Father Daniel Berrigan, the Jesuit priest whose pacifism landed him in jail and made him an icon during the Vietnam War era, died on April 30, 2016. He was 94. Following an outpouring of grief on dozens of platforms, including tributes featured on the Huffington Post, NPR, and the Guardian, Berrigan’s publishers are commemorating his life by reprinting a selection of his titles between now and next spring.
In 1968, Berrigan and eight others—later to be known as the Catonsville Nine—broke into a small-town draft board in Catonsville, Md., and used homemade napalm to destroy over 350 draft cards to protest the Vietnam War. The act made Berrigan the first priest to be listed on the FBI’s most wanted list and landed him on the cover of TIME magazine. After being sentenced to three years in prison for destroying government property, Berrigan went into hiding. He later turned himself in and would spend two years in prison before his release in 1972.
Throughout the rest of his life, Berrigan, who wrote more than 50 books, remained both a leading anti-war activist as well as an important figure for the Catholic left.
In May, shortly after Berrigan’s death, Orbis released a book of correspondences between the priest and his brother, Father Philip Berrigan, in The Berrigan Letters. According to publisher Robert Ellsberg, Orbis is already reprinting the second volume in the Modern Spiritual Masters series, Daniel Berrigan: Essential Writings (2009) today. The book, edited by John Dear, features a selection of excerpts from Berrigan’s writings—books, journals, poems, and homilies—that chronicle his vocation toward peace making.
Fordham University, where Berrigan served as poet-in-residence from 2000 until his death, is reissuing two of the priest’s books through its publishing arm next spring. And the Risen Bread, originally published by Fordham University Press in 1998, features 40 years of selected poetry by Berrigan; while The Trial of the Catonsville Nine (2004) draws on court transcripts to detail Berrigan and his compatriots’ struggle with conscience, justice, and law.
To mark Berrigan’s passing and celebrate his life, Plough Publishing offered a free, limited-time download of the e-book edition of Daniel: Under the Siege of the Divine (1998) which was downloaded over 1,500 times in May, according to Sam Hine, editor at the publishing house. Further, Plough will reissue Daniel in paperback next spring. In Daniel, Berrigan compares the modern world to that of his namesake, the Hebrew prophet Daniel, shedding new light on the biblical book of Daniel.
Although Eerdmans has no plans to reissue any of their books by Daniel Berrigan, the publisher intends to keep his two backlist titles in print for the foreseeable future: The Kings and Their Gods: The Pathology of Power (2008) and No Gods but One (2009). In a statement, Eerdmans president and publisher Anita Eerdmans said the late priest’s “prophetic voice” will continue to be heard through his books. “We expect that his work with us and others will remain in print for a long time to come.”
