An Open Letter to Joe O'Rourke
Berrigan, Daniel
recognize the reality and autonomy of the eternal dimension of human existence, as well as its own inability and inappropriateness for trying to cope with it. A dying man needs a priest, not a...
...But you never gave up...
...Categorically not...
...Commonweal: 63 Such conditions for your expulsion were simply not met, as we are bitterly aware...
...Knowing as well, that trust in Him implies being trustworthy ourselves...
...But in every case, to wait respectfully on the word of the community, to proceed only after, and in accord with their self-understanding and conscience...
...All honor to you in a time of dishonor...
...And that the cooler types precisely owed itmto themselves, to their brothers, to the bleeding world--to support and help further the edgy, lonely, uncharted work of resistance against the warmaking state...
...Our editorial on the subject appeared in the September 20 issue...
...A dying man needs a priest, not a commissar...
...First among your crimes and delicts (I find this delicious) your civil offenses are never mentioned...
...There were careerists, the Society was mecca and mentor...
...A layman said to me...
...Their historical energizers were not the saints or Jesus at all...
...but you are not so to act...
...Too much was happening...
...As Commonweal: 65...
...The real world...
...I want, as simply as I know how, to say thank you for that small gesture (all our gestures are small...
...between two Catholics (performed), in the Ossining State Correction Facility, on June 16, 1974 . . . implying disregard for existing norms of delegation for a Roman Catholic wedding within the confines of the N.Y...
...This man is ready to ring Claudine's chimes...
...Where do we go from here, you, I, all of us who have been sweating out these weeks in various stages of despair, frustration, fury, hope...
...it was because of you and a few other Jesuits that the old rundown fiats on West 98 Street were tapped and watched by the F.B.I., that other consciences were aroused, that at least some came face to face with the most serious moral question of their, or our, lifetime...
...we have all talked ourselves into bone weariness about this...
...I should add too, that I would have baptized the child, if certain conditions were met...
...Trust me, though you haven't the slightest idea of what's happening, what way my decisions are going in disposing of your life, your future, your conscience...
...for you, and for others as well...
...Like this...
...The troublemaker is dead...
...stowaways, peaceniks, freeloaders, senior citizens, homosexuals, and (God save the cloister) women...
...By implication, a good troublemaker is a dead one, and vice versa...
...Then the matter of secrecy, that ancient bugaboo of church, state and Jesuits...
...The decision to show you to the door is intolerable from every point of view--ethical, human, Christian...
...I remember the joy and gratitude I felt...
...Frayed maybe...
...To digress: in the summer of 1973, I wrote a letter to a Jesuit paper, at their request...
...their ideal existence was a compound, a tower, a cover of ivy, a chapel to the side...
...And of course that says it badly...
...You went to Marlboro, in the teeth of a Cardinal's order, and a superior's prohibition, to baptize a baby...
...Well, what place did all this leave for superiors...
...In this case, Joe is running ahead, he takes the first fall...
...How _I indeed does the state get to decide that an imprisoned felon is ecclesiastically dead, no fit subject or agent of the sacrament...
...such men and women, in fact, are a great deal like Me...
...The issue was undoubtedly complicated...
...And now and then, yes, to reprove, to rein in...
...If one can discern anything salvageable in the encircling gloom, it is the feeling, generally unarticulated, commonly accepted and acted upon, translatable as a true and universal sense of the people...
...My father used to describe them...
...friends who, like you, were passionate about so simple a thing as the murder of children...
...with priests and nuns, with people from all sides...
...It calmly said in effect that the question of obedience, whenever it was removed from the hands of local communities, became a cancerous question...
...Only after he has turned on the charm extraheavy does she relent and take him inside to witness the arguments and suffer the insults of her children...
...Jesuits (like other Americans) had been spiritually inducted into violence...
...Moreover, I find it impossible to make even the smallest grain of sense out of the turmoil of the past weeks, except in the light of our friendship, our common and sweaty dedication to sanity, and our love of the Society of Jesus...
