COLUMN ONE : Berrigan at 71: Still Protesting : The anti-war priest, pursuing his campaign against The Bomb, submits to genteel arrest several times a year. People must devote their lives to peacemaking, he believes.

By BARRY BEARAK

April 10, 1993 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

NEW YORK — America’s best-known radical priest observed Good Friday with a ceremonial breaking of the law. Father Daniel Berrigan is 71 now, but he still manages to get arrested several times a year, whistling as always against the prevailing winds, the somber chaplain of the nuclear Death Row.

The Bomb has long been his fixation, its ominous mushroom cloud darkening the light of creation. His favorite place to confront it is the Riverside Research Institute, a strategic weapons think tank in an office building here near Times Square. RRI’s specialty is the “Star Wars” missile system.

Berrigan has been arrested on its front steps about 75 times in the past 15 years. By now, it is a wearying routine, a choreographed minuet that ends in a wordless promenade to a police van. No one from inside ever meets with the demonstrators. Passers-by hurry on, looking and pretending not to.

“When I get home it seems so fruitless,” the priest said. “But my deepest belief is that results are not important. If you want to profess your faith, you have to seek consonance with Christ and let the chips fall. And they often fall in legal jeopardy and public disgrace and things like that.”

Usually, Berrigan is joined by a dozen or so regulars. But this time there were 45 ready for arrest, most of them split off from a peace march that went up 42nd Street, making 14 stops in observance of the stations of the cross, the stages of Jesus’ suffering as he was led to Calvary.

Their numbers were equalled by patrolmen in the building lobby. The peace group barely had time to begin a hymn before a police captain made a polite announcement into a bullhorn: “May I have your attention for a moment? You are all under arrest.”

Several officers were standing on tippy-toes, trying to see. “Is he here?” one of them asked, knowing that sometimes the actor Martin Sheen comes to the RRI arrests. Back at the precinct, the cops like to get their picture taken with him. “But he ain’t here today,” one of them concluded.

It was just the usual peaceniks, taking up their time.

But why now? Isn’t the world safer these days?

To Dan Berrigan, recent arms treaties are but tinkerings with the military engines. The war mindset remains unchanged. To escape it, mankind would have to find its way to a worthier landmark: the cross and all that it requires.

This is a hard way to go, Berrigan said, demanding no less than a life’s devotion to peacemaking: give more, suffer more, risk more, trust more.

As things are now, the killing never stops. “Some people who ought to know better want to enter the fighting in Bosnia,” he said. “Ever since Korea, there are always people saying: This is a good one. This a good one. Well, there can’t be a good one, not if you start with the Sermon on the Mount.”

In his mind’s eye looms The Bomb, a half-century old now and remarkably fertile, its offspring strategically apportioned across the planet.

How many? If all the planned cuts are made by target year 2003, some 20,000 nuclear warheads will nevertheless remain, according to the Center for Defense Information in Washington. Divide those weapons into Hiroshima-sized bombs and there will still be enough firepower to explode one an hour for 23 years.

The police were well-pleased. These were the good kind of pacifists, not the type who make you carry them out. These obedient demonstrators were willing to rise in groups of five and follow an officer to the vans outside.

Patrolman Martin Robinson, 29 and a Roman Catholic, accompanied Berrigan and four others. The officer asked each for some identification and then escorted them to the vehicle.

“Hey, we got a priest here,” he said quietly, looking at the IDs. “Father Daniel Berrigan. Anybody know him?”

But these were mostly young cops, and the name meant nothing.

Dan Berrigan--nuclear resister and black-sheep Jesuit, gifted writer and unrepentant prisoner--is built as thin and upright as a Popsicle stick. There is gray-white hair now above his creased, elfin face. His voice is often so soft that others must lean in to hear. He has a pious way about him, as if his mind has deciphered many bleary truths about the agonies of the century.

Pessimism rules his words. And, at times, examples of inhumanity seem his nourishment, confirming as they do his dour appraisal of mankind. “God will prevent the apocalypse,” he allowed gloomily. “But there is an ‘if’ involved--if there are humans willing to do God’s work on behalf of the living.”

Those doing such work are few, he said, though “the serious peace movement has never been in better health. We’ve always operated with small numbers; the larger the numbers the less coherent things become and more volatile and less dependable over the long haul.”

Berrigan’s faith lies with a coterie of pacifists, their actions “small circles of sanity” eddying against the tide. His trust in traditional institutions was spent long ago: courts, universities, the Roman Catholic church. Wars have gone on with the church’s blessing, he said, and now mass murder has come to seem normal and soldiering mistaken for a Christian duty.

