Mary of Nazareth, Fr. Daniel Berrigan, and the War on Children

Author’s Note: The following is adapted from a meditation written for the prayer journal Give Us This Day, on the Feast of the Assumption of Mary, August 15, 2023.

A great sign appeared in the sky, a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars. She was with child and wailed aloud in pain as she labored to give birth. Then another sign appeared in the sky; it was a huge red dragon, with seven heads and ten horns, and on its heads were seven diadems. Its tail swept away a third of the stars in the sky and hurled them down to the earth. Then the dragon stood before the woman about to give birth, to devour her child when she gave birth. She gave birth to a son, a male child, destined to rule all the nations with an iron rod. Her child was caught up to God and his throne. The woman herself fled into the desert where she had a place prepared by God.

Revelation 12:1-6

My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord; / my spirit rejoices in God my Savior / for he has looked with favor upon his lowly servant. / From this day all generations will call me blessed: / the Almighty has done great things for me / and holy is his Name. / He has mercy on those who fear him / in every generation. / He has shown the strength of his arm, / and has scattered the proud in their conceit. / He has cast down the mighty from their thrones, / and has lifted up the lowly. / He has filled the hungry with good things, / and the rich he has sent away empty. / He has come to the help of his servant Israel / for he has remembered his promise of mercy, / the promise he made to our fathers, / to Abraham and his children forever.

Luke 1:46-55

On this feast of the Assumption of Mary, it is jarring to find Luke’s account of the Visitation and the Magnificat paired with the wildly apocalyptic scene from Revelation, in which a seven-headed dragon stands before the Woman Clothed with the Sun, poised to “devour her child when she gave birth.” About this famous scene, biblical scholar Craig Koester says that the author “grapples with the cultural icons of his day”—namely, the dominant practices of the Roman Empire—“to unmask them, so that when readers see the realities that lie behind the façades, they might better resist and persevere in faith.”

What does it mean to give birth to something that will threaten the world with its goodness, its joy, its beauty? What does it mean to resist and persevere in faith under the boot of state power? On closer examination, the Magnificat—“God has cast down the mighty from their thrones, / and has lifted up the lowly”—perfectly unmasks “the realities that lie behind the façades.” Despite all appearances, the Beast has no power to prevail against the God of Life, or a young Jewish girl named Mary, who births hope in the unlikeliest of places, far from the centers of power.

Two millennia later, contemplating the idols of our own time, Jesuit Fr. Daniel Berrigan often lamented that our late modern world is almost literally constructed as a war on children. “Our apologies, good friends, for the fracture of good order, the burning of paper instead of children,” he said in a courtroom in Catonsville, Maryland, on trial with eight others for the burning of draft files with homemade napalm. For Fr. Berrigan, the “American War” in Viet Nam and the continued development of nuclear weapons were like the seven-headed Beast of Revelation, never satisfied, ever feasting on the flesh of the world’s children. “For we are sick at heart, our hearts give us no rest for thinking of the Land of Burning Children.”

No less than Mary’s Magnificat, the prophetic witness of Fr. Berrigan confronts the church today — confronts me — like an irksome question that won’t go quietly away. What are the cultural icons and idols that continue to demand the lives and unrealized happiness of countless innocent victims today? And what must we do to protect our children, the world’s children, from these devouring beasts?

The timeless words of the Magnificat, paired with the terrifying imagery of Revelation 12, unmask a beautiful if unsettling mystery that Dan Berrigan understood very well, and proclaimed tirelessly through his poetry and countless acts of civil disobedience. To call Mary “Theotokos”—Mother of God—is at once to recognize our own vocation to birth and protect the Christ-Child, who gestates like a seed in each of us. God asks us to bring something beautiful into a broken world, through the enduring power of love and compassion, in the combustible marriage of freedom and grace. (Dan Berrigan was nothing if not combustible!)

May God look with favor on us, his lowly servants. And may God give the church today, we who call ourselves followers of Christ, some fraction of the courage of Mary of Nazareth, and Fr. Dan Berrigan.

Recommended

Jim Forest, At Play in the Lion’s Den: A Biography and Memoir of Daniel Berrigan (Orbis, 2017)

Bill Wylie-Kellerman, Celebrant’s Flame: Daniel Berrigan in Memory and Reflection (Cascade, 2021)

The Berrigans: Devout and Dangerous, dir. Sue Hagedorn, at https://theberrigansmovie.com/.

Daniel Berrigan, The Bride: Images of the Church, with Icons by William Hart McNichols (Orbis, 2000)

Photo montage by Stephen Stookey