...Our own brothers, " . . . at the conclusion of a serious process by . . . consultors and myself (Father Taylor) . . . as well as by Father General and his assistants . . . . " have handed you the ax, blade first...
...Something to this effect: I took it as a good thing that a Jesuit was playing chaplain to war criminals in the Nixon government, since even war criminals need salvation...
...It seems worth recalling first of all, that the Jesuit authorities have cleared the cardinals of New York and Boston of any part in your untimely demise...
...Such men were also sharing in that special and lethal American luxurym taking violin lessons while Hanoi burned...
...Nor screaming nor cursing...
...The perspective of eternity is not a proper perspective for coping with temporal problems...
...everyone who died Irish rated a eulogy...
...His most recent book is Lights On in the House of the Dead: A Prison Diary (Doubleday...
...no holds barred, no reasons given...
...Because I don't like mob scenes at a sacrament...
...I used to appear at the Fordham Fortress on command, explain as patiently as I knew how my latest trespassings and divagations, receive my birching and depart...
...But the purpose of that recognition is to set free for human effort the entire dimension of human life which belongs to Caesar...
...Much easier than, say, playing human...
...Finally, it insisted that the Brotherhood was not made up, locally or otherwise, of unconcerned professionals and freaky zealots...
...It was like giving away $10 bills or free food in the old morgue-like lobby on 98 Street...
...A standoff ensued...
...it is part of the agony of the times...
...And how does the church get to agree with such an iniquitous law...
...You'd better look to yourself...
...The other refused to impart the customary gesture of peace to the Cardinal of New York, who was conferring the sacrament...
...Those, too, are real and autonomous...
...No, the deceased went out, and up, with a bang...
...The war...
...Indeed the tone of the letter is a little like that of an old-time funeral...
...Joseph O'Rourke has been dismissed from the Society oJ Jesus...
...just as evidently, other sorts of activity are the occasion of top trouble...
...to speak rigorously and in metaphor too . . . . But what a debasement occurs, when this tenuous, living, endangered, ennobling, organic venture is uprooted bodily and clumsily retooled, to serve a bad scene...
...In any case, you had your day, before the cameras and crowds...
...I can buy that, Joe...
...unlike official pronunciamentos, there was some taste and smell of the real world in it...
...to exercise those high and special gifts of which Paul speaks...
...the line is unbroken, from the holy land through the unholy history, to all lands, to the present...
...During the same decade, I was urged on at least four occasions, with varying degrees of anger and frustration, to withdraw from the order...
...That I think is the invisible writing of the letter that pushes your life, your ministry, your sacrament, to the wall...
...out of control...
...No matter the sense of relief at the passing of Paddy O'Paragon, or the sigh of relief issuing from under the widow's crepe...
...But you weren't, Joe...
...No Jesuit house, from Syracuse (where I had taught for six years) to New Orleans, could be found to receive me while the necessary legalities, visas, etc., were being concluded...
...This time she has forgotten about their date and would rather cancel it...
...You went through civil trials, you endured and won friends in and out of the order...
...He went to the microphone to explain, in defiance of rubric and good order, the meaning of the refusal...
...There's some evidence for the eonelusl.on that trusting Him is not altogether a cretinous assignment...
...It assumed that mature people would by and large be able to take care of their own lives, conflicts, activities, without outside interference...
...A strategy of progress, if it is not to be caught up in the murderous attempt to be God, must render unto God the things that are God's...
...The language of their letter of dismissal is unexceptionable...
...So we come to the offense that brought the house down...
...Progress cannot solve the eternal mystery of being human---but it can solve its temporal problems...
...Ignatius, that is first victim of this outrage...
...Damn it, no...
...The superior at 98th Street, Father Fred O'Connor, responded with thumbs down, after the long discussion on the night before you went to Massachusetts...
...trust us...
...Where people are starving and despairing and in prison and under bombs...
...The sentiment evidently stirred few...
...I left as empty as I came...
