Religion: A Marriage of True Minds

In the earlier days of his imprisonment for destroying draft records, the Rev. Philip Berrigan had strong views on the value of the Roman Catholic discipline of priestly celibacy. Married resisters, he noted, were not fully free to fight: they had to temper zeal with prudence and think of their families as well as their mission. Few of his fellow revolutionaries agreed with him more than Sister Elizabeth McAlister, an intense and idealistic admirer, who was convicted at Harrisburg last year, along with Berrigan, of smuggling letters into and out of a federal prison.

But this week Philip Berrigan and Elizabeth McAlister were to be married.

The details of the planned wedding—a quiet family ceremony in the vicinity of New York City—were kept a closely guarded secret. No one could confirm whether, in order to marry, either or both had sought release from their religious communities—hers the Religious of the Sacred Heart of Mary, his the Society of St. Joseph.

Yet the notion of wedding should come as no great shock. The campaign against the Viet Nam War is now all but over. Berrigan himself, writing in 1972, was beginning to argue that celibacy can be "an excuse to flee from the complexities of human love." Besides, the two peace rebels had grown closer together during months of shared adversity.

They openly telegraphed their mutual affection to the world during the trial at Harrisburg, sitting hand in hand at the defense table in the courtroom.

In the smuggled letters revealed by the Government, Berrigan was almost embarrassingly lavish in his praise for Liz. "Your visit leaves me speechless, at least on paper though not in heart," he wrote. "You were so clear in your own mind, and confident. I knew implicitly that you were a vast help to the others—sense of history, human philosophy and tactics, courage, discipline..."

For her part, Elizabeth once admitted to an interviewer: "We grew to love one another very much—without being aware of it for a long time. But we both believe deeply in the religious commitments we had made. The choices, if they are choices, are yet to be made."

At 50, Philip Berrigan is a dashing, ruggedly handsome man whose huge ebullience rarely fails to infect those he meets. Elizabeth McAlister—one of twin daughters among the nine children of an immigrant Irish contractor—became a nun in 1959 while she was still in college, but went on studying to get a master's degree in art history. At 33 she is a bit more subdued than in her breathless revolutionary days before the Harrisburg trial. A few years ago, when her community shifted from long religious habit to optional civilian clothes, both Phil Berrigan and her sister nuns used to kid the mildly miniskirted Liz about having "the world's most wonderful legs." These days Liz's legs are often hidden behind a lectern: she is a tireless speaker on, among other topics, the question of amnesty for draft resisters.