Saturday, May 07, 2016

Remembering Fr. Daniel Berrigan

The photos that appear here are scanned from a book that seems to have disappeared from historical consciousness, A Spectacle unto the World: The Catholic Worker Movement by psychologist Robert Coles, with photos by Jon Erikson. I am feeding them here into the vast maw of the world wide web that they may not be forgotten.

When Fr. Dan was released from Danbury Federal Prison in 1972 after serving his sentence for burning draft files at Catonsville, he came to the First Street house of the New York Catholic Worker to say mass among the community.

The kitchen table on which meals were prepared served as his altar.

Here Frank Donovan receives the blessed bread.

Jon Erikson was horrified by the poor quality of his publisher's reproduction of these photos; my scans have further degraded them. But they retain some power nonetheless.

1 comment:

Civic Center said...

Way to use the World Wide Web for historical good. I remember writing about a famous interior designer named Stephen Chase when I started my photoblog and realized that there was no photographic record of his work online because he had died about five years too soon. There are a lot of odd gaps out there still to fill.