The Fracture of Good Order

A replay of 1968 it wasn’t. While months of pro-Palestine protests stoked fear among the chattering classes that this year’s DNC in Chicago would be derailed by the same tumult as fifty-six years ago, that did not come to pass. Thousands did descend on the city last week to righteously demand an end to the genocide in Gaza, including during a roughly twenty-four-hour sit-in on the steps of United Center, but the protests were largely peaceful—and widely ignored, so enraptured was the media by the slickly produced lovefest unfolding inside the convention center walls.

But not that long ago, journalists and pundits couldn’t turn away from those who struck out in opposition to Israel’s war, especially the students who set up encampments on college campuses across the country. Between April and May, the New York Times alone ran well over a dozen op-eds on the protests—with many echoing a version of the argument that if only activists would just conduct themselves more civilly, they would be more successful in winning over the average American to their cause.

But when pro-Palestinian protesters obstruct a highway or blockade a weapons manufacturer, their immediate goal isn’t to enlighten the mythical median voter. They’re looking to halt, however briefly, the system’s functioning and jolt an anesthetized body politic out of its stupor. It’s these types of actions, on the vanguard of protest, that trouble the manufacture of consent by the pro-war media and Washington establishment.

Daniel and Philip Berrigan, two radical Catholic priests, understood this. During the Vietnam War, these two brothers of the cloth became the figureheads of the Catholic Resistance, which led more than a dozen draft board raids in the late 1960s and early 1970s, where activists seized and destroyed draft files to sabotage the administration of the draft. The Berrigans—much like those protesting the ongoing genocide in Gaza—rejected the strictures of civility, and pressed on even in the face of public contempt. They knew it’s never a fair fight when the institutions that determine the acceptable bounds of dissent are the same ones conducting or enabling mass slaughter.

Philip Berrigan, the younger of the two brothers, developed a progressive political consciousness after witnessing segregation in the military while serving across Europe during World War II. Shortly after the war, he enrolled in seminary with the Josephites, a Catholic order founded in 1893 that primarily ministers within black communities and has historically been more open to integrating Catholic liturgy with African American customs and culture. Philip spent the latter half of the 1950s in New Orleans, where the vast majority of his parishioners were subjected to the brutality of Jim Crow. As Brad Wolf details in his introduction to A Ministry of Risk: Writings on Peace and Nonviolence, Philip threw himself into civil rights activism. He became the first Catholic clergyman to participate in a Freedom Ride and marched in Selma and Montgomery alongside stalwarts of the movement, including Martin Luther King Jr.

Meanwhile, the United States’s imbroglio in southeast Asia worsened. Fresh off a massive election victory, President Lyndon Johnson announced Operation Rolling Thunder in February 1965: a massive bombing campaign against communist targets in southeast Asia that would continue for nearly a decade. The campaign coincided with a steep escalation in troop deployment: in 1964, 23,300 troops were deployed in Vietnam; by the end of 1965, that number soared to over 184,000.

From his post in New Orleans, where he taught at an all-black high school near the city’s Seventh Ward, Philip witnessed young black men flock to army recruitment offices, where they often enlisted in combat roles for extra pay. “I discovered that blacks represented ten percent of the American population,” he wrote in his memoir,  “but made up one-third of the combat troops in Vietnam.” As a result, black soldiers were dying at disproportionately higher rates in Vietnam—an especially perverse reality given the violent oppression they continued to face at home. “The United States government wasn’t lynching African Americans. It was convincing them to lynch themselves,” Philip declared.

Soon after the announcement of Operation Rolling Thunder, Philip began speaking out against the war effort, which, drawing on black radical thought, he argued was inextricably bound up with the struggle for civil rights. His increasingly fiery public addresses excoriating imperial American foreign policy brought about swift retaliation from the Church: in 1966, he was relocated to Baltimore, where the Josephites were headquartered, presumably so that they could keep a closer eye on him. But despite his superiors’ attempts to muzzle him (“I was told, quite literally, to shut my mouth,” he recalled), Philip remained defiant. Even as top brass in the American Catholic Church kept mum on the growing bloodshed in Vietnam, or worse, openly supported American bombings, he soon became one of the nation’s most prominent antiwar faith leaders.

In 1966, Philip organized the Baltimore Interfaith Peace Mission, which consisted of Catholics and Protestants (both clergy and laymen) who’d been active in civil rights work. His public profile helped secure meetings with prominent figures, including several U.S. senators and representatives; he was even promised an opportunity to testify before a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing by its then chair, Senator William Fulbright, though it never materialized. Philip debated hawkish academics and foreign policy experts, while also lecturing on college campuses across the country, helping mobilize students against the war effort. But as the year progressed, it became clear to him that traditional, legally permissible tactics—genteel debates, meetings, and rallies—weren’t going to thwart the American war machine in any meaningful way.

So he began to escalate. In late December, he joined a group of twenty  activists, many of them clergymen affiliated with the Baltimore Interfaith Peace Mission in Washington, D.C., to picket the home of secretary of state Dean Rusk, where they hoisted signs demanding an end to the bombings and a diplomatic resolution to the conflict. Later that same day, they moved to secretary of defense Robert McNamara’s home, where they knelt on his snowy front lawn in prayer. Journalists and newsmen marveled at the scene, and a photo of the silent protest appeared on the front page of Philip’s local paper, the Baltimore Sun, the next day.    

The protest led to a meeting with Secretary Rusk. Philip and two other members of his peace group spent hours fiercely debating the Johnson administration’s policy in Southeast Asia with one of its key architects—a meeting that, to some activists, represented a victory and testament to the success of targeting the private residences of officials. But in fact, it only left Philip disappointed. The meeting inspired no material shifts to war policy; it had simply been a theater for the proponents of the war to defend their blood-soaked policies. One moment during their debate revealed the dead end of Berrigan’s present strategy, when a frustrated Rusk huffed, “I leave morality up to you clergymen.”

