The Burglary Read Online Free PDF Page A

forms of nonviolent resistance. He first met people in the Catholic peace movement a few months after some of its members, including Daniel Berrigan, were convicted for the resistance act for which the Catholic movement is probably best known—the public raid in May 1968 of the draft board in Catonsville, Maryland.Nine of them—including Daniel Berrigan and his brother Philip—burned draft files with homemade napalm in the draft board parking lot while they waited for police to arrive and arrest them. Because Davidon had recently been impressed by the writings of the Berrigan brothers, he said yes when a woman who was part of the Catholic peace movement invited him to havedinner with about a dozen members of the movement. He had been especially impressed by the play Daniel Berrigan wrote,
The Trial of the Catonsville Nine
. It drew directly from the transcript of the group’s 1969 trial, including this statement made by him to journalists as the nine watched the records burn and waited for the police to arrive:
    â€œOur apologies, good friends, for the fracture of good order, the burning of paper instead of children, the angering of the orderlies in the front parlor of the charnel house. We could not, so help us God, do otherwise.”
    Davidon found the resistance ideas and methods of the Catonsville Nine compelling. Berrigan’s poetic writing and the stark trial testimony resonated deeply with Davidon’s values. Years later, he recalls that the play made him “take seriously these kinds of things as a possibility” for himself. “I don’t think I would have even considered such steps had it not been for Dan Berrigan.”
    Davidon shared Berrigan’s deep concern for the people in the peace movement who had despaired and turned to violent protest. Berrigan spoke of his respect for them and also of his concern about their violence in a letter he wrote to people in the Weather Underground and released for publication while he himself was underground as he briefly avoided beginning his sentence for his Catonsville conviction.He sent the letter a couple months after the March 1970 explosion at the Greenwich house where three members of the Weather Underground were killed when a bomb they were building accidentally exploded. He was critical of violence in both government and the peace movement.
    â€œDear Brothers and Sisters, Let me express deep gratitude that the chance has come to speak to you across the underground, …” he wrote. There was a need, he continued, for “a new kind of anger which is both useful in communicating and imaginative and slow-burning, to fuel the long haul of our lives”:
    I hope your lives are about something more than sabotage. I’m certain it is.…I hope, indeed, that you are as uneasy about its meaning and usefulness.…
    How shall we speak … to the people? We must never refuse, in spite of their refusal of us, to call them our brothers. I must say to you as simply as I know how: if the people are not the main issue, there simply is no main issue and you and I are fooling ourselves.…
    No principle is worth the sacrifice of a single human being. That’s avery hard statement. At various stages of the movement some have acted as if almost the opposite were true, as people got purer and purer.…
    When madness is the acceptable public state of mind, we’re all in danger, all in danger; for madness is an infection in the air. And I submit that we all breathe the infection and that the movement has at times been sickened by it too.…In or out of the military, in or out of the movement, it seems to me that we had best call things by their name, and the name of this thing, it seems to me, is the death game, no matter where it appears. And as for myself, I would as soon be under the heel of former masters as under the heel of new ones.…
    The question now is: what can we create? I feel at your