To the Jesuits

The ineffable John Gotti of Mafia fame is reported to have stated recently, with considerable passion, the following (The statement was taken from an FBI phone tap; one cannot therefore guarantee its accuracy. How does the saying go, "To catch a thief ..."?).

Anyway, I quote: "This is gonna be a Cosa Nostra till I die. Be it an hour from now, or be it tonight, or a hundred years from now, when I'm in jail. It's gonna be a Cosa Nostra."

Matters of grammar aside, and though his constituency and mine, and possibly our worldview, might be thought to differ, let one thing be clear. I am rapt in admiration for such, shall we say, contumacious pertinacity.

Mr. Gotti, if one can credit the reports, early in life came on a good thing. Or was born to it. But in any case, at some point he said something fairly seminal to his own soul. "Cosa nostra till I die" perhaps?

A child genius, a sort of "padrone" saint for the times? In any case, he pursued his calling with fervor. His career might therefore be thought of, in a generously Christian sense, and without pushing things, as a vocation of sorts.

More, as a metaphor joined to a larger scope of criminality in more exalted places. As shall appear hereafter.

Possibly readers have already come on my drift. Which is to say, for a number of years Mr. Gotti and I have, each of us, in a manner of speaking, stuck to our guns.

The following is perhaps redundantly stated here. Concerning matters that might be judged peripheral, for example, silk suits, ample girth, tanned jowels, prowling bodyguards, limos, perks of all description, I will not cavil. Gotti surpasses me by a mile or more.

On the other hand, he has in all likelihood endured more sorrows than I. One thinks, for instance, of the disappearance of so many companeros over the years; the grief of which events must be intensified by the abruptness, indeed, the "deep damnation of their taking off."

I summon in this regard Ecclesiastes. "Grasses of the field," I believe, is a reasonably near reference.

Who was responsible, and why? Mr. Gotti, heroically and stoically silent, raises no questions.

LET US NOT FLOG the analogy. The Jesuits, my constituency of choice, are busy in a corner of the vineyard somewhat far removed from the derring-do, the suitcases crammed with green stuff, the mysterious night passages hither and yon, the guns and graft of our separated brethren of Cosa Nostra.

Even a cursory look at the two entities, Jesuits and Mafia, would reveal a marked diversity as to tools, means, assets, even ideologies. Oh, infinite variety of callings!

To some indeed is given to plant, to others to water, to yet others to issue contracts regarding proprietorship, even, alas, survival -- to muscle in on the harvest.

I claim (and surely this is an accident which time will correct in due course) a longer tenure in the Jesuits than any but the most decrepit godfather in his familia of choice. As of August of '91, 52 years to my credit (and undoubted debit), a reflection occurs.

In the strict seniority arrangement of the Cosa, someone of my proven merit would by now have mounted -- by rope, tackle, and spurs -- into the Himalayan regions where power has its source.

Nothing like this to report with regard to the Jesuits and myself. As to any possible accession to power of the undersigned, it seems that the Jesuits have decided on a quite sensible course.

Now and again in quest of this or that candidate to run the enterprise, their eyes rove up and down the line of generations. And in the midst of the talent search, I don protective cover. Include me out. Horsemen pass by. A neat arrangement, with both parties at peace.

ALMOST AS THOUGH I were essaying automatic writing, my pen reverts to Mr. Gotti, his torment at the hands of dame justice. (As well as his many astonishing deliverances.) "Wotta providence!" Mr. Gotti might be imagined to exclaim from time to time.

He fairly revels in legal travail and crisis. He grins like a naughty schoolboy into the cameras, as successive juries express -- in the nicest way imaginable -- their gut belief in his baptismal innocence.

I conclude that Mr. Gotti is constitutionally opposed to mere routine, even of the disciplined sort commended by his familia. He will have little of it; he is no hewer of wood or drawer of water. Routine is deadly; it tends to wear away the edge of life, to stifle innovation and becloud the frolicsome eye.

Is the Mafia to be transformed into a coven of dour lawyers and their housebroken, law-abiding clients? As far as one can judge without immediate access, one is well advised to conclude: over Mr. Gotti's dead body.

Cosa Nostra (to quote our protagonist) "is gonna be a Cosa Nostra."

Jesuits, I am convinced, would well serve the greater good by borrowing a leaf from the Gotti handbook. We too are at our best when scrutinizing and testing the law, confronting head-on its many darknesses and declivities. At the present, at the federal level, that would mean standing in public, illegal opposition against the endemic malice and wickedness, the gargantuan appetite for violence, duplicity, and greed that lie like a stigma on the federal regime.

