Honoring the Nonviolent Journey: The Berrigan-McAlister Award

On May 5, DePaul University in Chicago will take what I regard as a momentous step by inaugurating the Berrigan-McAlister Award.  Named in honor of the seminal Catholic peacemakers Fr. Daniel Berrigan, Phillip Berrigan and Elizabeth McAlister, this award will be given annually to an individual or organization whose “active Christian nonviolence resists injustice, transforms conflict, fosters reconciliation, and seeks justice and peace for all.” 

Two years in the making, the award was the brainchild of Michael Budde, a DePaul professor of Catholic Studies and Political Science, who had been casting about for a way for the university to mark the late Daniel Berrigan’s 100th birthday on May 9, 2021.  DePaul had a long association with Berrigan, and is also the repository of one of the collections of the Berrigan and McAlister papers. 

With Prof. Budde’s inspiration, a number of us at the university formed an ad hoc committee to shape the purpose and reach of this prize, rooted in our hope to advance the power of active nonviolence and to signal our solidarity with those on its front lines.

While the Berrigan centenary remains a key aspect of the launch—underscored by an online screening of a new film about Daniel and Phillip entitled The Berrigans: Devout and Dangerous, planned for May 4—the long-term vision of this yearly event is to recognize advocates for nonviolent change around the globe whose often risky struggles for justice and peace deserve greater awareness and support.

Kings Bay Plowshares 7

Liz McAlister will be among the recipients of the first award, the Kings Bay Plowshares 7.  In April 2018, this group engaged in symbolic disarmament of nuclear weapons at the largest nuclear submarine base in the world.  Besides McAlister, the group includes Fr. Steve Kelly SJ (Jesuit California Province); Carmen Trotta (New York Catholic Worker, New York City, NY); Clare Grady (Ithaca, Catholic Worker, Ithaca, NY); Martha Hennessy (New York Catholic Worker, New York City, NY); Mark Colville (Amistad Catholic Worker, New Haven, CT); and Patrick O’Neill (Fr. Charlie Mulholland Catholic Worker, Garner, NC).  While it is rare for such an award to be given to its namesake, the committee considered it fitting that the first Berrigan-McAlister accolade would include Liz, a life-long change-agent who continues in real-time to engage in powerful, nonviolent resistance for social change.

On April 4, 2018, the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., the group entered Kings Bay Naval Submarine Base in St. Mary’s, Georgia without authorization to draw attention to the global dangers of its Trident submarine fleet and to connect the nuclear threat to what Dr. King called the triple evils of “militarism, racism and consumerism.” As part of this witness, they hung banners in three areas of the facility reading: “The ultimate logic of racism is genocide,” Dr. Martin Luther King; “The ultimate logic of Trident is omnicide”; and “Nuclear weapons: illegal—immoral.”

“The Kings Bay Plowshares 7 has kept alive the spirit of resistance to mass murder, and have drawn attention to the evil of nuclear weapons in a world grown accustomed to them,” said Professor Budde.  “They are fitting recipients of DePaul's first Berrigan-McAlister award as they continue the Plowshares disarmament movement begun by Daniel and Phillip Berrigan in 1980, conducting nonviolent action to plea for peace and justice based on the biblical concept of ‘beating swords into plowshares’ (Isaiah 2:4). As Pope Francis said in 2019 about the immoral possession of nuclear weapons, ‘If we really want to build a more just and secure society, we must let the weapons fall from our hands’, and ‘Future generations will rise to condemn our failure if we spoke of peace but did not act to bring it about among the peoples of the earth.’”

I am grateful that the school where I have been teaching for fifteen years has opted to honor Dan, Phil and Liz in this distinctive way and, at the same time, to side with those in real-time who are struggling for a more anti-racist world free from white supremacy, economic inequity, environmental destruction, and the horror of war and nuclear weapons.  This is consistent with the university’s recently revised mission statement which reads in part, “Through education and research, the university addresses the great questions of our day, promoting peaceful, just, and equitable solutions to social and environmental challenges,” and that deliberately underscores, in the mission statement supporting document, the institution’s commitment to the philosophy of nonviolence and to becoming an anti-racist institution.

 The Vision and Praxis of Daniel Berrigan

I am especially grateful for DePaul taking this step because Daniel Berrigan was enormously pivotal to my own journey and identity as an agent of nonviolent change.

At the end of a mesmerizing three-hour conversation he and I had in his Manhattan apartment in 1981, I asked Dan if there was anything I could do for him.  After all, he was facing ten years in federal prison for the first Plowshares action he and eight other faith-based activists had done the year before.

He looked me in the eye and simply said: “Don’t do anything for me. Just find some people you can pray with and march with.”

Ricocheting through my unsuspecting soul, this unadorned command dramatically changed my life. 

