Old Tom Berrigan was a good father, a good union man and a good Catholic who beat the tar out of his sons, Daniel and Philip, but he couldn’t beat the devil out of them. It has even been suggested that the beatings had an adverse effect. (“My father,” says Dan Berrigan, “was a tyrannical, brutal man who made me bristle against authority.”) They never forgot the mighty hand he laid on whenever they committed an infraction of the Berrigan house rules. This left its mark on the unruly sons, more so on Dan than on Phil, a sturdier lad, who was able to shuck off the boyish pains easier than his more sensitive and bookish brother.
When Dan grew up he would subscribe to Partisan Review, an intellectual journal of pseudorevolutionary pietism. Phil, less addicted to things of the mind, subscribed to I. F. Stone’s Weekly. I don’t know which were the more decisive influences—Papa Berrigan’s rigid upbringing or the loose ideas they picked up at random from the marginalia of New York and Washington radicalism. It has been suggested the war in Vietnam helped to radicalize them, as did the teachings of Monsignor Ivan Illich about whom we shall have more to say later. In any case, whatever the influences, they became what they are—the most dedicated of revolutionary clerics whose trials and tribulations have suddenly elevated them to the top of the heap in the radical counterculture of America, even above Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman. But—whereas one could laugh at the clowning of the aging Yippies (how sad to contemplate that they are both now crowding forty)—it is not so with the Berrigans—not at all.
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