THE CONVERSATION goes back to St. Veronica's Church in Cherry Hill, the night that Philip Berrigan got himself arrested in Washington inside a so-called tiger cage. Berrigan wanted to show the suffering of caged prisoners in Vietnam. When the police showed up, they charged him with protesting without a permit. It was a terrible thing to do. When Berrigan went out to break the law, he didn't anticipate a piddling permit charge. He expected the worst that the law could throw at him, so he could run with it.
I was at St. Veronica's that night with a couple of priests who knew Berrigan pretty well, the Rev. Richard Wagner and the Rev. Paul Banet. When we heard the story about the tiger cage, they rolled their eyes a little, as if saying, "Here we go again."
They understood the dramatic instinct behind the protest, and the passion, too. They were all members of the Josephite Fathers, which serves African-American communities. Wagner and Banet understood Berrigan's action because they were staging their own public protests in the area.
Wagner was fighting every government bureaucrat he could find to get a drug abuse program for Cherry Hill; Banet was doing the same thing to clean up some miserable housing conditions. They understood the intransigence of people in power, and they knew they had to stage protests imaginatively to get people's attention.
Berrigan, who died Friday night, at 79, at Jonah House on the grounds of a West Baltimore cemetery after a long fight with cancer, knew the way the game was played. He and his elder brother Daniel famously led the draft board raids that helped galvanize opposition to the Vietnam War in the late 1960s.
But the war kept going on. And there was Berrigan, paroled from prison, driving around the White House in this tiger cage on an open truck. He was chained inside it, the way prisoners in Vietnam were chained.
When the truck slowed to a stop behind a line of cars, park police told them to wait. They waited for an hour and a half, until the cops got their act together and finally charged them -- with protesting without a permit.
This was not what Berrigan expected. From the time his Josephite superiors hustled him out of Newburgh, N.Y., for getting too aggressive in civil rights demonstrations, he protested in large ways -- and was punished in large ways.
In Baltimore, he founded the anti-war group Peace Mission, which picketed the homes of Dean Rusk and Robert McNamara for orchestrating the war. Then, in 1967, Berrigan and three friends walked into downtown Baltimore's Customs House and splattered Selective Service records with their own blood.
He was sentenced to six years in prison for that. But while awaiting sentencing, he and eight others -- the Catonsville Nine -- walked into a Frederick Road draft board, grabbed hundreds of files and took them to a parking lot, where they set them afire with a mix of gasoline and soap chips -- homemade napalm.
He eventually served 11 years behind bars for different protests, so the bit with the tiger cage wasn't much to talk about. Big deal, protesting without a permit.
"It's not just the war," Wagner said that evening. We sat in the little dining room in the back of St. Veronica's parish on Cherry Hill Road. "It's trying to get something down here for these addicts, it's ..."
He groped for the right words and motioned toward Banet, who was fighting negligent landlords in the community.
"As a priest," Wagner said, "you want to feel as if you're doing something with your life. It isn't enough to preach from the pulpit on Sundays. There's a here-and-now, and not just a hereafter. You want to count for something."
Those like the Berrigans, and Wagner and Banet, were part of a generation that was redefining our notions of clergy. When Berrigan was arrested in Catonsville, he handed reporters a statement that said, "We confront the Catholic Church, other Christian bodies, and the synagogues of America with their silence and cowardice in the face of our country's crimes."
Around here, there were times when the clergy lent their stature to public protests. Some demonstrated against segregated restaurants and theaters. Others marched outside the old Gwynn Oak Amusement Park. But the war was something else.
Many saw the Berrigans as communists or dupes. The whole tapestry of government lies and hypocrisy was still a secret waiting to be discovered. Berrigan not only figured it out -- he made it his life's work to let everybody in on the secret.
He did it out there in the open, where everybody could see him, and he took his punishment behind bars, because he figured the fight was worth it. Which is why that piddling permit charge over a tiger cage was such a tragedy. The damned government reduced a war crime to a misdemeanor.