...So we are involved in a strict family affair...
...At the end, when so much wreckage lay around, when So many had departed, the bond still lies on us...
...One priest, a member of another order said to me: "I don't know what 'expulsion' means...
...Indeed, the sense arises that a one-way street is being laid out, paved and pc>liced...
...The law, by "and small, is too narrow for life...
...and always in the sacristy...
...Eternal perspective can free progress from the frantic, murderous attempt to create a secular substitute for God--but it cannot be a substitute for a human perspective...
...And the mills of the gods were set in motion...
...In the middle sixties, I was urged, in just such words, to take in stride a certain command, filtered down through various levels of authority...
...They have feelings about the law, and act on them...
...DANIEL COLOR TELEVISION OOOOOOOOOOOOOO THE SCREEN The plot of the film Claudine is bracketed by a matched pair of episodes neatly placed, like bookends, so that they will contain everything in between them...
...Where whirring xerox machines are never heard and papal directives are unintelligible, and only the feistiest, most responsible, tenacious, trusting, unselfish priests need apply...
...but no medico Commonweal: 61 I ever met could tell me how to live after the siamese surgery that cut me from the body...
...A nun echoed the same idea...
...But as soon as he spots Claudine coming across the street, he hops out to try again...
...our work is invoked, our service of the church, our loyalties, the gospel and its priorities...
...Regrets, but relief...
...and that worthiness of trust leads outward into the world, and by a hundred obscure strands, back to Himself...
...We felt in sum that it was a classic example of a non-issue, that there would be heavy consequences for a lightweight gain...
...Help us be brothers one of another, in the world, and to endure there...
...The gentiles lord it over one another...
...a process that demands among other things, admission of fallibility, failures, put-downs, moral untidiness, humiliation...
...And in the instance of such rending apart of the fabric of His body and ours, His word and our consent, does not the contrary act (that of a disobeying blessing on a proscribed marriage) become the duty of a priest...
...dossier...
...Evidently the worst sort of mucking about with obscene power is O.K...
...forthwith for Latin America, with no return ticket...
...Letter of Ft...
...It praises you, Brother Joe, almost beyond measure...
...archdiocese...
...Gospel together, like it or not, bail, row, or sink...
...I was advised by the local superior to obey, because (in some such words) this was the least punitive of the measures they were considering...
...they wouldn't condemn, they wouldn't stand by...
...It was the beginning of all our troubles...
...But pitching you overboard, in the immortal image of the book of Jonah, is no acceptable way of calming the storm...
...Where you, Joe, try to live, where many of us are trying to live together...
...Those few who were favored with some word from the authorities, heard, by and large, one admonition...
...Well, what have you been up to...
...During thirteen to fifteen years of studies when the kids are outside looking in, it's a way of huddling, coping...
...But first, to the crime...
...I learned of your act as I came around from a nearly fatal dosage of xylocaine...
...The second delict is an "illicit marriage ceremony...
...Hadn't the gospel said so, long ago, and hadn't the Lord so advised and so proceeded...
...A word seems to be in order too about those famous guidelines that the Woodstock Jesuits developed in the late hot sixties, a kind of community stakeout...
...the level issuing the command being, as usual, inaccessible...
...No better...
...And you felt it was a foolish and criminal thing, to make an infant the whipping child of other special interests...
...Progressives must not resign the responsibility for human welfare to religion...
...And through these others, his friends, brothers, peers, community, that he be answerable also to higher authorities, who presumably exist somewhat at the periphery of our lives, to encourage, stimulate, praise, bless, intuit...
...One's way of 'conducting' his life...
...Then you embraced the Cardinal, as prescribed...
...Why then you...
...Everyone came running...
...But certain abortion freaks were promoting the baptism, as a way of dramatizing the issue...
...So 1 tried flipping my reactions around, for sanity's sake...
...Many Jesuits hadn't tasted the sixties at all...
...No reasons were given for the order, no interviews granted...
