Frida Berrigan

Last updated

Frida Berrigan
NLN Frida and Dan Berrigan.jpg
With her uncle Daniel Berrigan SJ at a Witness Against Torture event, 2008
Personal life
Born (1974-04-01) April 1, 1974 (age 50)
Baltimore, Maryland, U.S.
Religious life
ReligionRoman Catholic, Unitarian

Frida Berrigan (born 1974) is an American peace activist and author. She published the 2015 book, It Runs in the Family: On Being Raised by Radicals and Growing into Rebellious Motherhood, about her life in a family of prominent activists and her own philosophies of parenting. [1] Raised in the Plowshares movement, she has been featured in documentaries and studies of the movement, including award-winning director Susan Hagedorn's 2021 The Berrigans: Devout and Dangerous. [2] [3] Frida Berrigan has documented and interpreted the movement's history and meaning from her first-hand perspective for a global audience.

Contents

Early life and education

Frida Berrigan, named for her paternal grandmother, [4] was born on April 1, 1974, in Baltimore, Maryland to Elizabeth McAlister and Philip Berrigan, a former nun and priest turned radical Catholic peace activists. [5] [6] They lived in the Jonah House community, which they co-founded. [7]

Her mother is most recently a member of the Kings Bay Plowshares 7, and her father co-established both the Catonsville Nine and the Plowshares movement. Frida is the older sister of Jerry and Kate Berrigan, and the niece of Jesuit peace activist Daniel Berrigan. [8] In 1971, both Philip and Daniel made the cover of Time magazine as "rebel priests" while Philip was still in the Josephite order. [9] [10] Frida Berrigan has estimated that her parents spent 11 of their 29 years of marriage incarcerated for antiwar activities, which affected family life. [4] In her memoir she recalls both parents accidentally being arrested at the same time when she was three and her brother just one; community members cared for the children. [1] She was first arrested at age 8, during a protest at the US Capitol. [4]

She attended the selective, majority-Black magnet Baltimore City College High School. [11] She attended Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts after receiving a scholarship that covered the majority of the costs; she covered the remaining $800 per semester herself by working at a food co-op. [4] She graduated in 1997, while her father was in jail in Maine for the "Prince of Peace" Plowshares action at Bath Iron Works. [12] [13] [14] In college she studied with Pakistani political scientist Eqbal Ahmed, and she worked for Frances Crowe at the American Friends Service Committee. [15]

Peace activism and political party

At an anti-war rally in Newark, New Jersey, 2007 NLN Frida Berrigan.jpg
At an anti-war rally in Newark, New Jersey, 2007

Her first job after college was spending two years working for a Central America solidarity organization in Baltimore. [12] She left to intern at The Nation in New York City, and write about military policy, nuclear weapons, and the arms trade for a think tank, the Arms and Security Initiative, a position she held until early 2010. [16] She joined the World Policy Institute's Arms Trade Resource Center, led by William D. Hartung. [12] [17] In another Hartung endeavor, she was a senior program associate at the New America Foundation's Arms and Security Initiative, also at the World Policy Institute, prior to February 2010. [16] She is on the board of the War Resisters League, a secular pacifist organization that marked its centennial in 2023, and serves as a member of its national committee. [18] [19]

In 2005 she cofounded Witness Against Torture with Matthew Daloisio and others, to work for the closure of the Guantánamo Bay detention center and end the US-backed use of torture. [20] Berrigan is currently a columnist for Waging Nonviolence, [21] and she has written columns and op-eds for The Day. [22] She blurbed the book ARISE AND WITNESS: Poems by Anne Montgomery, RSCJ, About Faith, Prison, War Zones and Nonviolent Resistance, published in 2024. [23]

She has been a mayoral candidate for the city of New London, Connecticut, running for the Green Party. [24] Her platform focused on affordable home ownership, in conjunction with her role as a convener of the New London chapter of the Southeastern Connecticut Community Land Trust. [25] She is also a member of the Connecticut Committee for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. [26] She teaches a first-year seminar at Connecticut College, focusing on disarmament. [27] In 2016, Berrigan estimated she had been arrested around 20 times for activism-related reasons. [4]

