Rev. Daniel Berrigan (1921–2016,) fully Daniel Joseph Berrigan, was an American Jesuit priest, poet, essayist, and antiwar activist. He is celebrated for writings such as Time Without Number (1957) that reflect his deep commitment to social, political, and economic change in American society.
Born in Virginia, Minnesota, Berrigan earned a bachelor’s degree from a Jesuit novitiate in Hyde Park, New York, and a master’s degree from Woodstock (Maryland) College. He got ordained a priest in 1952, served in various ministries, and taught or lectured at a series of colleges, including Cornell and Yale universities.
Berrigan was influential in forming U.S. opposition to the Vietnam War: in 1968, Berrigan and his brother Philip (also a priest) led other activists in seizing hundreds of local draft records in Catonsville, Maryland, and setting them on fire with homemade napalm. Berrigan was imprisoned. His activism and subsequent arrests continued in his later years.
Berrigan’s works include the one-act play The Trial of the Catonsville Nine (1970; which dramatized his federal trial,) Prison Poems (1973,) Tulips in the Prison Yard (1992,) and We Die Before We Live: Talking with the Very Ill (1980.) His autobiography is To Dwell in Peace (1987.)
Berrigan works on biblical figures and the Bible includes Isaiah: Spirit of Courage, Gift of Tears (1996,) Ezekiel: Vision in the Dust (1997,) Jeremiah: The World, the Wound of God (1999,) Wisdom: The Feminine Face of God (2001,) and A Sunday in Hell: Fables & Poems (2006.)
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Sometime in your life, hope that you might see one starved man, the look on his face when the bread finally arrives. Hope that you might have baked it or bought or even kneaded it yourself. For that look on his face, for your meeting his eyes across a piece of bread, you might be willing to lose a lot, or suffer a lot, or die a little, even.
—Daniel Berrigan
Topics: Helping
The gift we can offer others is so simple a thing as hope.
—Daniel Berrigan
Topics: Hope
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