In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Introduction The Irish are not in a conspiracy to cheat the world by false representations of the merits of their country­ men. No sir; the Irish are a FAIR PEOPLE;-they never speak well of one another. -JAMES BOSWELL, The Life of Samuel Johnson In the logic of our time, it is better to have a bad experience that turns out well, than to have just a plain good one. During the first three months of 1 972 a trial took place in the middle district of Pcnnsylvania : THE UNITED STATES of AMERICA versus Eqbal Ahmad, Philip Berrigan, Elizabeth McAlister, Neil McLaughlin, Anthony Scoblick, Mary Cain Scoblick, Joseph Wenderoth. The defendants stood accused of conspiring to raid federal offices, to bomb government property, and to kidnap the presidential advisor Henry Kissinger. Six of those seven individuals are, or were, Roman Catholic c1ergy­ priests and nuns. Members of the new "Catholic Left." The Catholic Left has no Flaubert, or Mark Rudd ( of SDS ) , to declare : "I am the Catholic Left." If that personification could fall on any shoulders, it would have to be the Berrigan brothers, the Fathers Philip and Daniel. They and the Catholic Left, in the last haIf­ decade, were aboard a questing Pequod, spinning round and round in the vortex of antiwar protest. Their fragile craft was taken under; the momcnt had come and gone. Thc whirlpool that swallowed them ultimately was the trial of x xiii INTRODUCTION the Harrisburg Seven. With the intensity of Ahab, they had sought to scuttle the war machine of the state. The government, in turn, responded with a power equal to a force of nature. The narrative that follows tells the tale of those three months in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania : the trial, the case, the events, the demonstrations, the panels, and the people. The Vietnam war is the shadow that falls on all the proceedings, and though this country is not in a state of siege, the defendants, lawyers, and all concerned, found themselves living its vastly diminished counter­ part, a state of trial. It was unrelenting and did not lift till the cease-fire of the verdict. After the trial concluded, the case's raison d'etre died in his sleep on May 2, 1 972 ; that day, in Harrisburg, there was a post-trial hearing on the issue of discriminatory prosecution. A UPI photographer came into the courtroom with the news : "Hoover's dead!" History has already begun to wash his memory in Lethe; America's forgetfulness is its form of forgiveness and absolution. Memory should not be another casualty of the Vietnam war; the trial of the Harrisburg Seven is not just a footnote to the folly of J. Edgar Hoover's last days. Seven men and women, and more, contested the awesome force of this country's ire and might; like Ishmael, we can be saved by the great buoyancy that the defend­ ants gave to the coffin of their trial. And, further, let us not forget that the Reverend Philip Berri­ gan, S.S.J., at this writing, is serving his thirty-fifth month of imprisonment for pouring blood on a filing cabinet full of paper. xu William O'Rourke 23 July 1 972 xiv ...

Share