Need it be said? The Gotti record, in comparison with the Bush dossier, is small potatoes -- crime writ minuscule.

The government record might well be titled, in blazing capitals, THE SEVEN CAPITAL SINS AS NORMAL CIVIC POLITY.

IN ACCORD WITH OUR half-millennial discipline, we Jesuits pray daily, sometimes in common, at other times apart, each in his own preordained or peculiar way. This, together with the sacraments and service of the neighbor, may be said to issue in a certain strength and staying power. All well and good.

Meantime, something else, some worm or termite, eats away at our substance.

It must be recalled, by way of prelude to a painful subject, that among Catholic orders only Jesuits, with a nice measure of chutzpah, took the name of Jesus to themselves. We are not named in honor of our founder (as are, say, Benedictines, Franciscans, Dominicans, and others).

Once the choice was announced by Ignatius of so sacred a name for his new venture, an uproar ensued, as may be imagined. Questions arose among the luminaries of the venerable orders. Who are these upstarts anyway? Why can't they simply call themselves "Ignatians"?

Alas, the dragon of Revelation was awaiting our original name day. His (he is undoubtedly a he) weapon goes by the unlovely (and unbiblical) name of "institution." He is, in a quite literal sense, the power behind that throne, "that money, those honors, that credit of a great name." We were, according to Ignatius, to shun that unholy trinity with all our strength.

Beware, all communities, be warned! For the principality whose name is institution would be "above every name" would pre-empt not only the Cosa Nostra, not only the Big Brother of fiction, not only the United States of America, but the Society (so named) of Jesus himself.

Institution would, in effect, take to itself a capital letter, and reduce the name of our savior to small print indeed.

The institutional spirit declares a prime mover and shaker in all sorts of fetching ways. Through attitudes and drives in favor of the above trinity, it persuades "the entire world" (Revelation) that we are saved by another power than that of Jesus.

The best I can muster amid such times and their realms and coercions as Christians endure today (as Jesuits also endure, believe me) is a form of confession, of making sorrow manifest.

"There have been good Jesuits and bad," an old priest said to me long ago. I was stung by the remark; in truth I had yet to encounter that other world and its worldliness. I was to learn. For all the myths and misconceptions and aura and grand repute, for all the hatred and adulation that lie like a perpetual fog around Jesuits dead and living, our vocation, with all its great moments and sad lapses, remains on sensible scrutiny nothing other than the human condition, writ small and deadly accurate.

Which is to say that the old priest was right, in the main. Saints and sinners indeed!

This is our story, good and bad. A multitude of brothers, priests, seminarians, and novices, tested and testing, innovative, rambunctious, of good heart. Now and again, a genius. But for the most part devoted, low-key, unsung teachers, ministers to prisoners and the ill and dying, dray horses pulling hard in an uphill world.

And now and again, awfully, a rogue.

Thus the codicil is required, my own. The good Jesuits outnumber, let alone outclass, the bad. For the which, two heartfelt cheers from me (and let Christ in his good time raise the third) for the wondrous grace of their company!

Be it admitted too: We have inflicted scars and wounds on the face of history. Wounds on others and inevitably on ourselves. I learned this from the resentments that live on in the Protestant communities of Eastern Europe; I viewed the unhealed wounds and mourned them. They had a different tale to tell than the one we learned as novices and after, concerning Jesuit zeal in "turning back" the Reformation.

To be godly, my confession ought not to stop short of the present. What we are doing badly, sinfully, institutionally, here and now, must be named. It includes the notorious presence and thumping drums of the ROTC on Jesuit campuses.

IN SUM, DEAR FRIENDS, pardon the Jesuits our mixed message. For the message of the Jesuits, more exactly of the North American Jesuits, is by no means single-minded. It mixes the lucid gospel word (love your enemies, do good to those who do ill to you) with the military word (just war, which is to say, sanctioned mass murder).

This is a moral failure of great moment. It touches and taints the good estate of universities. One of the more astonishing phenomena of the campuses today is the marriage of convenience (arranged and blessed by university officials) between the military and the religious studies departments.

One such president wrote me, in response to my objections, that it is a good thing for the Jesuits to "Christianize the military" officers. What the benefit is never became clear. Perhaps to kill, or be killed, by Christian bullets might be thought to guarantee eternal beatitude?

LET ME REVERT BRIEFLY to another aspect of the ever fascinating Cosa Nostra. I mean to venture this: The Mafia is larger than itself. It is among other things a telling metaphor of the criminal character of American government.

