America Magazine Exposes "Leftist Catholic" Bomb Plot

Barrigan brothers plotted criminal activity together, Phil planned bombing of US Customs Building! So much for the Catholic peace movement's hero's.

Debating "The Camden 28" II
Activist nuns, punk rock and the demise of the Catholic Left
By James T. Fisher and Edward Murphy SEPTEMBER 17, 2007

Read part 1 of this discussion.
Dear Ned,
Your reflections confirm my view that no one old enough to remember the events and issues treated in The Camden 28 should watch it alone! Dialogue is surely the best way to treat the powerful emotional and spiritual responses provoked by the film. Perhaps we need to recruit much younger viewers to watch the film with us. I suspect their reaction would be generally more dispassionate than of those of us formed in any fashion by the culture and politics of the 1960s.
The historian in me will note that the tactics of the “action community” emerged very quickly after figures from the nascent Catholic Left concluded that no ordinary response to the Vietnam War could succeed. The most startling passage in Disarmed and Dangerous--the 1997 Murray Polner/Jim O’Grady biography of Dan and Phil Berrigan--reveals that as late as autumn 1967, Phil Berrigan and his associates seriously contemplated blowing up the U.S. Customs House in Baltimore! (When an attorney sympathetic to the cause heard of this plan at a meeting, the “shaken lawyer” bolted from the room in horror). The more creative non-violent methods widely associated with the Catholic Left (as practiced by the Camden 28) thus developed very quickly amid the crisis: just as you eloquently testify in the film, the idea was to stop the war first and foremost. As to issue of alleged naïveté of the Catholic Left, Disarmed and Dangerous includes not only a lengthy treatment of FBI informant Boyd Douglas, but a photograph of Douglas wearing shades and flashing the peace symbol. This was the kind of visual imagery that made many of us younger Catholics (younger then; I was born in 1956) cynical about “the movement.”
That story is where history and the personal intersect. Just prior to the period depicted in film, I was an altar boy in training along with a kid named Eddie “the Swamp Rat” McNeil, who was quickly sent packing (as I deserved to be), but then re-emerged in mid-70s as “Legs” McNeil, the leading spokesperson (and now leading historian) of the punk rock scene that transformed much of American youth culture. I can still recall Eddie (and others, including me) poking fun at the semi-activist nuns that struggled to teach us in 6th grade at St. Bridget’s School in Cheshire, Connecticut. Eddie came from a working-class Irish American background whose disdain for the “peace movement” represented a blend of the same antagonisms that caused many “non-punk” and older U.S. Catholics to recoil against the Catholic Left and especially the action community.
Of course there were two separate generational dynamics at work here: the WWII “immigrant church” generation of the “Church/America Triumphant,” as you so aptly put it, and a fairly surly second-wave baby boomer cohort tired of hearing about how “cool” the slightly older anti-war activists were. I am now convinced we found it especially galling to be so told by nuns. (In fairness it was awfully confusing time: in one small school we had old-time authoritarian slugger-nuns, peacenik nuns and nuns that disappeared into the night).
If the legacy of 1960s America is emotion-fraught for survivors, generally it is even more so for Catholics. The intense repercussions of the church’s fractious transformation during that era--in the context of wider but not unrelated social and political trauma--is a subject almost impossible to treat head-on, or so it seems from evidence in books and documentaries including The Camden 28. However the film does succeed very well in freezing a moment in time, and inviting viewers to inquire and speculate. (Much as I appreciated the reunion scene, I wanted to know much more about the lives of participants in the intervening years.)
We also need to look further back than the 1960s and 70s. Having finally completed a book on the New York Jesuit labor priests of the 1930s-1950s (especially Fathers Phil Carey and “Pete” Corridan, who you must have known during their later years), I concur with the screenwriter Budd Schulberg of On the Waterfront fame who always insisted these Jesuits were the “first liberation theologians.” (Budd might’ve meant second, after Jesus). In light on this tradition, we may better come to understand that the witness of the Camden 28 need not be dismissed as a “period piece,” but a vital element in an enduring tradition that today links the work you do in the Bronx with that of my (younger) contemporary Anna Brown in Jersey City and with the vast cohort of students in Jesuit and other Catholic colleges doing service and justice work. I’d only suggest we open up the tradition further, to better engage the experience and struggle of persons with cognitive differences/disabilities (a personal plug from an autism dad but a good example of an apostolate still in infancy).
Thanks again, Ned for your own work in “opening up” this great tradition in dialogue and service.
Best wishes, Jim

Original Post (here)