Although I met him only once, Fr Dan Berrigan SJ was a significant figure in my boyhood and early Jesuit years.
A New Yorker active in protest movements over his life time, Berrigan anticipated, in a more Augustinian form, the movement across boundaries to vulnerable people we now associate with Pope Francis.
Berrigan wrote beautifully and was at once attractive and challenging in his way of life. As a schoolboy I had followed with dismay the siege and surrender of the French troops at Dien Bien Phu. I saw it as a defeat for Christendom, a view confirmed by the exodus of Vietnamese Catholics from the north of the country.
The Russian invasion of Hungary followed two years later. So it was natural to see this as the falling of dominoes, to fear for the future of South Vietnam and to welcome the US and Australian intervention there. We were the good guys, deserving the support of our citizens and the Catholic Church.
My first hint at the ethical corruption that war brings to all touched by it came with the US sanctioned assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem and its aftermath.
It was then that I first heard of the young US Jesuit priest and poet who had been jailed for protesting against the US involvement in Vietnam. My colleague, Peter Steele, had written to him in prison and received a warm reply. Berrigan had made it his business to expose the ethical corruption that afflicts societies that wage war and the human cost to the people whom war supposedly helps.
In a United States that saw itself having a providential mission to right wrongs, and believed that the end of making peace justifies all means, the symbolic actions taken by Berrigan and others, such as illegally entering military facilities, pouring blood on draft cards and assaulting nuclear weapons by tapping them on the nose with a little hammer, were bitterly divisive.
They were also followed by criminal charges and jail sentences. Berrigan and others who went to North Vietnam were seen by many as traitors.
"I found a way of addressing the question Berrigan posed through my association with the victims of the Indochinese war and its aftermath in refugee camps and Australia."
By many United States Jesuits including military chaplains, Berrigan was seen as a divisive figure. I also found his actions challenging. I was still to move from my concentration on the goals of military action to focus on