Fighting the Lamb's War: Skirmishes with the American Empire [Paperback]

Fred A Wilcox (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 1, 2002 | ISBN-10: 1567511007 | ISBN-13: 978-1567511000

"A Christian who truly walks the radical way of the cross. Phil Berrigan overturns the tables of injustice and summons us to love our enemies and worship the God of peace. Like Thoreau, Ghandi, King, and Dorothy Day, Phil Berrigan exemplifies courage. He is both an inspiration and a challenge to me and countless others. Here is a true hero of our turbulent times.

-Martin Sheen

"Few nations in history have had a prophet of Phil Berrigan's stature. With iron intransigency he has stood in the breach leading to nuclear omnicide. The state has tried to quash his witness time after time: arrests, lockups, long sentences, all the paraphenalia of intimidation. Why doesn't it work? What enables this jack-in-thebox prophet to pop up, again and again? Find out. Read this book."

-Walter Wink, author, Engaging the Powers

"How important it is for our children to know this history of courage, risk, and commitment that they won't find in history books."

-Grace Paley

"I have been waiting for Phil Berrigan's autobiography and it is a pleasure to read. His words have the direct, simple eloquence of his actions. He provokes and inspires, and dares to be critical of himself even as he recounts a life committed to peace, justice and community."

-Howard Zinn

"One of the best books I have ever read. I loved its honest probing of the thoughts, feelings and actions of an unusually sensitive, occasionally wrong-headed, but clearly not self-righteous pioneer in the struggle for a better world. Its acute analyses of of the periods in which Phil have lived, from before World War II to the present, are invaluable contributions to real history."

-David Dellinger, author, From Yale to Jail

"It is difficult to be dispassionate about the Berrigans. No one who knows them can doubt that they are heroic individuals, willing to do what many realize should be done, regardless of the personal cost...There are not too many people of whom this can honestly be said."

-Noam Chomsky

--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In his own voice, still clear and strong, Philip Berrigan has written the story of how he and his brother became the two most infamous Catholic radicals of the Vietnam era and chronicles his ongoing resistance to war and injustice through the Ploughshares movement. Berrigan begins with moving descriptions of his family life. His mother, caught in a troubled and tumultuous marriage, was a constant source of love and a living example of kindness and commitment. His father, an unstable Irishman, socialist, labor organizer, and unsuccessful bard, was prone to settling disagreements with fisticuffs; readers do not wonder long where the Berrigan brothers' blend of righteous fierceness and principled courage comes from. The detailed stories of their paths toward the priesthood, their burning of draft cards at Catonsville, their underground cat-and-mouse games with Hoover's FBI, and their courtroom and prison-yard challenges are recounted in crisp language with little sentimentality.

Review

Whatever reservations one may have about the Berrigans' style of dissent, one must admire their dogged persistence and fierce devotion to principle. Now 73, Phil not so long ago completed 10 months in a federal prison for raining hammer blows and pouring blood on an F-15 fighter bomber. . . . -- The New York Times Book Review, J. Anthony Lukas

Product Details

• Paperback: 232 pages
• Publisher: Common Courage Press (July 1, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1567511007
• ISBN-13: 978-1567511000
• Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 5.1 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,386,661 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Living the Passion of Christ, April 4, 2004

By 

Alan Mills (Chicago, Illinois USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Fighting the Lamb's War: Skirmishes with the American Empire (Paperback)

The perfect antidote to Mel Gibson's version of Christian values. Phil Berrigan was a typical product of the depression--family of dirt poor immigrants, went into the army to fight Hitler and do his patriotic duty--but then came home and entered the seminary. His first posting was to inner City Washington DC, where he encountered racism and poverty up close. Rather than just put in his time, and then turn his back, serving out his priesthood in a comfortable middle class white community and give an occasional sermon about poverty, Berrigan engaged the poor children he was working with as brothers in Christ, and asked why.

His quest for answers continued as he was posted in the deep south (Louisiana) in the late 50's, early 60's...Emmett Till through the Freedom Rides. He concluded that racism was a violation of Christ's principle that all men are brothers--and said so.

Forced out of the deep south, he relocated to Baltimore--still a racially divided city, where Blacks were in poverty. As the Vietnam War escalated, Berrigan saw that the racism and poverty he experienced daily were inextricably linked to this country's increasing military industrial complex, and its position of world domination/exploitation.

As a Christian, Berrigan felt he had no choice but to resist this injustice, demand that the world put aside militarism, and treat all of mankind as brothers in Christ. He joined civil rights movements, and the anti-war movement--always maintaining that non-violent resistance was not only the right tactic, but was the only course open to a practicing Christian in America.

He poured blood on draft files, burned them with napalm, and spent six years in high security prisons as a result. While imprisoned, the FBI charged him (along with his brother, Daniel Berrigan and his by then wife, Elizabeth McAllister) with plotting to bomb the White House and kidnap Kissinger himself.

Berrigan freely admitted to discussions about making a citizens arrest of Kissinger for war crimes, but denied all other charges. He was ultimately acquitted of all charges.

For the rest of his life, Phillip Berrigan resisted the military. A founder of the Catholic Ploughshares movement, he consistently sought to beat swords (nuclear weapons) into ploughshares. As he explains at length, he did not expect his actions to cowl the US government into abandoning its nuclear program. Rather, he was acting on his conscience.

