The Berrigan Legacy

It is with deep gratitude that I read the excellent article “When the FBI Feared the Catholic Left” (March). At age seventy-nine, I’m one of the current “Catholic Left” who met and was inspired by Philip, Daniel, and Liz. When my husband and I met Liz McAlister and Philip Berrigan in 1978, they were, as your article points out, still “relevant,” but the firestorm over their Hoover/Kissinger existential and Gospel-based resistance seemed to have faded.

Nevertheless, Liz and Phil traveled the country from their Jonah House residence in the toughest section of Baltimore, keeping alive the most important aspect of their legacy: building communities of resistance—after which our nonviolent community, the Agape Community in Hardwick, Massachusetts, is modeled. Once we met them both, my husband and I were “in.” This meeting led to a lifelong relationship that extends to this day with the Gospel-based communities and network of resisters that they inspired.

Today, Frida Berrigan, Liz and Phil’s second child, carries on their legacy with an extended network of East Coast Catholic Left activists. We have named ourselves the Atlantic Life Community. Out of this community has come the Plowshares movement, with a long history of arrests at nuclear weapons facilities, including the Kings Bay Plowshares in Georgia.

We are small in number, but strong in commitment, and the memories that you so compellingly captured are a significant part of our history. Young people do not leave our lay Catholic nonviolent community without hearing about and knowing the history of the “Catholic Left.” Several years ago, we planted a tree on our thirty-four acres of Nipmuc land in central Massachusetts, which Frida Berrigan came to dedicate. The Berrigan Tree, roots firmly planted, flourishes, its persistence a symbolic and physical reminder.

The tree was planted by a group of students from Iona University in New York who had never heard of the Berrigan-McAlisters, but who took from the planting a lesson on the followers of Jesus who, like a tree standing in the water, could not be moved. “They will be like a tree planted by the water that sends out its roots by the stream. It does not fear when heat comes; its leaves are always green. It has no worries in a year of droughts and never fails to bear fruit” (Jeremiah 7).

Your history lesson on this era, on the continued violence of the state and the enduring relevance of the Catholic Left, offers a glimpse of the ongoing radical, faith-based power of the Gospel, and the prophets who follow in the footsteps of the Nonviolent One.

Suzanne Belote Shanley
Hardwick, Mass.

Entering the Human City

In “God or Trump?,” (April) Thomas Geoghegan writes: “There is no longer any need for [Evangelical ministers], as they merely offer more secular political ideology.” Wait, what?

Describe prosperity Gospel preachers that way, but don’t lump all Evangelical ministers and their churches together. My (Catholic) university has a grant from the Lilly Endowment to teach contemplative practices in twenty-five Christian churches across many denominations, supporting their members as they engage their neighborhoods. The most engaged congregation of the bunch is Restoration Anglican Church, an Evangelical church that arose in south Minneapolis (two miles from where George Floyd was murdered) to try to be a presence in the city.

I don’t know their theology, but fifty members, including two pastors, gathering monthly to learn, among other practices, the Ignatian Examen (“How can I collaborate more fully with God’s work in the world?”) doesn’t sound like politics to me.

Geoghegan (and so many of us Catholic liberals) undermine our own best hopes when we write, think, and speak sloppily about others. Geoghegan is correct about the huge religious vacuum into which Donald Trump is stepping. But let’s acknowledge our own part in creating that vacuum. Jesuit philosopher William Lynch (1908–1987) put the problem clearly in his brilliant book Images of Hope: “The evidence is strong that whenever reality is or looks too difficult there is a tendency to fly into some gnostic and private version of reality, to build a new, interior world that can be managed.” And Lynch gives us our best strategy against the nation’s Idolater-in-Chief: We must “enter the human city…. Only the city of the human is safe.”

William McDonough
Professor of Theology
St. Catherine University, St. Paul, Minn.

Commoditized colleges

I couldn’t agree more with Anthony Annett that “Catholic social teaching guides us beyond neoliberalism” (“What Comes Next,” April). “The theology of social democracy” requires that citizens believe that the common good is central to a good society, and that we should endorse the common possession of the goods of the earth over a legitimate, but derivative, right to private property. How would such agreement become feasible in America where the theology of neoliberalism seems to have displaced the theology of St. Paul, notwithstanding the ubiquitous churches?

As a salient consequence of the neoliberal capitalism that has dominated American society for the past forty-plus years, almost everything society needs has been commoditized. Even university education (especially at business schools) has been commoditized; students have become “customers” and professors “education-service providers.” As a result, the word “happiness” also has assumed a hedonistic, or commodified, connotation in America.

One may suggest that education is the solution: educate citizens, especially young ones, to become human beings who claim freedom and autonomy and recognize responsibility for their thoughts, intentions, and actions. But a serious question arises: Is such education feasible in corporatized schools, especially universities, that seem to have become handmaidens of the neoliberal market while preaching lofty goals?

Yeomin Yoon
Professor Emeritus
Seton Hall University, South Orange, N.J.

Traction for Worker Cooperatives

Thank you for Anthony Annett’s perceptive summary of the failures of neoliberalism: “What Comes Next.” However, I would suggest his assessment of worker cooperatives in Spain and Italy, which he correctly calls “successful examples,” begs a more positive review than that they have “gained surprisingly little traction.”

There are many successful worker cooperatives in North America, many with origins in Catholic social teachings and teachers, but this dimension of both our economy and our faith is ignored in the woefully inadequate “religious education” offered by the Church. So, despite the clear failure of neoliberalism, the vast majority of our faithful are not informed of the economic liberation at the heart of the Good News. Although in 2015 Pope Francis approved moving Mondragon founder Padre José María Arizmendiarrieta forward in the canonization process, certainly few in the U.S. Church learn of such an innovative leader and his remarkable success among the young. “Traction” requires knowing.

Edward Lorenz
Alma, Mich.