I was a graduate student studying theology at the time, and our wide-ranging exchange was bracing and breathtaking, but the gift that was Dan Berrigan distilled itself into that handful of words, compressing spiritual search, community, faith, and action into a pointed moment of decision.  Over the next few months, I let that invitation circulate within until I was ready to unswervingly say “yes” to it.  Berrigan’s simple but profound haiku marked out a way forward for me and, more incisively, beckoned toward a new way of being.

But by the early 1980s, this had been the case for many, many others. 

Catholic priest, poet and protester, Dan instructed people everywhere on a life beyond the script handed out by a system that thrives on war and cruelty.  We are called to live nonviolence and peacemaking, he told us, with his words—in 40 books and endless poetry—but especially through his communicative action.  Using the most powerful language at his disposal, his own vulnerable and creaky body, he unleashed a decades-long conversation with his society with every act of civil disobedience and divine obedience. 

There was drama and surprise in these pilgrimages for peace, where he joined others in publicly calling out the well-oiled machinery of war and everything conspires to keep it running. He wanted to interfere with its smooth functioning, its 24-7 relentlessness, and he found many ways to do this, from burning draft files to hammering on the gadgetry of nuclear annihilation.  These vignettes were stunning in the way that Flannery O’Connor’s grotesque literary characters were—designed to shock us into recognition and awareness, and to compel us to consider things anew. 

Dan stood in a tradition of impresarios of vivid enlightenment, going back to the Hebrew prophets and Jesus—but also the Buddha and a long lineage of mystics and shamans in innumerable cultures and contexts—who have taken it upon themselves to stand in the withering glare of history and declare with their lives a profoundly better way.

I now see that this is what I was looking for when I made my way to his place, that day 40 years ago this summer.

 Researching the consequences of the nuclear arms race for a book project, I had traveled from California where I was based to the East Coast to visit a number of foreign policy think tanks. No one I spoke with could envision a world free of atomic weapons.  At most, they thought we might be able to cut back on nuclear weapons by dramatically increasing conventional ones. Each appointment left me more and more depressed, and finally, when I arrived in New York, I suddenly thought to call Dan.  I was in need of some pastoral counseling on the matter of nuclear weapons, and who better to see?  We had never met, but he graciously welcomed me to his quarters.

For several hours, he shared with me his vision, which essentially boiled down to this: “We live in a culture of death -- and it is up to us to resist it.”  There was a lifetime of experience behind these words, and I felt the weight of them.   Then, as I was about to leave, I got my marching orders.

Find some people you can pray with and march with.

That handful of syllables hit their mark all those years ago, and I have done my best to practice them.  Following his plain and provocative order, I did as he asked—and my life took an unexpected detour onto a road of nonviolent transformation that I am still, in fits and starts, traveling on, including my teaching in the Peace, Justice and Conflict Program at DePaul and my work with Pace e Bene.

One of the secret promises I made to myself after that fateful visit was that, when the time came, I would do everything I could to be at Dan’s funeral in order to join his thronging community of faithful activists in expressing our great gratitude for his life, his witness, and his wisdom. After he died in 2016 at the age of 94, I was indeed able to make my way to New York City to do just that. 

It was both somber and joyous, and I am so glad that God granted me my wish to be at that holy party, including the peace march that wended its way through lower Manhattan before arriving at the service at the Church of St. Francis Xavier.

I will never forget the homily, which was delivered by Fr. Steve Kelly, SJ, who is among those DePaul will honor in May, and who is currently in prison.  He is also a long-time colleague.

Steve’s words were so on point. 

Daniel Berrigan, he said, “saw all that was possible in hope, community and resistance.”

His ultimate gift, Steve said, was to offer the “conscientious objector as imitating the life of Christ.” 

But, for me, the most astounding thought Steve shared was this: Both Dan and Phil (who died in 2002) were “Doctors of the Church.” 

Doctors of the Church. This was such an original idea—and so true, especially in the way he developed it. 

There are 36 official “Doctors of the Church” in Catholicism.  This is a title given “to saints recognized as having made a significant contribution to theology or doctrine through their research, study, or writing.” 

Kelly expanded these categories to include “action.”  He said that the Berrigans were Doctors of the Church helping us move from “Orthodoxy” (right teaching) to “Orthopraxis” (right practice). 

Yes.

On May 5, we at DePaul will honor Dr. Dan Berrigan, Dr. Phil Berrigan and Dr. Liz McAlister for how their “right practice” has taught us how to transform our lives and our world.  And we will honor those who, in that spirit, are continuing to do so today.

Please join us for the Berrigan-McAlister Award on Wednesday, May 5, 6:30pm Central—and for the screening of The Berrigans: Devout and Dangerous (with the film’s director, Susan Hagedorn) on Tuesday, May 4, 6:30pm Central.

For more information and to register, visit http://BerriganMcAlister.eventbrite.com .

See also this story in the National Catholic Reporter.

Ken Butigan teaches in the Peace, Justice and Conflict Studies Program at DePaul University.  He also consults with Pace e Bene Nonviolence Service.  This essay incorporates content from a blog of his written after Daniel Berrigan’s death in 2016.