Faith, Resistance, and the Future: Daniel Berrigan's Challenge to Catholic Social Thought

A Kind of Piety Toward Experience:Hope in Nuclear Times

132 Personal Musings I don’t have to look far to find the influence of Father Daniel Berrigan, SJ, in my life. Taped to my office door is a bumper sticker for Nebraskans for Peace, a statewide peace and justice organization that came together in 1968 with a small grant from Clergy and Laity Concerned, a national organization uniting religious opponents to the war in Vietnam that Berrigan cofounded with Rabbi Abraham Heschel and Reverend Richard Neuhaus.1 Opening the door and looking to my right, I see a poster in red, white, and blue depicting a quote attributed to A. J. Muste, “There is no way to peace, peace is the way.” The poster originated as a fundraiser for the Marquette University Peace Fellowship, a campus affiliate of the Catholic Peace Fellowship, a national peace group that also was cofounded by Berrigan.2 Paul Schwartz, Jim Derks, and Terry McDonald, three members of the university-sponsored 14th Street Commune, where I lived during my junior year (1968–69), inaugurated the Marquette chapter. I became the head of the group the following year, when we brought “coconspirator” David Dellinger to give a talk during the trial of the A Kind of Piety Toward Experience: Hope in Nuclear Times Patrick Murray and Jeanne Schuler Marsh-Ch09.indd 132 Marsh-Ch09.indd 132 2/2/2012 2:04:16 PM 2/2/2012 2:04:16 PM A Kind of Piety Toward Experience 133 Chicago Seven. Judge Julius Hoffman banned Dellinger from public speaking after that address to an overflow crowd in Brooks Memorial Union. Paul Schwartz, one of the few Catholics to have registered as a conscientious objector at age 18, boldly wrote Sr. Corita Kent, IHM, a friend of Berrigan’s, asking her to donate a poster design.3 She was too busy to take on the project, but she passed it along to her associate Donald Mekelburg, who provided us with a beautiful Corita-inspired silk-screened poster. At home, looking up in our dining room I ponder a bronze death mask of the crucified Christ, entitled “Our Hope” by its sculptor, Bill Farmer. This work of art epitomizes the testimony of Daniel Berrigan: the crucified and resurrected Jesus is our hope, our only hope.4 That I have an office in the Philosophy Department at Creighton University and a home in Omaha, Nebraska, is in part a consequence of my attraction to, and certain reservations toward, Daniel Berrigan during my four tumultuous years at Marquette University (1966–70). Physics had been my passion in high school, and I went to Marquette planning to become a research physicist. Though I did graduate with majors in physics and mathematics, my experiences during those Vietnam War years impelled me to jump the track and go to graduate school in philosophy instead. I arrived in Milwaukee in the fall of 1966 during the open housing campaign led by Father James Groppi and the NAACP Youth Commandos. Open housing was the last major piece of the 1960s civil rights agenda to be adopted by the federal government (1968); the marches of the Youth Commandos that Father Groppi was leading into white neighborhoods of South Milwaukee created a national stir. My mother, aware that my antiracist and antiwar political consciousness had begun to develop through my participation in the Young Christian Students group at Brother Rice High School in Chicago, warned me not to get involved. I didn’t, but I did help organize a fall dance as an alternative to the fall prom held at the racially discriminatory Eagles Club on Wisconsin Avenue. While we danced at the War Memorial to Milwaukee’s top rock band, The Messengers, Father Groppi and the Youth Commandos picketed the prom. Father Groppi was hardly the only Catholic prominent in social activism living in Milwaukee during those years. A group of Marquette students , including several Jesuit seminarians (Mike Williams, Bob Graf, Gus McCarthy, Dick Zipfel), lay graduate students (Jack Cummings, Bill Taylor, Mary Alice Peckham), and undergraduate students (Paul Schwartz, Donna Boyle, myself, and sometimes Art Heitzer) came together during my sophomore year around a weekday afternoon mass in Johnson Hall celebrated by Father Harry Zerner, SJ. Responding to a letter by the Jesuit Superior Marsh-Ch09.indd 133 Marsh-Ch09.indd 133 2/2/2012 2:04:16 PM 2/2/2012 2:04:16 PM 134...