John Gotti, rightly understood, is an understudy of George Bush: in the braggadocio of the bandit, in his violence and duplicity, and perhaps above all in his capacity to walk unscathed from the scene of the crime.

In both "offices," the front is everything -- the image, the clothing, the briefcase, that air of spurious innocence, the phalanx of lawyers, the imperturbable, earnest air of law and order. The wheeling and dealing, always in secret, and always, that faint whiff somewhere (in Denmark perhaps) that something is rotten. And yet, the immunity, the unaccountability before the law. Every effort known to technique, to sound bites and absurd slogans, to normalize the abnormal, indeed the morally abhorrent.

As for the Jesuits, I think my North American brethren are urgently summoned, along with all sorts and varieties of Christians, to resist this Greater Gotti, the prime analogate, the one who up to present writing has made off with (allow my inelegance) the whole swag. Oh, dame justice, blind indeed!

On a different note. Our hope, Paul tells us, is "elsewhere." The martyrs remain my hope: the murdered Jesuits of El Salvador, the more than 40 others who have died violently in the last decade. From them I take my soundings and a human measure. And I am reproved for falling short.

PARDON THE FOLLOWING, a departure from my topic. (But perhaps it enlarges one or another point, in a zen kind of way.)

The Buddhists have a saying. When wars impend and all good things are endangered, there are as many things to be done as there are good folk to do them.

I remember in this regard that during the Vietnam years, I often repaired (and on one occasion fled) to Block Island, to seek the hospitality of my friend Bill Stringfellow. I did this in early '72, when I had just rounded out a federal scholarship at Danbury Prison.

Bill, normally laconic and slow to reveal himself, began bemoaning his persistent ill health. It prevented him, he said, from doing something substantial against the war. He was in fact doing many things of substance against the war.

In response I recounted a story I had heard in Ireland. It concerned barbarians and monks and the great round towers of the fifth century.

At that period, invasions were frequent and awful. So the monks and people raised the towers. And when an incursion was imminent, they entered the towers, barred the doors, and mounted in safety. They took along with them the Book and the Cup.

The vandals came and went, leaving ruin and a scorched land. The tower dwellers emerged. They could start over. For something had been salvaged: an irreplaceable tradition of biblical literacy and Eucharist.

Bill often referred to the story in the years that followed; it seemed to offer him comfort. Maybe he came to realize (I surely hope he did) that he in fact was doing something both precious and irreplaceable on behalf of all. His writing, his prayer, the retreats he led were at the heart of our common task of resistance.

After the death of Thomas Merton and the departure of Thich Nhat Hanh for Europe, Bill became our contemplative-in-action. He was preserving the Book and the Cup -- a sublime act of resistance on the day of the vandals.

A DECADE AGO, I floated among a few friends an idea then aborning in my mind. On the face of it, the idea was absurd. It went like this: The church was the only social entity in America capable of raising a consistent outcry on behalf of the victims of government vandalism, war, eviction, search-and-destroy "missions," and so on. I went further. I urged that only the church could win an end to the nuclear arms race.

It is perhaps no news by now. An earthquake has engulfed our institutions. The courts, the educational apparatus, the medical savants, the housing or urban experts, and above all and most flagrant of all, the government -- in sum, those entities supposedly in larger possession than ourselves of skills, savvy, tactics, money, and the like -- all were engulfed in the quake. There were only very few quake shelters left to us. And among the few, the church was the strongest.

My analysis, which would seem fairly rudimentary, was received with a kind of kissing contempt.

The kiss was due the veteran; the contempt fell to his ideas. He was a dear of course, had been through a few things, deserved a kudo or two. But alas, he unaccountably had gone silly. Pity left it at that. But pity, I thought, seldom picked up the pieces of a predicament, let alone repaired or fitted them together.

And maybe it was the sillies who, like children intent over jigsaw pieces, could make a picture out of a puzzle.

The conviction grows. Believe it; the Jesuits nourish the conviction. I think of my community, over all these horrid and wondrous years. And I take heart. Jesuits across the bloody world are dying for something, being murdered for something. Being imprisoned and tortured; and short of that, standing with the poor and helpless and inarticulate.

The message seems to be that if there's something worth dying for, quite possibly there's something worth living for -- even fighting for, being arrested for, tried and convicted for.

I believe it with all my craven heart. And with that I rest my case.

And may my beloved brothers also rest, in the peace of Christ.

Daniel Berrigan, SJ, a Sojourners contributing editor, was a priest, poet, peace activist, and the author of Whereon to Stand: The Acts of the Apostles and Ourselves (Fortkamp Publishing, 1991) when this article appeared.