Two perspectives on armed struggle.

Thomas Merton was a best-selling author, literary genius and Trappist monk from the monastery at Gethsemane in Kentucky. He died tragically of accidental electrocution in December of 1968. Though monks are supposed to leave the world behind, Merton sustained lively correspondence with a broad range of prominent movers and shakers, worldwide. One of his protégés was Jesuit Father Daniel Berrigan, famous for dramatic protests in Washington against the Vietnam war. 

In an open letter published on May 5 of 1978 in the National Catholic Reporter, Berrigan confronts Nicaraguan poet and holy man, Ernesto Cardenal, also, a disciple of Merton for many years. Cardenal’s religious community at Solentiname in the Nicaraguan countryside had been attacked and destroyed by Somoza’s National Guard in 1977. Some members of the community subsequently joined the Sandinista revolutionary forces who eventually overthrew the Somoza dictatorship in 1979. One of the holy images at Solentiname portrayed El Cristo Guerrillero, (The Warrior Christ), an image the pacifist Father Berrigan could not abide.

Berrigan was an advocate of strict non-violence. Cardenal was not.  Berrigan’s open letter to Cardenal bears the title, “Revolutionary Violence and Christian Conscience”. 

“Guns don’t work,” he writes. Berrigan recognizes that Sandinista violence is nothing compared with what the US did in Vietnam, or with the “doomsday cache of nuclear horrors” lurking in Rocky Mountain bunkers.  And he recognizes the “long tradition of legitimate self-defense” in Catholic thinking. But he laments the fact that the “young men of Solentiname resolved to take up arms.” He calls on his friend, Ernesto Cardenal to refuse “the enmities pushed at us by the war-making state of a war-blessing Church.” 

The Church had a history of legitimizing war, though never leftist revolutionary war. “We cannot handle both,” Berrigan says, “gospel and gun.” No principle, he insists, is worth bloodshed. 

Cardenal does not respond immediately.  He waits more than a year, until after the Sandinista victory. In an interview with Latin American correspondent, June Carolyn Erlick, published in National Catholic Reporter, September 14, 1979, Cardenal begins, “To Berrigan I say, arms gave Life.”

“Father Berrigan can now come and see the immense jubilation of the people for their victory…” No principle is worth spoiling blood, he writes, but that includes the principle of non-violence. The Sandinista struggle was not for any principle, he says, but to avoid more bloodshed. He graphically describes how the Guard had massacred many young men, sons of campesinos, suspected of Sandinista sympathies. 

“This war was found to end violence,” he says. He cites Sandinista leader, Tomás Borge, locating the Guardsmen who had tortured him years before. “This is my revenge,” says Borge. “I forgive you.” Armed struggle had not, as Berrigan predicted, turned him into a monster. The question about how the Sandinistas would deal with Christians was not a valid question, according to Cardenal. Those who made this revolution are Christians.

That was the revolutionary “new man” as Cardenal envisioned him: revolutionary and courageous but serene, in the face of real and abundant violence.  Berrigan’s situation was different.  He did go to jail for his beliefs, but there was no one shooting back, no soldiers systematically killing innocents on the streets of Washington. Berrigan ultimately recognized that “Gandhi would agree with us, but Merton would agree with you.”

Canto de la revolución: Guerrero del Amor.