“Looking Good on Wood: Reflections on the Tenth Anniversary of Dan Berrigan’s Death”

By Bob Keeler, April 30, 2026

The tenth anniversary of Daniel Berrigan’s death, right in the middle of yet another senseless, wicked war, offers a serious opportunity for reflection. He was all about rejecting war, and he was willing to spend many long months in prison to make that point, in defiance of the law.

First, full disclosure: Rev. Daniel Berrigan, SJ, had a significant impact on me as a journalist. In 1993, I was covering the religion beat for Newsday, and I was working on an article about the renowned Trappist monk and prolific author, Thomas Merton. I had read a lot of Merton’s vast store of wisdom on such subjects as the contemplative life of the monastery and the evils of racism and war. His books line my shelves, and a drawing of Merton by Newsday illustrator Bob Newman adorns one wall in my home, right next to a Bob Newman illustration of another hero of mine: Jackie Robinson. So the anniversary of Merton’s death back then seemed like a natural occasion for a feature article.

It was while working on that article that I learned that Berrigan, a good friend of Merton’s, would be speaking about him at St. Brigid’s Parish in Westbury. So I attended.

“We have all been touched and rendered perhaps more seeing, more courageous and more hopeful by Thomas Merton,” Berrigan said during that St. Brigid’s memorial service. Later, I interviewed Berrigan for the article, and he said this to me about Merton: “It just seems as though he’s more present to people than he ever was in the monastery.”

Not long after that article ran, my editor, Phyllis Singer, asked me to write a series of stories about a year in the life of a Catholic parish. I remembered the vivid impression I’d had of St. Brigid’s: a lively parish filled with warmth and energy. I did some reporting on other parishes to come up with the right one. In those days, I had a fanciful nickname for boring, by the-numbers parishes: St. Rigid’s. Picking a St. Rigid’s-style parish would make for a boring year for me and the readers. That 1993 talk by Dan Berrigan convinced me that St. Brigid’s was definitely not St. Rigid’s. In addition to my own impressions of the parish, Father John White, a good friend of Berrigan’s who had arranged his talk about Merton, encouraged me to choose Brigid’s. So I spent more than a year there.

I have to admit, at that stage of my life, I knew a lot more about Thomas Merton than I did about his friend, Dan Berrigan. Over the years, I have tried to remedy that lack of knowledge with a lot of reading and reflecting on his lifelong war resistance. At least I have an excuse for missing a huge Berrigan event that happened on May 17, 1968. I was in the army, in Korea.

On the other side of the world from me, Berrigan and eight others, including his brother, Rev. Philip Berrigan, protested the war in Vietnam by going to a draft board in Catonsville, Maryland. They took draft records to the parking lot and burned nearly 400 of them, using a mixture of soap and gasoline, meant to symbolize the fiery napalm dropped on civilians in Vietnam.

Berrigan’s famous statement about that action is often cited by peace activists all these years later:

“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.”

The Catonsville Nine went on trial that October. They were convicted of destroying government property and interfering with the Selective Service Act, and they were sentenced to prison. Dan Berrigan, a poet and the author many books, wrote a free-verse play about it, The Trial of the Catonsville Nine. It later became a movie produced by actor Gregory Peck, who said that he “lost every penny” that he spent on the film.

My favorite part of the Catonsville Nine story is what happened in 1970, after the Supreme Court declined to hear the case. Berrigan was due to report on April 9, 1970, to begin serving his prison term. But he chose not to show up. Even though he continued to give interviews and appear at public events while in “hiding,” the FBI took four months to catch up with him. The agency’s initials, it seemed, stood for Federal Bureau of Incompetence.

That incompetence became obvious again after a group of peace activists burglarized the FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, in 1971. (I wrote about this burglary in my first Substack column, in November 2024, soon after the election that gave us Trump 2.0. But it’s worth telling the story again now, to mention Dan Berrigan’s influence on the burglars.) The leader of that burglary was William Davidon, a physics professor at Haverford College, a Philadelphia-area institution founded by Quakers and still showing a strong Quaker influence. Davidon was an unlikely leader of a burglary gang. But in her book, The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret FBI, Betty Medsger explained the evolution of Davidon’s thought from physics to felony:

Who would dare to think they could break into an FBI office? Surely the offices of the most powerful law enforcement agency in the country would be as secure as Fort Knox. Just talking about the possibility seemed dangerous.

