Yesterday April 30 the controversial Jesuit priest Daniel Berrigan died at age 94 after 70 years of intense political activism, public debate, prison time, and the publication of countless books, poems and plays illustrating his unique brand of public theology.  He died on the anniversary of the 1975 fall of Saigon and South Vietnam to Hanoi’s invading Communist regime, a victory facilitated partly by the anti-war movement he helped lead.

Berrigan and his brother Philip splashed into global notoriety in 1968 by breaking into a federal draft office and burning draft cards to protest America’s “crimes” in the Vietnam War.  Not anxious for jail, the brothers were fugitives until their eventual incarceration.  The Berrigans made opposing USA involvement in Southeast Asia their chief cause until Indochina fell to communism, after which their interest in justice for the Indochinese seemed mostly to end.  In 1979, when fellow anti-war protester Joan Baez organized a public appeal by many of her anti-war allies to Hanoi to relent from its vicious subjugation of South Vietnam, Daniel Berrigan commendably joined.  His brother, like Jane Fonda, ultimately refused.

As the ad pointed out, Hanoi as “liberator” had murdered and tortured many thousands while incarcerating hundreds of thousands.  Baez, Berrigan et al were evidently surprised by this misbehavior by what they had assumed was a friend, but at least they tacitly admitted their error in judgment.  There were of course also eventually several million refugees from South Vietnam who were not appreciating their liberation into a Marxist-Leninist police state.  The horror in liberated Cambodia was even worse, where the new Communist regime killed almost 2 million in one of the last century’s great genocides.  Liberated Laos was also no bed of roses.

Despite signing Baez’s ad, Daniel Berrigan did not alter his political perspective.  For the duration of the Cold War he sided with pro-Soviet proxies against America and the West.  He is celebrated as an opponent of “empire,” but his activism was never particularly concerned about the Soviet Empire, or human rights abuses under totalitarian regimes, just primarily opposing and demonizing America.  He likened the U.S. nuclear deterrent to the Nazi Holocaust and was arrested for breaking into a missile plant.  After 9-11 Berrigan pronounced the USA “guilty, guilty, guilty” for provoking the al Qaeda attacks, a guilt he traced back decades to the Vietnam War. He was inextricably, zealously, ideologically and spiritually anti-American, unable to see any political or economic malfeasance not traceable to USA perfidy.  Similarly he was outspokenly anti-Israel, prompting Rabbi Arthur Hertzburg to deride him for “old-fashioned, theological anti-Semitism.”

In the 1960s Berrigan helped found one anti-war group with the eventual co-founder of my Institute on Religion and Democracy, Richard Neuhaus, who later moved from left to right over the anti-war movement’s reluctance to confront the human rights horrors of Indochina under Communism.  Although agreeing on little in later years, Neuhaus, who himself would become a Catholic priest, retained a grudging respect for Berrigan.  “He is a most remarkable person,” Neuhaus, who died in 2006, once said of his former ally, whom he called “a most devout person and a devoted priest. He is exemplary in different ways while also very much a restless spirit, which I suppose comes with being a poet, among other things.”

Berrigan was sacrificially faithful to his worldview until the end.  He also was committed to priestly good works, such as ministry to AIDS patients.  His politics, as he conceived them, emerged from his Christian faith and the search for earthly justice.  Berrigan’s long career of intense activism almost exclusively on the far left, largely ignoring threats to human dignity outside that perspective, illustrate the limits of Christian faith by itself as a guarantor of political wisdom.  Christians, even when sincerely devout, are often extravagantly mistaken and destructive politically.

Heaven will be full of such Christians who gave themselves to bad causes yet still leaned on the Everlasting Arms.  Hopefully Father Berrigan is now with his brother Philip, Richard Neuhaus, and many others, comparing notes, and spending the rest of eternity in permanent fellowship with each other and in gratitude for divine grace.