ideas: from people

How faith, and America, can heal

The Trial of the Catonsville Nine is many things Australians dislike about Americans: political, patriotic and preachy.

But unlike the worst of the United States, this play, imported from the land of the free and brave for the Brisbane Festival, is also deeply questioning of its place in the world. It wears its jingoism with pride – an imposing stars and stripes flag provides a stark background to the courtroom drama – while prosecuting what impact that nationalist fervour has on the rest of humanity.

In a review for Australian Stage, I wrote the piece is brilliantly executed by Tim Robbins’ Los Angeles-based Actor’s Gang. The exposition nor the argument come as any surprise: it is a true story, after all, reciting a time of uprising against colonialist war (Vietnam, specifically, though the parallels to Iraq now are obviously drawn); a sermon you might expect in a story of clergymen, from an acting troop founded and directed by one of Hollywood’s most garish bleeding-hearts. But it is great theatre.

And more importantly, it is full of ideas. It prosecutes the West’s involvement in Vietnam, familiarly perhaps, but goes further to examine American exceptionalism and the greyness of, and uneasiness between, faith and justice. They are ideas worth pondering.

As the story goes, Catholic priests Daniel Berrigan (who wrote the play originally) and brother Philip, along with seven of their activist flock, stand condemned for an act of civil disobedience. These nine had memories of working overseas, in Africa, and seeing the brutal aftermath of American colonialism. They watched the scenes from Vietnam and vowed not to remain silent.

In 1968, the group peacefully raided a military office at Catonsville and took hundreds of files on citizens eligible for the draft. They burned the documents outside with homemade napalm, the same insidious toxic cocktail American troops were dropping on Vietnamese villages. Says Daniel Berrigan:

“Our apologies, dear friends, for the fracture of good order, the burning of paper instead of children, the angering of the orderlies in the front parlor of the charnel house. We could not, so help us God, do otherwise.”

Before court they would admit their guilt of the crime but plead innocence – not mercy; there was a sense of martyrdom about their fight – on the grounds of attempting to stop a war they argued was a much more grievous crime against humanity. To try the war, they decided, they had to commit a crime and try themselves.

The play’s audience sits in judgement, presented the evidence as if watching from the jury box and continually warned by the Judge to decide the case on facts, not motivation and not our own conscience – an almost impossible task.

They are guilty of the crime, certainly, but so much more is on trial. Is justice – in the grandiose sense – really served by sending them to prison? We see the sheer inadequacy of the law, hopelessly incapable of righting the wrong.

Really interestingly, we see the internal torment in people of faith, and the power of a church that has instigated war before but also offers the humanity to end them. “No one knows God,” Philip Berrigan recites, “until one knows injustice.”

We see Catholicism in parallel with these United States – decent and well-meaning, yet with the capacity for such brutal intolerance.

I’ve written about this disconnect before, that the compassion the church teaches only extends to an exclusive few. Too often religious groups will hitch their wagon to the conservative side of politics, as they did with Dwight Eisenhower during Vietnam and as they did with George W. Bush and his Iraq war, and then remain silent as their faithful leader orders the rape and pillaging of faraway lands.

The separation of church and state is one thing, but surely all faiths would preach peace in any circumstance. It should be said the catholic order, from US bishops to Pope John Paul II, spoke out against the invasion of Iraq. It is moralising for good, not the evil it preaches in so many other areas.

And what of America? In the play, the giant star-spangled banner is lowered and carried down stage by the united court players. It is folded, hauntingly, in the same militaristic formation as if to bestow on a grieving war widow.

It was the death of the United States, at least as an ideal, in 1968. Except nobody learned the lesson.

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