Personal life

Prior to 2010, Berrigan lived in Redhook, Brooklyn, New York City. [16] In 2010 she moved to the Maryhouse Catholic Worker in New York, [4] where she lived until her marriage. [28] Around the same time, she reconnected with Patrick Sheehan-Gaumer, also a member of the War Resisters League. The two began dating and married in June 2011 at All Souls Unitarian Universalist Congregation in New London, [4] [16] in order to meet Sheehan-Gaumer, an atheist, halfway on faith. [29]

She lives in New London, Connecticut with her husband, a social worker who grew up in the same peace circles, and their three children. [4] [16] She categorizes herself as an urban farmer, and also a community activist. She does not consider herself a lapsed Catholic, but rather "a Catholic in waiting, waiting for my church to remember the Gospels, to be a justice and peace-seeking community, to be fully inclusive of women and to be welcoming to people who are not hetero-normative. Pope Francis is a step in the right direction, but there is a long way to go". [29]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Philip Berrigan</span> American anti-war activist (1923–2002)

Philip Francis Berrigan was an American peace activist and Catholic priest with the Josephites. He engaged in nonviolent, civil disobedience in the cause of peace and nuclear disarmament and was often arrested.

The War Resisters League (WRL) is the oldest secular pacifist organization in the United States, having been founded in 1923.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gandhi Peace Award</span> Peace award presented by Promoting Enduring Peace

The Gandhi Peace Award is an award and cash prize presented annually since 1960 by Promoting Enduring Peace to individuals for "contributions made in the promotion of international peace and good will." It is named in honor of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, but has no personal connection to Mohandas Gandhi or his family.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Daniel Berrigan</span> American poet and religious activist (1921–2016)

Daniel Joseph Berrigan was an American Jesuit priest, anti-war activist, Christian pacifist, playwright, poet, and author.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Plowshares movement</span> Christian pacifist movement

The Plowshares movement is an anti-nuclear weapons and Christian pacifist movement that advocates active resistance to war. The group often practices a form of protest that involves the damaging of weapons and military property. The movement gained notoriety in the early 1980s when several members damaged nuclear warhead nose cones and were subsequently convicted. The name refers to the text of prophet Isaiah who said that swords shall be beaten into plowshares.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Catonsville Nine</span> 1968 civil disobedience in Maryland, US

The Catonsville Nine were nine Catholic activists who burned draft files to protest the Vietnam War. On May 17, 1968, they took 378 draft files from the draft board office in Catonsville, Maryland, and burned them in the parking lot.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John Dear</span> American Catholic peace activist

John Dear is an American Catholic priest and peace activist. He has been arrested 85 times in acts of nonviolent civil disobedience against war, injustice, nuclear weapons.

Clare Grady is an American peace activist and a member of the Catholic Worker and the Plowshares movements. She advocated against use of cruise missiles for first-strike capability in the 1983 Griffiss Plowshares action. In the process of the protest, military equipment was damaged and splattered with blood. In 2003, she and three others made up The Saint Patrick's Day Four, who conducted a protest action at a military recruiting center in Lansing, New York against the impending Iraq War. She participated in the Kings Bay Plowshares action on April 4, 2018, which resulted in a conviction and sentence of one year and a day.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kathy Kelly</span> American peace activist, pacifist and author

Kathy Kelly is an American peace activist, pacifist and author, one of the founding members of Voices in the Wilderness, and, until the campaign closed in 2020, a co-coordinator of Voices for Creative Nonviolence. As part of peace team work in several countries, she has traveled to Iraq twenty-six times, notably remaining in combat zones during the early days of both US–Iraq wars.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Thomas Lewis (activist)</span> American activist (1940–2008)

Thomas P. Lewis was an artist and peace activist, primarily noted for his participation with the Baltimore Four and the Catonsville Nine.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Harrisburg Seven</span> American anti-Vietnam War activists

The Harrisburg Seven were a group of religious anti-war activists, led by Philip Berrigan, charged in 1971 in a failed conspiracy case in the United States District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania, located in Harrisburg. The seven were Phillip Berrigan, Elizabeth McAlister, Rev. Neil McLaughlin, Rev. Joseph Wenderoth, Eqbal Ahmad, Anthony Scoblick, and Mary Cain Scoblick.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Elizabeth McAlister</span> American peace activist and former nun

Elizabeth McAlister is an American peace activist and former nun of the Religious of the Sacred Heart of Mary. She married Philip Berrigan and was excommunicated from the Catholic Church. McAlister served prison time for nonviolent acts of civil disobedience.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">G. Simon Harak</span> American peace activist (1948–2019)

G. Simon Harak (1948-2019) was an American author, peace activist and professor of theology and Director of the Center for Peacemaking at Marquette University.