...Trust me, the superior says, offering no reasons for trust...
...Talbot...
...On the one side, the impenetrable metaphor of God's work in the world is invoked, a hard thing to get ahold of, in the divine instance, trust being the best response we can muster in a faulty and obscure cause...
...In sum, the community was making itself guilty, in flagrante delictu, of "Theology, the study and practice of...
...Bu: in what sort of essence shall we dip such a letter, and the minds that drew it up, so that the truth may appear...
...I have never learned how to cope with this 'peccatum perenne,' to this day I am unable to do so...
...close Woodstock...
...We felt sure that there were other priests than you, who would be willing to perform the baptism, in circumstances they would judge fitting and sensible...
...Moreover, there are still some saints around, most of them in obscure corners, most of them unrecognized, some of them actively tortured, imprisoned, forgotten, reviled...
...You, meantime, stood at your place and said: "I too find it difficult to kiss peace with war...
...B~shops, I suppose, every day, almost everywhere, are tempted to blow their miters about deviances from church law...
...There is much that is cloudy in this legal huffing and puffing...
...Finally and reluctantly, Georgetown took me in for a week or so...
...But at least, one can argue in a bad hour (most hours) that the One asking our trust has laid something out on our behalf...
...still coming down on us, forever refurbished with new rhetoric, fearful of human probings, interventions, communitarian impulse, criticism--the light and warmth and unsettling spontaneities of the truth...
...Trust Me...
...something responsible and weighty, i mean adherence to the law of humanity, the law of community, the law of conscience, the law of Christ in fact, a law that allows for excesses and mistakes and distemper and extremes, with the one proviso that the agent be alive to human beings, aware of their struggles, and answerable to those he loves...
...Maybe it's an anus I lack, maybe a heart...
...among members of her congregation, there was an agreement in favor of "working things out," with the intractable, (the prophetic...
...some of us, at least, do not consider the law, badly and even iniquitously applied, as the measure of our life together...
...You can too...
...They do such things, the majority of them, without a qualm...
...There were too many publicans and sinners around the place...
...It is a word worth pondering...
...A bit of the truth comes out anyway...
...But the converse is no less true: a starving man needs bread, not only a blessing...
...On September 5, Father Eamon Taylor, S.J., New York Provincial, wrote a letter to his Province: (published in the National Jesuit News): " . . . Today I have a painJul duty, that of informing you that Fr...
...And therein lay the rub...
...Yet as a plain matter of record, you are a felon in the U.S...
...We consider you a Jesuit as long as you choose to be so considered...
...I love you, I Iove my own sanity, I love the Company, and I mourn the trouble of which your purgatory is a sign...
...It tried, I thought, and succeeded to a degree, in bringing intramural questions like obedience, church questions like good order, down to earth, where they belong...
...AN OPEN LETTER TO JOE O'ROURKE DANIEL BERRIGAN To hell with the glory of God: or, how we got rid o| Joe As most oJ our readers know, on August 20, Father Joseph O'Rourke, S.J., agah~st the directives of his New York religious superiors, baptized a child in Marlboro, Massachusetts when the child had been re[used baptism because o] his mother's stand on an abortion issue...
...The parents of the child made it clear they were not pro-abortion--to the contrary...
...why not consider such occasions as reinforcements, honors, decorations, instead of assaults...
...the feeling that the era of bad law requires, if we are not to go entirely bananas, an era of virtuous lawlessness...
...Such self-destructing machinery should be on display at the Museum of Modern Art...
...A mature strategy of progress may well depend on the recognition that the two are distinct...
...Laughlin survived...
...But I took it badly that the same Jesuit spent his time, and our money, cruising around the world justifying the crimes of his masters...
...where we go when the road signs are down...
...Much easier to drag in the paraphernalia of transcendence, draw the curtain of the holies around one's activity, invoke the penates, and like some supernal xerox, toss out one's decisions from within the impenetralia...
