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Life-changing experience

Finding Fred Stewart’s evaluation of Father Berrigan’s recent visit lacking in understanding or compassion, I’d like to offer an alternative view.

Father Berrigan’s words served as testimony to the fact that resistance and civil disobedience can be viewed as grace arising to counter violence. Daniel Berrigan has shown us that no man or institution can, or should, rob us of our dignity.

It has been said that total isolation has the potential to force a person to “see” his own self-deceptions, thereby endowing him with the ability to see others’ deceptions as well. Prison served only to anchor Father Berrigan deeper in his own truth.



In other words, those of us who are also concerned with civil liberties must be true to our ideals regardless of attempts by authority, or fellow citizens (whose civil liberties we are fighting for), to break our spirit and destroy our resolve.

It is a rare honor to have dialogue with someone who has lived life at a level of idealism and activism that many are called to, but few have the courage of convictions to respond to. My experience with Father Berrigan was not only awe-inspiring, but life-changing.




Kathryn Preston

Carbondale