c. 1997 Religion News Service

(Rabbi Rudin is the national interreligious affairs director of the American Jewish Committee).

UNDATED _ Historically, governments have always punished terrorists and traitors with expulsion, prison, and execution. That’s the easy part.

Much more difficult is dealing with prophets who speak in God’s name and directly challenge the existing order. Such people frequently present serious problems for kings, emperors, and presidents.

Philip Berrigan’s recent arrest and imprisonment in Maine reminded me once again of this unchanging fact of political life. Together with his brother, Daniel, a Jesuit priest, the Berrigans are among America’s most famous religious-political rebels of this century.

As brothers in faith and civil disobedience, no one who knows of them is neutral about the Berrigans. But love them or hate them, they represent a unique American phenomenon: deeply pious Catholic children of Irish immigrants who became our country’s best known and most dynamic anti-war activists.

Philip Berrigan, a former Josephite Catholic priest, is now 73, but age has not diminished his remarkable capacity for righteous indignation and radical civil disobedience. Philip joined civil rights marchers 36 years ago in Selma, Ala., and ever since he has been a vigorous opponent of many American military and social policies, especially the Vietnam War, the U.S arms trade, and nuclear weapons.

In 1968, the brothers permanently entered America’s collective consciousness after they burned stolen draft records in Catonsville, Md.

Since those early days in Selma, Philip Berrigan has spent seven and a half years in jail, including a 10 month term in 1994 after he was convicted for physically damaging a jet fighter plane in North Carolina.

Earlier this year, Philip and five associates again got the government’s attention after they boarded a U.S. Navy guided missile ship in Bath, Maine, and smashed the craft’s navigational equipment with hammers. Berrigan and his colleagues also sprayed the ship with their own blood, carried in plastic baby bottles.

Proudly explaining his actions, Berrigan invoked the image and words of the Biblical prophet Isaiah: His goal, he said, was”to hammer the instrument of death into a peaceful plowshare … peace probably won’t happen in my lifetime. But it will happen because God told us not to kill one another. Either we destroy war or it will destroy us.” Over the centuries, governments have had a hard time dealing with activists like the Berrigans because they claim the ultimate source of their authority is not a realpolitik filled with terms such as national defense, security treaties, and nuclear deterrents. Instead, prophetic empowerment stems from something political leaders always find uncomfortable, even threatening: God and the divine commandments.

The Berrigans have also troubled their fellow Catholics by basing their radical and often illegal actions on a profound Christian faith. The brothers have confronted their church, accusing it of being too tepid in its support of the civil rights movement and too accepting of America’s foreign policy.

Philip and Daniel see themselves as people of religious conscience standing against the powerful state as faithful witnesses for life and truth. Some Berrigan admirers compare the brothers to earlier Catholic activists like Joan of Arc and Sir Thomas More.

The remarkable story of the Berrigans is recounted in their recently published biography,”Disarmed and Dangerous: Brothers in Faith and Civil Disobedience”(Basic Books). Written by Murray Polner and Jim O’Grady, the authors skillfully tell how the Berrigans moved from a traditional Catholic childhood in Minnesota, to seminary studies, the priesthood, then onto the world stage and prison sentences.

I was pleased the authors devoted a full chapter to the most lamentable episode in Daniel Berrigan’s public career: a fierce anti-Israel speech delivered in 1973 before an Arab audience in Washington, D.C., in which he falsely imposed the moral and political categories of the Vietnam War onto the highly complex situation in the Middle East.

The speech was severely and rightly criticized by many of Daniel’s closest Jewish and Christian colleagues, and some labeled him an anti-Semite, a charge he strongly denies. Even a quarter century later, Daniel believes people still hold the speech against him. His verbal assault upon Israel remains a sharp, bitter memory for many.

However,”Disarmed and Dangerous”tells more than the Berrigans’ story. The authors place the brothers in a larger setting: America in the tumultuous `60s, a time of intense political activism, high hopes, and crushed dreams.

Polner and O’Grady aptly write that the painful questions raised by the Berrigans remain,”… essentially untested and unexamined, scorned by a new generation of avaricious cynics and demagogues.” But being a prophet has always been a dangerous profession.

MJP END RUDIN