Reading his autobiography makes one ashamed of all of the excuses we each make on a daily basis of why we can't act better--too busy, might affect my job, I have kids, and on and on. Berrigan let none of this stop him. He married, raised three kids, and spent most of his adult life in prison, on bail awaiting trial, or on parole.

His courage is magnificent. His dedication to living a life of conscience is inspirational. But above all, Berrigan's version of Christ and Christian duty is one of universal love and respect. If these principles were lived by everyone, we would live in a far better world than that of Mel Gibson and his glorification of pain and violent sacrifice.

Berrigan lived the life (as he put it) of a Catholic attempting to become a Christian. Whatever one's beliefs, Berrigan's was a life worth understanding.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars THE GREATEST MODEL FOR AMERICAN CATHOLICS (BY DEFINITION A DIVIDED PERSON SERVING TWO MASTERS OR NOT, LIKE PHIL), October 31, 2007

By 

C. Scanlon "least helpful reviewer" (among us humans) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Fighting the Lamb's War: Skirmishes with the American Empire (Paperback)

What more can be added to the excellent reviews already posted here but to say that Philip Berrigan stands ever, though now posthumously, as the most courageous of Catholics in America, with his Jesuit brother Daniel, and provides us the way to live ever and fully Catholic in our anglo America.

Father Philip earned his sainthood through courageous and direct action for peace and justice, suffering for his Catholic faith within the dank cells of federal prisons. Not for him the country club prisons of the wealthy GOP and Enron offenders, etc., for which much of the present administration seems bound and determined. Father Philip suffered the same fate as our poor who dare to defy the Empire and cry prophetically for peace and economic justice, for social justice, for equal opportunity, for our Faith.

Read this book to learn where Phil came from, in his own words, the strength of his courage and uncompromising Faith conviction. Read this book to discover how Phil lived our Faith to the fullest ("hasta las ultimas consecuencias" as we say untranslatably in Latin America). Read this book to discover the strong example of living the Catholic Faith which we leaves us all to follow, to live as true children of God, working for peace and justice as powerfully and bravely as Jesus of Nazareth at the market stalls dirtying the Temple gates.

Highly recommended for all Catholics, particularly for those of us grown lazy and materially comfortable and thus compromised by the secular powers and dominations from the full exercise of our Faith, a prophetic Faith which compells us to alter those structures which oppress us, as Our Holy Father Pope Benedict XVI clearly states repeatedly in the conclusion of his Apostolic Exhortation The Sacrament of Charity: Sacramentum Caritatis, where he writes the Eucharist compells us to action, where he writes we cannot remain on the sidelines in the face of such injustice and oppression, in a world, as His Holiness explicitly exhorts us, in which a tiny percentage of the resources wasted on war would feed our world's hungry and poor.

Read this book and learn to live with courage and truth our Faith to the fullest, in the footsteps of the prohpetic martyr of the Americas Archbishop Romero, in the path to peace and justice forged of Phil Berrigan.

10 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars UNNERVING, PROPHETIC NON DRAMATIC telling of a life, November 11, 2001

By 

A. Hogan (Brooklyn, NY USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Fighting the Lamb's War: Skirmishes with the American Empire (Paperback)

Philip Berrigan,who beacame {in}famous for being the first Catholic priest jailed ON PRINCIPLE{for his destroying of draft files in Baltimore in 1967},has penned a sort of autobiography. Philip Berrigan has always been a huge burr in the side of everyone in power:religious superiors,wardens, govenment officials{his encounter with Rober McNamara during the war is telling}et,al. He has courage that is beyond my comprehension,continually going forth to non violently protest the ongoing nuclear threat{often by hammering a submarine,or desnt the hollow nose cone od a missle, the pouring blood as a symbol over the objects] For these protest, he has served the majority of the past 30 years in tough penitentaries.What would make this talented handsome intelligent man do such things? The story that he tells, almost mundanely is captivating. Childhood on the Iron range in Minnesota,Stern Irish father and sweet,loving german mother,brood of brothers,athlete,decorated soldier in WWII[they didnt give medals out for laying in foxholes},the he joined the only Roman Catholic order dedicated to serving Black americans, the josephites.{S.S.J} His older brother Daniel,Jesuit priest and famous poet and peace activist,was his role model on this. Throughot the momoir, Phillip Berrigan recounts the good life and hrad times of the next 35 years of his life. His eventual leaving the priesthood, his marriage to Elizabeth McCallister{a former nun , which coused much idiotic tounge wagging back then},his three daughters, his life in Jonah House in Baltimore,Md.{a kind of catholic woker house}, and his dogged, relentless pursuit of the Gospel truth as he sees it. Whether or not one agrees with Berrigan{and in the current climate, thew number of sympathizers must have shruken dramatically}, his almost sisyphusian struggle is admirable. Time alone will decide whethere or not Philip Berrigan has been a prophet or not. What he is is a courageous,honorable man who is willing to put his life, NOT YOURS, on the line for his beliefs. Now that is quite extraordianry.Good book, well written{if almost purposely low-keyed},simply astonishing story.