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Peace activist Jesuit priest Daniel Berrigan dies at 94

2018-07-11T06:10:44Z

CharmainPennefat:

NEW YORK (AP) - His defiant protests helped shape Americans' opposition to the Vietnam War. And they landed The Rev. Daniel Berrigan behind bars. The Roman Catholic priest, writer and poet, who became a household name in the U.S. in the 1960s after being imprisoned for burning draft files in a protest against the war, died Saturday. He was 94. Berrigan died after a "long illness" at Murray-Weigel Hall, a Jesuit health care community in New York City according to Michael Benigno, a spokesman for the Jesuits USA Northeast Province. File-This Feb. 16, 1981, file photo shows Daniel Berrigan, ex-priest, now political activist on NBC-TV�s �Today� show in New York. The Roman Catholic priest and Vietnam war protester, Berrigan has died. He was 94. Michael Benigno, a spokesman for the Jesuits USA Northeast Province, says Berrigan died Saturday, April 30, 2016, at a Jesuit infirmary at Fordham [http://www.vtr.org.vn/cam-nang-du-lich-bac-kinh-5-ngay-4-dem.html du lịch Bắc Kinh] University. (AP Photo/Dave Pickoff, File) "He died peacefully," Benigno said. Berrigan and his younger brother, the Rev. Philip Berrigan, emerged as leaders of the radical anti-war movement in the 1960s. The Berrigan brothers entered a draft board in Catonsville, Maryland, on May 17, 1968, with seven other activists and removed records of young men about to be shipped off to Vietnam. The group took the files outside and burned them in garbage cans. The Catonsville Nine, as they came to be known, were convicted on federal charges accusing them of destroying U.S. property and interfering with the Selective Service Act of 1967. All were sentenced on Nov. 9, 1968 to prison terms ranging from two to 3.5 years. Berrigan wrote about the courtroom experience in 1970 in a one-act play, "The Trial of the Catonsville Nine," which was later made into a movie. When asked in 2009 by "America," a national Catholic magazine, whether he had any regrets, Berrigan replied: "I could have done sooner the things I did, like Catonsville." Berrigan grew up in Syracuse, New York, with his parents and five brothers. He joined the Jesuit order after high school and taught preparatory school in New Jersey before being ordained a priest in 1952. Berrigan began writing poetry as a seminarian. His work captured the attention of an editor at Macmillan who referred the material to poet Marianne Moore. Her endorsement led to the publication of Berrigan's first book of poetry, "Time Without Number," which won the Lamont Poetry Prize in 1957. Berrigan credited Dorothy Day, a social activist and founder of The Catholic Worker newspaper, with introducing him to the pacifist movement and influencing his thinking about war. Much later, while visiting Paris in 1963 on a teaching sabbatical from LeMoyne College, Berrigan met French [http://www.vtr.org.vn/cam-nang-du-lich-bac-kinh-5-ngay-4-dem.html vtr.org.vn] Jesuits who spoke of the dire situation in Indochina. Soon after that, he and his brother founded the Catholic Peace Fellowship, which helped organize protests against U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Berrigan traveled to North Vietnam in 1968 and returned with three American prisoners of war who were being released as a goodwill gesture. He said that while there, he witnessed some of the destruction and suffering caused by the war. While he was teaching at Cornell University, Berrigan's brother asked him to join a group of activists for the Catonsville demonstration. Philip Berrigan was at the time awaiting sentencing for a 1967 protest in Baltimore during which demonstrators poured blood on draft records. "I was blown away by the courage and effrontery, really, of my brother," Berrigan recalled in a 2006 [http://www.usatoday.com/search/interview/ interview] on the Democracy Now radio program. After the Catonsville case had been unsuccessfully appealed, the Berrigan brothers and three of their co-defendants went underground. Philip Berrigan turned himself in to authorities in April 1969 at a Manhattan church. Four months later, the FBI arrested Daniel Berrigan at the Rhode Island home of theologian William Stringfellow. Berrigan said in an interview that he became a fugitive to draw more attention to the anti-war movement. The Berrigan brothers were sent to the federal prison in Danbury, Connecticut. Daniel Berrigan was released in 1972 after serving about two years. His brother served about 2.5 years. Long after Catonsville, the Berrigan brothers continued to be active in the peace movement. Together, they began the Plowshares Movement, an anti-nuclear weapons campaign in 1980. Both were arrested that year after entering a General Electric nuclear missile facility in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, and damaging nuclear warhead nose cones. Philip Berrigan died of cancer on Dec. 6, 2002 at the age of 79. Daniel Berrigan moved into a Jesuit residence in Manhattan in 1975. In an interview with The Nation magazine on the 40th anniversary of the Catonsville demonstration, Berrigan lamented that the activism of the 1960s and early 1970s evaporated with the passage of time. "The short fuse of the American left is typical of the highs and lows of American emotional life," he said. "It is very rare to sustain a movement in recognizable form without a spiritual base." Berrigan's writings include "Prison Poems," published in 1973; "We Die Before We Live: Talking with the Very Ill," a 1980 book based on his experiences working in a cancer ward; and his autobiography, "To Dwell in Peace," published in 1987. File-This July 25, 1973, file photo shows Rev. Fr. [http://www.vtr.org.vn/cam-nang-du-lich-bac-kinh-5-ngay-4-dem.html du lịch Bắc Kinh 5 ngày 4 đêm] Daniel Berrigan and some friends participating in a fast and vigil to protest the bombing in Cambodia, on the steps of St. Patrick�s Cathedral in New York City. The Roman Catholic priest and Vietnam war protester, Berrigan has died. He was 94. Michael Benigno, a spokesman for the Jesuits USA Northeast Province, says Berrigan died Saturday, April 30, 2016, at a Jesuit infirmary at Fordham University. (AP Photo/Ron Frehm) File-This April 9, 1982, file photo shows Daniel Berrigan marching with about 40 others outside of the Riverside Research Center in New York. The Roman Catholic priest and Vietnam war protester, Berrigan has died. He was 94. Michael Benigno, a spokesman for the Jesuits USA Northeast Province, says Berrigan died Saturday, April 30, 2016, at a Jesuit infirmary at Fordham University. (AP Photo/Marty Lederhandler, File) This is a Dec. 1968 photo of the Rev. Daniel Berrigan at an unknown location. The Roman Catholic priest and Vietnam war protester, Berrigan has died. He was 94. Michael Benigno, a spokesman for the Jesuits USA Northeast Province, says Berrigan died Saturday, April 30, 2016, at a Jesuit infirmary at Fordham University. (AP Photo/File) Advertisement