His pen has been unsparing of the powerful. The world has turned into an “Imperial Madhouse” run by “well-groomed manikins.” They entrust the future to “saucer-eyed weapons specialists,” who, in a horrid inversion of the children’s tale, spin huge sums of gold into mounds of combustible straw.

The Vietnam War was Berrigan’s crucible. In 1968, he, his brother Philip and seven others lifted 378 files from a draft board in the Baltimore suburb of Catonsville, Md. Outside in the parking lot, they then ignited the folders with home-made napalm, the recipe taken from a Green Beret handbook. The raid pioneered what soon became a popular coupling of arson and draft records.

It also turned Dan Berrigan--then a chaplain at Cornell University and already a notable anti-war figure--into an outlaw. Convicted of destroying federal property, the Berrigan brothers went underground: “like a shadow of a cardboard man, invisible as the mild air, observing, smiling, anonymous,” he would write.

It was a hiding-out that mocked the feds. Dan Berrigan was available for interviews with magazines and network TV. He once even returned to Cornell for a peace rally, entering the field house in a motorcyclist’s helmet and goggles. The crowd roared as he came on stage. He later slipped away during a mime show about the Last Supper, secreted in the huge papier-mache head of an apostle.

By then, Dan Berrigan was a cult figure, the hip, cerebral priest with a Fu Manchu mustache who had a kind word for Che Guevara and the Black Panthers. He was heroically anti-war and anti-money: Read the Gospel, get poor, get with it! A play he had written about his own martyrdom at Catonsville opened in Los Angeles. The fugitive priest sent a tape-recorded message for the audience.

Then, after four months of running, Berrigan was captured in August of 1970. FBI agents, charading as bird watchers, snared him at a friend’s house off the Rhode Island coast. He would join Philip in the federal pen.

Those hectic days on the lam had produced a scathing book of essays and poems, “The Dark Night of Resistance.” In it, Berrigan said it was scarcely possible any more to be “at the center of the web, without being cursed in our humanity, metamorphosed into the beast.” With America murderous and the church silent, he yearned to know, “What are we to do with our lives?”

As the decade aged and the war ended, the alienation within most of the disaffected trickled away. This was not so for Berrigan. His admonishments turned toward the world’s nuclear mortality. The Bomb, ever metastasizing, had become humanity’s eternal companion, a malignant presence accepted as incurable.

In 1980, Berrigan, again with his brother and six others, entered a General Electric nuclear missile plant in King of Prussia, Pa. They hammered on two nose cones and poured their own blood on the bright metal. Their protest was symbolic, to “turn swords into plowshares and fury into beatitude.”

There were at least two measurable consequences, more prison time for the trespassers and the birth of a new tactic. Since then, there have been nearly 40 other “Plowshares Actions,” protesters inviting lengthy terms behind bars for their ritual wielding of hammers and the stainings with blood.

These days, Berrigan feels his health is not up to risking another extended stay in prison. He lives in a three-bedroom, rent-stabilized apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. There is a community of Jesuits in the building.

His time fills with lecturing, teaching and writing. He has published 40 or so volumes of poetry and prose, including two autobiographies. For a decade now, he has ministered to people diminished by the hard dying of AIDS.

It is a quiet life away from the flash of the headlines, even with his occasional partaking in civil disobedience. Little he does now is daring. When the police end the periodic sit-ins, the arrested routinely spend a half-hour milling around the nearest precinct before being sent off with a summons and a court date. Then the freed pris- oners go out for coffee.

Once in court, some judges regard them scornfully, though rarely is jail or even a fine imposed. Other judges are actually welcoming, relieved to see peaceniks instead of the usual urban riffraff. At those times, they are smiled upon, like some agreeable old tune, folk singers blowin’ the answers in the wind.

It is only seven short blocks from Riverside Research to the Mid-Town South precinct. The police officers there are accustomed to seeing the protesters file in. A few of them began looking for Martin Sheen. (The actor was otherwise occupied, getting arrested for trespassing during a similar protest at the Lawrence Livermore Lab in Berkeley.)

“We extend courtesies,” said the sergeant in charge. “These people are like priests and nuns in civilian clothes. We wouldn’t put them back in the holding area. You should see the characters we got back there.”

The demonstrators, also arrested for trespassing, were directed to a large room across from the main desk. The scene looked like registration day in a college gym. Old friends hugged each other and gabbed, waiting to receive their summons.

