Excerpt from the "Ultra Resistance" by Francine du Plessix Gray

This topic Francine wrote about in 1969 is the subject matter of my screenplay "The Milwuakee 14."   There were 14 men, 5 of whom were priests who burned draft cards in Milwaukee and spent 1 year in prison.

At first this Ultra-Resistance involved men who — like Father Philip Berrigan and his brother Father Daniel Berrigan — were exempt from the draft either because of their clerical vocation or their age. Their average age was thirty-five, and their apostleship was to witness with and for the thousands of young Americans who have preferred jail to induction. These early draft board raiders were predominantly Catholic. The controversy that has rocked the American Catholic Church in the past decade has pitted a fanatically radicalized minority against a Catholic majority which still remains the most right-wing and hawkish segment of the nation. The desperately theatrical means of the Baltimore Four and the Catonsville Nine were aimed not only at the government’s war-making structure but at that most reactionary structure of all, the Catholic Church. The moral absolutism of the Catholic tradition, as the last few years have shown, can lend itself to satanizing the Vietnam war as fervently as it did Communism in the Fifties. No wonder then that many of the draft board raids, like political intrigues of Mazarin’s time, have been plotted in abbeys, monasteries, convents, the rectory next door.

Although draft-exempt men had originated this style of protest, the Ultra-Resistance is becoming more secular and youthful. The actions increasingly involve those young people who are threatened by the draft. The median age of the raiders came down from thirty-five to twenty-five in the Milwaukee action, to twenty-two in Chicago, Pasadena, and Silver Spring. The monastic stand-arounders, Barry Bondhus included, usually come from highly authoritarian and conservative backgrounds, which perhaps explains some of their differences from the permissively reared young people in the larger radical Movement.

Not the least of these differences is their disdain for amnesty, their sense that it is a positive act to go to jail. Many of them have had a more immediate exposure to the poor than the average college rebel, and feel drawn to the evangelic mystique of sharing, in jail, the powerlessness of the dispossessed. They place a greater stress on non-violence than the student movement – their symbolic destruction of property is meant, as a metaphor, to stress the sacredness of life. They incline to be apolitical — they tend to a personalistic Christian anarchism, or to Utopian socialism. And they claim to have a great distrust of rhetoric. “It’s not enough to just speak any more.” “I had to put my body on the line.” “It wasn’t just words, that’s basically it.” They reserve their rhetoric for the courtroom.