear missiles race was as great as his understanding of civil rights problems. However, his lecturing style had less charm than his writings or his conversations. It suffered from an overabundance of facts. 
  
  Philip and Daniel also became the first Catholic priests in America to openly criticize the government's policy in Vietnam. Several days after President Lyndon Johnson ordered "retaliatory strikes" on North Vietnam, the first statement against the Vietnam conflict, a "declaration of conscience" pledging total non-cooperation with the government, was made public to the press. Philip and Daniel had signed it together with Martin Luther King, Bayard Rustin, Linus Pauling, Benjamin Spock, and many others, and they attended the first demonstrations against the American involvement in Vietnam. A week later, Philip was protesting the war on Times Square. The magazine Commonwealth, in its editorial of March 5, praised his and his brother's courage and predicted "plenty of fall-out."
  
  When he had time to spare, Philip gave lectures against the Vietnam conflict. His knowledge of its chronology was impressive. Always enthusiastic, he also organized a peace group in New York, called the Emergency Citizens' Group Concerned About Vietnam. With his first Vietnam confrontations, he and Daniel became the high priests of the Catholic peace movement, the leaders of the new Guerrilla Christianity, which would come to be known as the Catholic Left and which would eventually invade the draft boards of Baltimore and Catonsville in nonviolent, but vocal, protest against the killing in Vietnam. 
  
  FIGHTING THE LAMB'S WAR is a brilliant autobiography. This book is as entertaining as it is informative, and it will be interesting for everyone who wants to know about the Catholic protesters of the sixties.