Death of the Liberal Class - Chris Hedges [90]
“I could not talk or write about him for ten years,” he said. “He was with me when I was shipped out of the country, and he was with me in jail. He was with his friend.”
The distractions of the world are for Berrigan just that: distractions. The presidential election campaign between Barack Obama and John McCain, under way when we spoke, did not preoccupy him, and when I asked him about it, he quoted his brother, Philip, who said that “if voting made any difference it would be illegal.” He was critical of the Catholic Church, saying that Pope John Paul II, who marginalized and silenced radical nuns and priests like the Berrigans, “introduced Soviet methods into the Catholic Church,” including “anonymous delations, removals, scrutiny, and secrecy, and the placing of company men into positions of great power.” He estimated that “it is going to take at least a generation to undo appointments of John Paul II.”
Berrigan despaired of universities, especially Boston College’s decision to give an honorary degree to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and to invite then-attorney general Michael Mukasey to address the law school. “It is a portrayal of shabby lives as exemplary and to be honored,” he said. And he has little time for secular radicals or the liberal class who stood with him forty years ago but who have now “disappeared into the matrix of money and regular jobs or gave up on their initial discipline.”
“The short fuse of the American left is typical of the highs and lows of American emotional life,” he said. “It is very rare to sustain a movement in recognizable form without a spiritual basis of some kind.”
While all empires rise and fall, Berrigan said, it is the religious and moral values, and the nonhistorical values, of compassion, simplicity, love, and justice that endure and alone demand fealty. The current decline of American power is part of the cycle of human civilizations, although, he said ruefully, “the tragedy across the globe is that we are pulling down so many others. We are not falling gracefully. Many, many people are paying with their lives for this.”
Berrigan argued that those who seek a just society, who seek to defy war and violence, who decry the assault of globalization and degradation of the environment, who care about the plight of the poor, should stop worrying about the practical, short-term effects of their resistance.
Berrigan is sustained, he said, by the Eucharist, his faith, and his religious community. No resistance movement can survive without a vigorous, disciplined spiritual core:The reason we are celebrating forty years of Catonsville and we are still at it, those of us who are still living—the reason people went through all this and came out on their feet—was due to a spiritual discipline that went on for months before these actions took place. We went into situations in court and in prison and in the underground that could easily have destroyed us and that did destroy others who did not have our preparation.
The decline of the Catholic Church, traditional Protestant denominations, and liberal Jewish synagogues, institutions that once had a place for radicals from Martin Luther King Jr. to Abraham Heschel to Dorothy Day to the Berrigans, was a body blow to the liberal class. These religious institutions, which purged radicals as ruthlessly as their secular counterparts, became as useless as the other pillars of the liberal establishment.
“The Unitarians represented the far fringe of the Social Gospel movement, and make it easy to see its fundamental flaw,” the Rev. Davidson Loehr, a Unitarian-Universalist minister in Austin, Texas, told me:In the late 1970s, Unitarians started saying that the trouble was that their children didn’t know what to tell their friends they believed. When I heard it in grad school at