By Rita McInerney

Daniel Berrigan, the durable Jesuit whose gentle, unassuming appearance masks a fierce opposition to all forms of violence, brought his message to Atlanta July 18.

His appearance was sponsored by the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception and concluded a daylong program, Voices For a Just and Peaceful Future. Sessions were held at the Shrine's neighbor and ally in social outreach, Central Presbyterian Church in downtown Atlanta.

About 90 people attended the talks by local leaders involved in organizations advocating justice and non-violence. Their number was augmented for Father Berrigan's keynote talk.

The prolific writer, poet and pacifist was impartial in his quiet denunciation of candidates for the White House, Operation Desert Storm, bishops and the just war theory.

Now 71, the priest whose long and steadfast opposition to nuclear weapons and the Vietnam war led to repeated arrests, lengthy trials and convictions, was arrested at an abortion clinic protest in Rochester, N.Y. last November. He participated with a local group, Common Ground, and was given 40 hours of community service which he was permitted to serve in New York City.

Berrigan preceded his talk by relating the efforts of a friend, a venerable Vietnamese monk in exile here. This monk long had dreamed of bringing together in a retreat setting 100 Americans and Vietnamese veterans. He was finally able to do this about a year ago but things didn't go well. "These men were still unable to weep," Berrigan told his audience.

Finally it was suggested, on the fifth day, that the men build a bonfire by the lake, stand together and throw in some of the symbols of their enslavement to the past, dog tags, dollar bills, mementos of their war. When they did this, "they began to weep," and the reconciliation the monk hoped for began to happen.

He called war, abortion and capital punishment "interchangeable horrors."

"War aborts the future of children in Iraq, Panama, Grenada, Vietnam." It is capital punishment on "a vast scale."

"Who would put a child on death row -- convicted of the crime of being born -- then gas a child, shoot a child, bomb a child? Who would do this? The answer, we would, we did..."

In his talk, Berrigan was critical of both the Democratic presidential ticket of Bill Clinton and Al Gore and President Bush.

"Watch those smooth faced Democratic adolescents," he warned. "Look to their credentials. Clinton went home to Arkansas to incinerate a retarded prisoner ... And Gore? He abandoned the Democrats to endorse Bush's Gulf slaughter. Watch out for the Bobbsey twins. They're lethal."

(According to the Catholic newspaper in Little Rock, Rickey Ray, a black man with brain damage, was executed in Arkansas, where Clinton is governor, about two months ago.)

He spoke of Vaclav Havel, recently resigned as president of Czechoslovakia, who visited this country and spoke to a joint session of Congress not long after a quiet revolution restored freedom to his nation. The Czech playwright-statesman spoke to the legislators of the great threats still confronting humanity: greed, militarism, and environmental destruction.

Berrigan quoted Havel addressing the Congress thus:

"Without a global revolution in human consciousness, nothing will change for the better in the sphere of our being ... We are still incapable of understanding that the only genuine backbone of all our actions, if they are to be moral, is responsibility ... to something larger than my family, my country, my company, my success."

Such "spiritual acuity" brought the lawmakers to their feet in a standing ovation for Havel, the Jesuit said. Then "less than a year later the same Congress embraced, endorsed and dramatized the very horrors Havel had indicted; militarism, greed, environmental destruction. The Congress approved a war in the Gulf that destroyed and continues to destroy, children, environment, public structures."

Such wartime loss of moral equilibrium and clarity affects Christians as well as authorities and the citizenry, Berrigan claimed. There has been a "domestic desert storm of yellow ribbons, flags, pealing of church bells and recently the bishops' applause for our leader's 'performance' during a war."

For Christians, there is another bond, he believes. "Citizenship in this or that nation can never exhaust the meaning of our vocation, never preempt the claim of Christ, never lord it over our conscience. Beyond the beat of every war drum, every national law, every ideology and frenzy, even beyond our crimes and betrayals, we are bound over to the Prince of Peace."

He asked his audience to consider the "just war theory." It's subterfuge, an evasion of the plain teaching of the Gospel, he said. It offers a painless way for Christians in wartime to shun the "thankless long haul of resistance," which requires patience, sacrifice, courage and readiness to be persecuted. It is the "quick fix."

If we believe as Christ taught, there can be no just war because love transforms enemies. It follows, Berrigan argues, that "Christians may not kill, may not hurl napalm at children ... May not launch the smart bomb against women and children in the shelter."

"Are women and children the enemy? No same person would declare so. Are the soldiers the enemy? The just war theory says so. But Christ denies it," Berrigan declared.

Even the Jesuits, "no coven of radicals," Berrigan said, have urged an "ethical housecleaning" of the just war theory in their Rome publication, Civilta Cattolica. The editorial said, "To declare that war is the last resort, is often to attempt to justify the very desire to declare war."

After his talk, the steady-voiced Jesuit took a variety of questions. Someone asked who he saw as today's prophets in the likeness of Thomas Merton and Dorothy Day, two friends and fellow workers for peace and justice.

There is, Berrigan replied, an "endless list of people keeping at it. My list is endless. They are helping me help them" and "whether the name is unknown or known is relatively unimportant."

He then spoke of his own ministry.

Seven years ago, he began to "get an inkling that AIDS was going to be epidemic" and signed up with a support group working out of St. Vincent's Hospital in Greenwich Village. In the beginning, it was just a case of meeting the patients in the emergency room and not getting to know their real needs. He said he went away to Kentucky and "did a lot of praying" before returning to work more closely with two or three patients with special needs. He stays with them "as long as they live," and when they die often celebrates their funeral Masses and helps their survivors come to terms with the disease and their death.

Before starting his work with AIDS patients, Father Berrigan worked for five years at St. Rose's Home in New York City. Here he assisted his friends, the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne (the congregation at Our Lady of Perpetual Help Home in Atlanta) minister to "people that no one wants, street people, addicts, people dumped from hospitals, people at the bottom"

A young teacher stood up to say she was "somewhat disturbed to read a question and answer interview with Father Berrigan in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in which he said he never voted.

After a sheepish look and the comment, "This question makes me wish I'd stayed home," he went on to say that he believed he had been "voting in other ways. I have voted by being in courts and jails for many years now ... The point is to be humanly responsible ... there are as many things to do as there are humans" to do them.

Consuelo Beck-Sagué, coordinator of the program and the person responsible for Berrigan's agreeing to come to Atlanta, asked him to say a few words on non-violent resistance to abortion. In reply, the activist priest said he sees this as an "intemperate time" with people on both sides unable to be "human to each other," and Operation Rescue "just not appealing to good people."

"We must find other ways of honoring the unborn," he said instead of the "lethal mix we've gotten ourselves into. It's now - or will shortly be - a dead end."

It's time now, he continued, "to pray together, to dehydrate this hateful corner we've gotten into." He suggested a weekend of prayer and discussion, not necessarily about abortion, but a time "to get some kind of human basis going."

In her introduction to Berrigan, Consuelo Beck-Sagué said the program was the result of a seven-year effort to hold a "consistent ethic of life meeting in Atlanta."

Topics examined during the day included non-violent pro-life advocacy and alternatives to abortion, Christian communities, death penalty abolition, a non-violent guide for demonstrators, a video and discussion on the just war theory, non-violent ministry and peacemaking in the post-Cold-War era.

Lunch prepared by Bradley DeCell was served by parishioners in the Shrine basement after the homeless and poor were fed.