...Then, and only then, and once or twice in a lifetime, and only after the most sensitive conscience among us is satisfied that justice has been done, that the 'crime' is flagrant and unrepented--to pronounce an anathema...
...In fact the parents themselves, or any layperson, could have performed the sacrament, judging that solid reasons existed for doing so...
...it takes, apparently, about two days to dispose of one...
...When you refused to take part in that charade, I was in the intensive care unit of the hospital at Danbury, shipped there under guard, a federal prisoner...
...Lawlessness...
...Later I took to fasting for the day of wrath, appearing before superiors light of head and gut, creating for myself a kind of inner Day of Atonement...
...Ninety percent of life (if we except those who visit the dead, carve tombstones and live off investment in this unreal estate)--most of life goes on outside...
...What is a crime anyway...
...In the first one, garbageman Rupert Marshall (James Earl Jones) drives up for his first date with cleaning lady/welfare mother Claudine Price (Diahann Carroll...
...The letter of dismissal makes you a church mouse, given to wrong appetites, fits, starts, directions...
...Trust, more precisely, is being used...
...Once a court of peers was assembled to hear my current delict, which involved, as I recall, a decision to travel to Hanoi with a symbolic gift of medical supplies, thus violating U.S...
...Unlike the famous classical ones, these gears ground fast...
...the sermon on the mount, the passion and death of Jesus...
...No, the guidelines said coolly that everyone was in the S.S...
...there were actually some Jesuits in town who were taking life seriously, the city seriously, the war...
...Then Rome panicked...
...Sense...
...We don't know how long we'll be able to keep this phase of the voyage going...
...We were exempt...
...They were invited, by implication, to keep out of the way, to disappear even...
...the action at Marlboro has so many loose ends that I am not satisfied the good you want would be accomplished, and I do not want you to put yourself in jeopardy for an action so ambiguous...
...Could it be that authority, so conducting itself, was really granting me a backhanded compliment, and every time I received an official put-down, I should wear it up and down Fordham Road like a shiny new Croix de Paix...
...The feeling is that the days of qualm are long over...
...that the baptism was performed in the home of the parents, with a handful of friends present, and no newspersons...
...The word about Woodstock was getting around...
...They were laying something out...
...some by implication, some by silence...
...Like your activity...
...Trust me...
...It implied moreover that authorities were guilty of such interference precisely to the degree that they zeroed in on local situations without sharing neighborhood table, altar, meetings...
...It takes some fifteen years to turn out a compleat Jesuit...
...When he does, however, Claudine isn't home yet, and since her daughter won't let him in, Rupert has to go back to wait in his car...
...Has civil non-violent crime then become acceptable, or of no account...
...So I went south, in what seemed to me then (and still does) one of the absurdest hegiras of the century, a panicky order issued speedily, under secrecy...
...I have pondered and prayed and talked...
...I thank you for this act, for the danger it exposed you to, for the turning back at least in one instance, of the incursion of Caesar on holy ground...
...he emerged from an ill-timed absurd outburst of his superiors, kosher and clean as gefiilte fish...
...There, you and one other misguided Jesuit yielded to a sulfurous suggestion...
...It is a love letter...
...Perhaps it is the intellect first of all, the feeling, passionate intellect celebrated by FATHER DANIEL BERRIGAN, S.J., is the anti-war priest and poet...
...There was fun in Funless City: a crash pad for the most unlikely types, all-night marathons that resulted in the bending and fracture of civil laws...
...I find a particular twist of the knife in the episode...
...In our outfit we have no process for it, we wouldn't know how to go about it...
...Since democracy involves the recognition that the things which are Caesar's are rei publicae, this means leaving to human effort the entire dimension of human problems and their solution, human progress...
...Nor do I believe that people taking part in such a scene, with whatever good intention, are led to think more deeply on the meaning of the event, or to link their lives more responsibly with one another, or with the life of the newly baptized...
...No pressures...
...No, I say to you that the first among you is to be as the least . . . . " And again, "If I, your teacher and lord, have washed your feet, it is to give an example...
