Roman Catholics: A Question of Freedom

• Share

The Roman Catholic clergy has certain military parallels. A priest, having taken the vow of obedience, can be moved from place to place at his superior's will. For many, such shifting around means only a creative variety of duty. But for others, just as for some soldiers, transfer implies punishment, or at least temporary removal of an inconvenience. Giving no reasons, bishops or religious superiors can move a priest or fire a professor who has done nothing more than exercise what others would call his constitutional right of free speech.

That is what has happened to the Rev. Daniel Berrigan, a Jesuit priest, who helped organize an interdenominational protest committee called "Clergy Concerned about Viet Nam." Last month Berrigan's superiors ordered him to quit the committee and sent him off on a ten-week tour of Latin America. The Jesuits insist that the assignment was "routine." Berrigan's friends believe that his exile was forced upon the Jesuits by the Most Rev. John Maguire, who was acting head of the New York Archdiocese while Francis Cardinal Spellman was in Rome for the Vatican Council. Archdiocesan officials say that they were "not involved with the reassignment." Berrigan, now staying in Cuernavaca, Mexico, says that he is delighted with the chance to visit Latin America, but that his trip "was arranged mainly to remove me from the movement of protest against the war in Viet Nam."

Preaching & Picketing. Berrigan, who was born in Two Harbors, Minn., and raised in Syracuse, has a considerable reputation as a skillful lyric poet. He taught English and Latin at Brooklyn Prep and theology at the Jesuits' Le Moyne College in Syracuse, where one of his students in 1963 was David Miller, the arrested draft-card burner. Since 1964 he has been an associate editor of Jesuit Missions magazine, a pleasant job that gives him plenty of time to travel and write.

Within the society, Berrigan has always been considered something of a radical. He has preached and picketed on behalf of civil rights. Earlier this year his Jesuit superiors reprimanded him for reciting more of the Mass in English than the council's liturgical reforms currently permit. A pacifist, he is a sponsor of the Catholic Peace Fellowship. Last October he joined Rabbi Abraham J. Heschel, the leading theologian of Conservative Judaism, and Lutheran Pastor Richard John Neuhaus of Brooklyn, as a co-chairman of Clergy Concerned, whose aim is to question the morality of U.S. action in the Viet Nam war. He is not alone in suffering curbs from the head of the Jesuits' New York Province. Two other members of the society—Fathers Francis Keating and Daniel Kilfoyle of St. Peter's College in Jersey City—were told to quit Clergy Concerned. Josephite Father Philip Berrigan, Daniel's younger brother, was shifted from the faculty of his society's seminary in Newburgh, N.Y., to a largely Negro parish in Baltimore for speaking out against the war.