Jonah House is a faith-based community/commune in Baltimore, Maryland (USA) centered on the concept of "Nonviolence, resistance and community". It was founded in 1973 by a group that included Philip Berrigan, then a Catholic priest, and Elizabeth McAlister, formerly a Catholic nun. Jonah House is located on the grounds of St. Peter's Cemetery in West Baltimore south of Coppin Heights. The 22-acre (89,000 m2) cemetery was largely abandoned and overgrown, the community has devoted itself to restoring and maintaining it.

Thomas C. Cornell was an American journalist and a peace activist against the Vietnam War and the Iraq War. He was an associate editor of the Catholic Worker and a deacon in the Catholic Church.

Molly Rush is a Catholic anti-war, civil and women's rights activist born in 1935. She co-founded the Thomas Merton Center in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, along with Larry Kessler in 1972, She was one of the Plowshares eight defendants. They faced trial after an anti-nuclear weapons symbolic action at a nuclear missile plant in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Megan Rice</span> American activist (1930–2021)

Megan Gillespie Rice S.H.C.J. was an American nuclear disarmament activist, Catholic nun, and former missionary. She was notable for illegally entering the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, at the age of 82, with two fellow activists of the Transform Now Plowshares group. The action was a nuclear disarmament protest referred to as "the biggest security breach in the history of the nation's atomic complex."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Anne Montgomery (peace activist)</span> American non-violent anti-nuclear activist, educator, and nun (born 1926)

Sister Anne Montgomery RSCJ was an American non-violent activist, educator, nun, and poet who was part of the Plowshares movement. Aside from teaching, she worked with the poor, and advocated for peace via the Catholic Worker Movement. She was a member of the original Plowshares Eight in the first Plowshares action in 1980. Anne Montgomery House in Washington, D.C., run by the Society of the Sacred Heart, is named for her.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Martha Hennessy</span> American peace activist

Martha Hennessy is an American Catholic peace activist and member of the Catholic Worker Movement co-founded by her grandmother, Dorothy Day.

Susan Crane is a peace activist, a member of the California Catholic Worker movement and a participant in the Plowshares movement. After decades of civil disobedience related to campaigns against nuclear war, she was sentenced to jail time in Germany in 2024.