Berrigan bummed a cigarette from a fellow Jesuit, Father Ned Murphy, who runs a soup kitchen in the Bronx. Usually, he does not smoke. “But I allow myself one smoke after every arrest,” he said. “It’s sort of my reward.”

Berrigan does not vote. To him, politics is about power, and power is about money and killing. “I feel very sorry for people who rest their hopes on Clinton or anyone like that,” he said dismissively. “After all, the country is ungovernable. Barons and robbers always make off with the swag.”

There is a cynic’s shirt beneath the clergyman’s wrap. Skeptical of the redeeming efforts of society, he trusts instead in renegade works of faith, those “impolitic, uncouth scenes . . . those tumultuous arrests.”

He nimbly turns aside the inevitably posed questions: Just what is he accomplishing? Aren’t these acts of conscience futile and even self-inflated?

“Results are secondary; unless I believed that I’d have to give up because not much ever happens,” he replied. “The deepest things in life conceal their outcomes, anyway. I look to the traditions of Jesus and Gandhi and King. They did things because they believed in them and let the rest go.”

Berrigan prefers to pose his own inevitable questions: Isn’t the way of the cross guileless and self-giving and indifferent to consequences?

And didn’t Jesus say: Sell all you have, take up your cross and follow me?

After the police had finished the processing, people were still visiting with each other. The sergeant had to insist that they leave.

Berrigan walked out with the theologian Earl Crow, who is a dean at High Point University in High Point, N.C. Crow had once enlisted Berrigan to teach an eight-week course. Then the Gulf War broke out, and the school’s president decided that he did not want a radical priest on campus.

“I’m frequently disinvited that way,” Berrigan said breezily. “Gandhi’s grandson invited me to speak at the Gandhi Institute, but then I was disinvited by his trustees. I think I’m the only one too peaceful for even Gandhi.”

In his 1987 autobiography, Berrigan wrote that most Christians are either ignorant of the Plowshares actions or openly hostile: “The bishops are silent or quizzical. The liberal Protestant pulpits that once welcomed me (the Catholic pulpits were never so venturesome) have closed their access.”

He professes not to care, though for a man unconcerned with “results” and “the credit of a great name” he is eager to be consulted. Why didn’t the New York Times ask his opinion about the Gulf War? he complained.

His prolific book-writing goes on full speed, streams of reflection that can be all at once persuasive and confounding, his passionate exhortations to the cross contaminated by the severity of his judgments.

Berrigan recoils from today’s “appalling normalcy,” the neglect of the poor by better-off people caught up in this “buying and selling, marrying and giving in marriage, this turning wheel of the world, this noiseless meshing of the gears of things--appetite and money, ego and power, pride of place.”

He is a hard person to sort out. Few occupy his rigorous moral universe. While he is a man of affability and wit, he can also be difficult company, self-righteous and challenging, a map maker for a guilt trip. He may be a man of prophetic vision or merely a willful misanthrope. Or possibly both.

Berrigan appreciates the vexation he can cause: “Someone has to say the things that are true. I try to be as personal and forthcoming as possible, then leave it to people to say: What does that mean to me?

“I try to tell the story. That’s what Jesus did, didn’t he? He told stories.”

The protest over--and the battlements, such as they are, sufficiently stormed for a Good Friday--about half the demonstrators moseyed around the corner to the Sunset Coffee Shop, which some have nicknamed the Nuclear Cafe.

The waitresses gave a back room over to the group. They love Father Berrigan. “He’s such a doll,” one said. They know this bunch to be easy to wait on. The customers set the table themselves and pour their own water.

In conversation, there is reminiscing. Joe Cosgrove, a lawyer, remembered when, during the Vietnam War, Berrigan sarcastically told people, “If the government were coming for your TVs and cars, then you’d be upset. But, as it is, they’re only coming for your sons.”

Dan himself recalled one time over at RRI when he was tossing blood onto the front doors. “‘Good to the last drop,’ I shouted, and somehow the drop landed on a policeman’s sleeve. He went wild, you know, scared of AIDS.”

Ann Brown teaches politics at St. Peter’s College in Jersey City, N.J. She has told her students about Dan Berrigan and they think he is insane. “They don’t consider bombing an entire nation to be crazy, but burning draft records, that’s what’s crazy to them.”

The talk went on for an hour. Then people had to get moving. This was one of the big weekends of the year, after all. There were things to do.

They had stood up to The Bomb once again, and now they were ready for the light of Easter to burst upon the world with the resurrection of Christ.