Despite the growing scale of the antiwar movement, the carnage continued—by the end of 1966, over 385,000 troops were deployed in Vietnam, and the body count piled higher by the day. The first half of 1967 saw three major protests carried out by Philip and the Baltimore Interfaith Peace Mission, all taking place at Fort Myer, a military base in northern Virginia. Echoing the December protests in D.C., activists picketed the homes of the joint chiefs of staff, who’d ignored activists’ repeated requests for meetings or interviews.

While these events did generate media attention, journalists seemed to regard them more as whimsical curiosities: the Associated Press wire service, for example, published a photograph of the December action that showed a small child sledding past the protest. Philip and his cadre determined that further escalation was imperative. Inspired by conversations with organizers with the Students for a Democratic Society, a radical group comfortable with taking direct action, Philip advised a different method of protest: the destruction of draft files.

On the morning of October 27, 1967, he led a group of two other religious activists, along with another priest, that stormed one of Baltimore’s draft board offices and drenched the files in blood. While they waited for the police to arrive, they prayed. Less than eight months later, while out on bail for the Baltimore action, Philip led another raid. This time he was joined by his brother Daniel, and the target was a draft board office in Catonsville, Maryland. News of the “Catonsville Nine” quickly spread across the state. One popular Baltimore radio disc jockey declared, “I think they ought to lock ‘em in the can and throw away the key”; a Catholic representative of Catonsville on the Baltimore County Council argued that the Church must “discharge from religious orders anyone involved in such activities.” News of the protest spread across the country, garnering headlines in newspapers and on nightly news broadcasts. Millions were transfixed by the scene of the Berrigans and their accomplices—brothers of the cloth burning draft files while solemnly reciting the Lord’s Prayer.

The Catonsville Nine marked an inflection point in activism against the Vietnam War. It helped birth the Catholic Resistance, a network of localized antiwar groups largely grounded in Catholic theology and practice that spawned across the country. The communities looked to the Berrigans as the moral and political North Stars of their work—and embraced the brothers’ calls to direct action. Between 1968 and 1973, the group led more than a dozen raids on draft board offices, destroying hundreds of thousands of draft files.

The contemporary opposition to the genocide in Gaza bears striking resemblances to the conditions faced by the Catholic Resistance. In one sense, there truly exists no “permissible” means to protest the U.S. taxpayer-funded slaughter of Palestinians, even in the halls of power. The Israel lobby, which recently scored a massive victory in the most expensive House primary in history, remains flush with cash—and its crusade to squelch dissent on U.S.-Israel policy shows no signs of slowing down. According to one group of congressional interns, dozens of congresspeople and staff members have “suppressed” their constituent calls on the Gaza genocide, a reality that shatters the illusion of democratic accountability on the issue. Thanks to pro-Israel donors, elected officials know that they owe no fidelity to their constituents’ opinions on the issue. So long as they vote the right way in Congress, they’ll be protected from any challengers—and if they don’t comply, they’ll pay for it by facing a well-funded opposition. It’s an arrangement that more resembles a Mafia racket than any democratic exercise.

Even explicitly nonviolent protests contesting U.S.-Israel policy, such as boycotts, are criminalized in over half of our nation’s states, despite the fact that these protests epitomize the ideal form of expression held by critics of violent protest. Meanwhile, pro-Palestine encampments at dozens of universities this spring sufficed to whip the political and commentariat classes into a hysterical frenzy—as well as drawing condemnation from President Biden, who decried the “violent” protests as not protected by the Constitution, a cruel irony when considering the scale of violence in Gaza, never mind the empirical evidence demonstrating the overwhelmingly peaceful nature of pro-Palestinian demonstrations.

This disjunct was beautifully articulated by Daniel in a statement written on behalf of the Catonsville Nine, where he lucidly anticipates the bad-faith critiques of “violence” to come: “Our apologies, good friends, for the fracture of good order, the burning of paper instead of children, the angering of the orderlies in the front parlor of the charnel house. We could not, so help us God, do otherwise. For we are sick at heart, our hearts give us no rest for thinking of the Land of Burning Children.”

As is the case with most dissent, civil or otherwise, the Berrigans’ actions were unpopular with the American public. One Gallup poll taken in 1971 asked American Catholics whether they approved of draft board raids and other such actions—only 18 percent answered affirmatively, while 67 percent were against. That trend continues today: while the majority of Americans support a ceasefire in Gaza, 63 percent of those over the age of forty-five opposed the campus protests according to a May poll.

Elected officials have tended to be dismissive, if not hostile: earlier this month, roughly half a dozen protesters disrupted a rally in Detroit for Kamala Harris, chanting: “Kamala, Kamala you can’t hide! We won’t vote for genocide.” The surrounding crowd was quick to drown out the chant, but the most stinging rebuke came from the vice president herself, who paused in her remarks to say, “I’m here because we believe in democracy. Everyone’s voice matters, but I am speaking now. I am speaking now.” All voices should be heard, the Democratic presidential nominee claims, though only in the appropriate venue and at the right time. But the protesters in Detroit know the impossibility of those conditions, how calls for civility serve only to stifle dissent. The only option left is to disrupt.

Today, the Berrigans are deemed prophetic by many of the same sorts who would have condemned them as heretical fifty years ago. One can only assume that, at some point in the distant future, contemporary antiwar protesters—smeared by journalists, beaten by police and counterprotesters, blacklisted by employers, taunted and tarred by politicians, rebuked by the public—will be similarly canonized. But it remains to be seen how many more years, and how many dead Gazan children, it will take to consecrate today’s prophets as such.