Faith, Resistance, and the Future: Daniel Berrigan's Challenge to Catholic Social Thought ed. by James L. Marsh and Anna J. Brown, and: The Catonsville Nine: A Story of Faith and Resistance in the Vietnam Era by Shawn Francis Peters (review)

The year 1968 marked one of the most tumultuous times in United States history and, as never before, Catholics were weighing in on significant social and moral issues and shaping pivotal national events. Eugene McCarthy and Robert F. Kennedy condemned U.S. policy in Vietnam and challenged President Lyndon B. Johnson for their party's nomination. Cesar Chavez and his allies launched a nationwide grape boycott in an effort to organize a farm workers union. Charles Curran, a prominent moral theologian, openly dissented from Pope Paul VI's teaching against artificial birth control.

That May, in a fiery liturgy, nine Catholics prayerfully torched 1-A draft cards that they had snatched from a government office in a Baltimore suburb. By using homemade napalm to cripple the draft, the group found a symbolically rich way to resist American military intervention in Southeast Asia. The burning of government records by the Catonsville Nine redefined Gandhian nonviolence and civil disobedience. Their controversial deed swiftly assumed a life of its own, inspiring a stream of similar acts of defiance against the manufacture and use of weapons of mass destruction by the United States and its allies that continues decades after Catonsville as Plowshares actions. Others found numerous reasons to be repulsed by the act. The works under review utilize strikingly different approaches to illuminate the nature of the faith-based resistance inspired by the Nine during the second half of the twentieth century.

Catonsville native Shawn Francis Peters has written a riveting and important chronicle of this draft board raid and trial. Based largely on oral histories, government documents, and a selection of primary and secondary sources, Peters situates the act of resistance in its immediate "Middle American" context. In contrast to older popular works, the author lavishes attention on the lesser known activists rather than on the renowned priest brothers, Daniel and Philip Berrigan. Sketches of Margarita and Tom Melville, former members of Maryknoll, and artist Tom Lewis are particularly insightful. Thick description provides an intimate account of the participants' lives, especially from the planning stage through the trial, imprisonment, and beyond. While the Nine's opposition to the Vietnam War brought them together, Peters shows how their divergent life experiences and viewpoints on social justice issues other than the Vietnam War led each to participate in the action. Before and after Catonsville, each resister prioritized concerns besides Vietnam, including poverty, racism, sexism, and militarism.

Although religiously informed consciences brought them to Catonsville, Peters brilliantly develops the thesis that commonalities aside, the Nine displayed little penchant for group think. The individuality of the defendants became plain after their arrest. Each of the Nine defined his or her own choice of legal strategies. Each decided whether to go underground to delay or evade punishment. Each determined how to survive the experience of prison. And each discerned the direction of his or her own life afterwards. After Catonsville, each of the surviving members remained a person of principle in their later years as their paths occasionally converged and more often diverged. By portraying the differences among them, Peters raises moral and tactical issues of significance.

The activists are not the only persons respectfully portrayed here. Peters provides similarly balanced sketches of such key figures as the draft board clerks, the presiding judge, and the attorneys on both sides. These portraits likewise enrich one's ability to evaluate the complexities of the issues raised by the defendants.

Researching the history of the Catonsville Nine poses many challenges that presently make the writing of a definitive volume premature. How might the action...