References

  1. 1 2 Berrigan, Frida (2015). It Runs in the Family: On Being Raised by Radicals and Growing into Rebellious Motherhood. OR Books. ISBN   978-1-939293-66-4.
  2. ↑ Cosacchi, Daniel (2021). "The Berrigans: Devout and Dangerous dir. by Susan Hagedorn". American Catholic Studies. 132 (4): 53–57. doi:10.1353/acs.2021.0062. ISSN   2161-8534. S2CID   246648957.
  3. ↑ "Dr. Susan Hagedorn '77". www.umassalumni.com. Retrieved February 18, 2024.
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 "'The Peace Kids' grow up: Daughter of activist recalls extraordinary upbringing". www.theday.com. Retrieved February 29, 2024.
  5. ↑ "Elizabeth McAlister and Philip Berrigan papers, Special Collections, DePaul University Libraries". archives.depaul.edu. Retrieved February 17, 2024.
  6. ↑ Lewis, Daniel (December 8, 2002). "Philip Berrigan, Former Priest and Peace Advocate in the Vietnam War Era, Dies at 79". The New York Times. ISSN   0362-4331 . Retrieved February 17, 2024.
  7. ↑ "Frida Berrigan accepting award for Philip Berrigan". jonahhouse.org. Retrieved February 18, 2024.
  8. ↑ Anderson, George M. (February 21, 2011). "Growing Up Berrigan: Portrait of a Family of Peacemakers". America Magazine. Retrieved February 18, 2024.
  9. ↑ "TIME Magazine Cover: Philip and Daniel Berrigan". Time . January 25, 1971. Retrieved February 17, 2024.
  10. ↑ Berrigan, Frida (May 13, 2016). "What the obituaries missed about my uncle, Dan Berrigan". Waging Nonviolence. Retrieved February 18, 2024.
  11. ↑ Berrigan, Frida (June 16, 2012). "The Coolest War Resister in School". Waging Nonviolence. Retrieved February 17, 2024.
  12. 1 2 3 Berrigan, Frida (May 25, 2013). "Pomp and Circumspect". Waging Nonviolence. Retrieved February 17, 2024.
  13. ↑ Abrecht, Marian (January 1, 1998). "Plowshares Update". Sojourners. Retrieved February 17, 2024.
  14. ↑ "Philip Berrigan describes plowshares action aboard the USS Sullivans: Prince of Peace Plowshares at Bath Iron works". jonahhouse.org. Retrieved February 17, 2024.
  15. ↑ Riegle, Rosalie G. (January 7, 2013). Doing Time for Peace: Resistance, Family, and Community. Vanderbilt University Press. doi:10.2307/j.ctv16758kn.7. ISBN   978-0-8265-1873-6. JSTOR   j.ctv16758kn.
  16. 1 2 3 4 5 Brady, Lois Smith (July 15, 2011). "Frida Berrigan and Patrick Sheehan-Gaumer". The New York Times. ISSN   0362-4331 . Retrieved February 18, 2024.
  17. ↑ "Frida Berrigan: World Policy Institute, 2001 | Special Collections". DePaul University Libraries. Retrieved February 17, 2024.
  18. ↑ "Frida Berrigan". War Resisters League. April 17, 2015. Retrieved February 18, 2024.
  19. ↑ Sargent, Carole (January 12, 2024). "The War Resisters League just turned 100. Here's a history of its Catholic ties". National Catholic Reporter.
  20. ↑ Riegle, Rosalie (2012). "Let's Do It Again!': The Berrigans and Jonah House". Doing Time for Peace: Resistance, Family, and Community. Nashville, Tennessee: Vanderbilt University Press. pp. 49–69. doi:10.2307/j.ctv16758kn.7. ISBN   978-0-8265-1872-9. JSTOR   j.ctv16758kn.
  21. ↑ "Frida Berrigan, Author at Waging Nonviolence". Waging Nonviolence. Retrieved February 29, 2024.
  22. ↑ Berrigan, Frida (April 1, 2009). "Made in the U.S.A.: American Military Aid to Israel". Journal of Palestine Studies. 38 (3): 6–21. doi:10.1525/jps.2009.XXXVIII.3.6. ISSN   0377-919X.
  23. ↑ Laffin, Arthur; Sargent, Carole, eds. (September 15, 2024). ARISE AND WITNESS: Poems by Anne Montgomery, RSCJ, About Faith, Prison, War Zones and Nonviolent Resistance. Washington, DC: New Academia/SCARITH. ISBN   979-8-9900542-4-0.
  24. ↑ Collins, David. "Frida Berrigan will crack open New London's mayoral race". www.theday.com. Retrieved February 29, 2024.
  25. ↑ "Presenters". Connecticut Land Conservation Council. Retrieved February 19, 2024.
  26. ↑ Centore, Michael. "Golden Rule Boat Sets Sail for 'A Nuclear-free World'". National Catholic Reporter. Retrieved February 19, 2024.
  27. ↑ Berrigan, Frida. "How my Gen Z Students Learned to Start Worrying and Dismantle the Bomb". Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Retrieved February 18, 2024.
  28. ↑ Berrigan, Frida (May 4, 2013). "Opinion | A Place Where It's Easier To Be Good". Common Dreams. Retrieved February 29, 2024.
  29. 1 2 Berrigan, Frida (October 11, 2013). "What Should Church Look Like?". Waging Nonviolence. Retrieved February 18, 2024.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.