...That I could go with...
...the first of whom were fated to tolerate the second, an inevitable evil, given the times...
...Whereupon, Roma loeuta...
...Be our brother, then...
...Trust Me...
...And what does connivance with a caesarian decree of untouchability do to the body of the church, joined as in marriage with Christ our Lord...
...Practically speaking, you must take our word for it...
...Some of them were already in trouble, others were in the wings, drumming up support for their brothers...
...You escaped going to jail only by the merest tic of justice...
...The bond grows, past ordination, into the struggle, the muck, fury, shuffled lives and geographies of the past decade...
...Not much in fact...
...And when I demurred, not being attached to a domestic domino theory, he added, "I mean Joe's interceding for you...
...One could legitimately raise all sorts of questions here about the meaning of a sacrament first of all...
...Pieties multiply...
...moody, ill-at-ease, retrenching, regrouping, its officialdom demoralized, its cultural roots stifled, its Nixonian enthusiasms swept away, its best people, priests, layfolk, nuns, functioning at the edge, or wearily enduring, or disappearing out of sight--the church limps on, relic, bare survivor, amputee, into the seventies...
...Evidently your real wrong-doing began in June of 1971, in Fordham Chapel, during the ceremony of your ordination to the priesthood...
...relief...
...I have to tell you unequivocally that Phil and I both felt uneasy about the affair...
...I simply refuse to accept, in silence, or in peace, your eviction from the Jesuits, accomplished in the way we have witnessed...
...There's always been a strange, heavy, willful, endangered bond among the brethren...
...I mean nothing romantic...
...Meantime, in the American church, bad law is badly understood, applied in fits and starts...
...THE EDITORS Dear Brother Joe, For friendship's sake, for my own sanity, for love of the Society of Jesus in trouble---for these and for many other reasons I want to write you this letter...
...Priests north, east, west, south, baptize, bless marriages, shrive, hold eucharist, in ways the law forbids...
...No access, no mediators, no community voice...
...a gentle jolt had been given to an unassailable authority who, presuming to speak in my name, was perverting the gospel and defaming us before history...
...So does a living man, confronted with the utter contingency of his existence, the givenness of joy and tragedy, the rigid limitations of his finitude and the infinity of the task...
...I liked their paper...
...loner, the line-crosser, the nay-sayer, the etc., etc...
...you admitted to trashing the records of Dow Chemical in Washington, in 1969...
...We hope you will continue to pitch your tent here at 98 Street, to share our work, our songs, our booze, our prayer, our precarious life together, whose image is that old scow launched by the Lord's word, in tricky seas, bound for all the world, uncomfortable, mutinous, crazily unsinkable...
...many were in fact quite value-free...
...Until this 18 October 1974:62 bishop refuses the designation "military," and drops his investment in killing, I will hesitate in this gesture...
...with Jesuit superiors...
...Priests do these things, those of them who still have a shred of faith and a shred of community to breathe with...
...But then, peace, peace in the end...
...They had gotten beyond paperpushing and book-worming...
...virtue as a cover...
...And it was through you and others like you, that Woodstock in New York, became, at least to a degree, a center of resistance to genocide...
...but in any case--In your case, there is something quite special...
...Ninety percent of its ambience is indeed a dead ground...
...It used to be called playing God, a bad business...
...there are common adversaries, the 'dads,' the brahmins, superiors, professors...
...you too should wash one another's feet...
...Immediately the process of dismissal started, the shutters went up at headquarters...
...18 October 1974:64 I bring up this ancient history, not in a mood of wound-licking, but because we must again resist these old creaky methods of human suppression...
...too fast, some said...
...And if such appeared, or if the pro-abortion people tried to make hay of the occasion, the ceremony was off...
...one is asked to apply oils, words, water, in a mortuary...
...It was, in sober estimate, a tempest in a baptismal font...
...And to those who love him...
...I was ordered to leave the U.S...
Vol. 101 • October 1974 • No. 3