Japan s tiny refugee community urges Tokyo to open doors wider

2018-06-24T05:26:43Z

CharmainPennefat:

By Kiyoshi Takenaka YOKOHAMA, Japan, Nov 29 (Reuters) - Hitoshi Kino, a bespectacled clerical employee at a university near Tokyo, doesn't stand out. Only a slight Vietnamese accent betrays his past, as he speaks in Japanese about being stranded on a rickety boat in waters off his war-torn homeland in 1980, starving with 32 others and left by pirates with nothing but his underpants. Kino, who was then Ky Tu Duong, is one of more than 11,000 refugees that Japan took in over the three decades to 2005 in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, [http://www.vtr.org.vn/cam-nang-du-lich-bac-kinh-5-ngay-4-dem.html vtr.org.vn] under a little-remembered open-door policy which has never been repeated on such a scale. Now, Kino and other "boat people" who have resettled in Japan believe Tokyo should again open its doors and let in some of today's asylum seekers, including those from Syria, not just for those in distress but for Japan's sake as well "Japan should open up a little to them to align itself with the international community," Kino, who became a Japanese citizen in mid-1980s, said over Chinese dumplings and stir-fry at a restaurant near his home west of Tokyo. "It could be just 100, or 50. But it would be better than doing nothing." Japan took just 11 of [http://www.vtr.org.vn/cam-nang-du-lich-bac-kinh-5-ngay-4-dem.html du lịch Bắc Kinh 5 ngày 4 đêm từ Hà Nội],000 asylum-seekers last year, or 0.2 percent, the lowest acceptance rate in the club of rich nations, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. In contrast, France took 22 percent and Germany 42 percent. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has offered nearly $2 billion to help other nations manage the flood of refugees from Syria's civil war, but his government has virtually shut the door on those fleeing Europe's worst migrant crisis since World War Two. This month's attacks in Paris, in which 130 people were killed in mass shootings and suicide bombings blamed on Islamic State, could make any public discussion of accepting refugees into Japan even more difficult. The government's reluctance to accept refugees shows that opening up to immigration is still politically unpalatable, despite an alarming shrinkage in the country's population. After the 2011 nuclear disaster caused by earthquake and tsunami, "foreigners scrambled to leave Japan. But few of us former refugees fled", Kino said. "Japan helped us and took care of us. We would not desert such a country." Indochina refugees speak not only of gratitude toward their adopted country but also of difficulties they have faced trying to fit into society, which prides itself on its homogeneous culture. Foreigners make up only 2 percent of the population. On the job, some Japanese "assume we don't understand things easily and we are not smart", said Hoai Takahashi, [http://www.vtr.org.vn/cam-nang-du-lich-bac-kinh-5-ngay-4-dem.html tour bắc kinh từ hà nội] another refugee from Vietnam who changed his name from Hoang Drong Hoai. "They even say things like 'This job should not be left to these people,' in our very presence." Banri Kawai, formerly Nguyen Van Ry, works at a facility in eastern Japan that houses five former Vietnamese refugees with mental illness. He said they had been bullied by their Japanese seniors at work. "They lost sleep and developed mental conditions," he said after attending Sunday service with [http://www.Trainingzone.co.uk/search/Takahashi Takahashi] at a Catholic church north of Tokyo. Chrisna Ito, who arrived in Japan at the age of 15, says she was rebuked at a factory dorm for using the communal bath before others had finished. She assumed they thought she was dirty because her skin was darker than that of a typical Japanese. Ito, a 43-year-old nursery school worker who was Cheth Chan Chrisna before fleeing Cambodia, had to start working at the rubber factory to support her family after six months of language and other adjustment training. It was only after she married and had children - now in high school and college - that she fulfilled her aspiration to go to junior high and high school. Asked how she feels about the government support she received, Ito reflected for a moment. "I am grateful. But at the same time, I cannot help wondering if Japan could have done a little better." (Additional reporting by Thomas Wilson; Editing by William Mallard and Mark Bendeich) Advertisement

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2018-06-24T05:26:36Z

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