But Davidon, with great reluctance, had decided that burglarizing an FBI office might be the only way to confront what he considered an emergency: the likelihood that the government, through the FBI, was spying on Americans and suppressing their cherished constitutional right to dissent. If that was true, he thought, it was a crime against democracy—a crime that must be stopped.

The Media burglars, who called themselves the Citizens Commission to Investigate the FBI, took every document they could find in that office and studied them closely. Those documents revealed the existence of the FBI’s COINTELPRO program, aimed at disrupting civil rights and antiwar groups, just as Davidon had suspected. The agency was acting like the Federal Bureau of Intimidation. The documents led to newspaper stories and to a congressional investigation by a Senate committee known as the Church Committee, led by Sen. Frank Church (D-Idaho), which looked into the FBI and the CIA. Despite the troubles the burglary caused the agency, the Federal Bureau of Intimidation/Incompetence was unable to identify even one of the burglars. They revealed themselves decades later.

What did Dan Berrigan have to do with the Media burglary? Well, he wasn’t one of the burglars, but he did inspire the lead burglar, Davidon, who first met people in the Catholic peace movement after the Catonsville action and was deeply impressed by Berrigan’s play, The Trial of the Catonsville Nine. Medsger wrote:

“Davidon found the resistance ideas and methods of the Catonsville Nine compelling. Berrigan’s poetic writing and the stark trial testimony resonated deeply with Davidon’s values. Years later, he recalls that the play made him ‘take seriously these kinds of things as a possibility for himself. I don’t think I would have even considered such steps had it not been for Dan Berrigan.’”

The Catonsville incident did not come from nowhere. The previous year, in October 1967, Berrigan participated in a huge protest at the Pentagon. “Dan brought a busload of Cornell students down to DC for the protest, and they all marched forward to face arrest,” said Father John Dear, a good friend and literary collaborator of Berrigan, on an episode of his The Nonviolent Jesus Podcast marking the anniversary of Berrigan’s death on April 30, 2016. “So he spontaneously joined them, and they were held for two weeks,” Dear said. “He was the first priest in US history arrested on the cause of justice and peace.”

Then, in February 1968, Berrigan traveled to North Vietnam with historian Howard Zinn to bring back three US prisoners of war. “And while they were there—it was global news—the US bombed Hanoi the block where they were,” Dear said. They hid in a shelter for a full week as the bombs continued to fall, and Dear said that the Hanoi experience was part of Berrigan’s motivation for Catonsville.

A personal note: John Dear’s podcast episode came to me in an email from someone who spent a lot longer in Vietnam than Berrigan did: Molly Blume, the daughter of Jack O’Connell, my friend since day one of high school in 1957. Molly lived in Vietnam for six years, first as a Fulbright scholar, then working for an attorney. She speaks Vietnamese fluently, and she looks at the current war through the lens of her painful firsthand knowledge of what our nation did to the people of Vietnam. “I personally am very devastated about what we are doing in Iran,” Molly said. “We’re just destroying the Middle East.

Molly’s father is another Berrigan connection: Jack and others from St. Mary’s Seminary in Baltimore used to visit Berrigan in prison. “The warden was a very nice guy, who loved the Berrigans,” Jack said. “He couldn’t do enough to help us talk to the Catonsville Nine.” Jack and I remain in touch regularly about the Mets—and Trump. The same with John White, who brought Berrigan to St. Brigid’s.

The burning of draft records in Catonsville was not the only time Berrigan and others made news and spent time behind bars. On September 9, 1980, the two Berrigan brothers and six friends walked into a General Electric facility in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania. “They just walked right in the door, and opened a door and there were nuclear weapons,” John Dear said. “They walked over and hammered on these unarmed nuclear weapon nose cones. The Plowshares 8 were arrested, convicted and faced 10 years in prison. Theirs was the first of over 100 Plowshare disarmament actions.”

Though Berrigan said he didn’t do well in prison, Dear said that Berrigan was arrested about five times a year over several decades. Berrigan saw those many months behind bars as part of obeying the command of Jesus, that his disciples must take up their cross and follow him. As Berrigan famously put it, “If you are going to follow Jesus, you better look good on wood.”

Those are useful words to remember, in these days of vastly destructive, totally unnecessary war. How far are any of us willing to go, to protest? Do we have any Berrigan in us?