"To the Editor:
Re “He Traveled Light: Just a Backpack and Beliefs,” by Jim Dwyer (About New York column, front page, May 6):
Though he would have rejected the phrase, the Rev. Daniel J. Berrigan, a Jesuit, was among the great spiritual leaders of his generation. This was at least in part because of the way he rejected the public trappings of moral authority that such leaders often acquire, and clung as tenaciously as he did to his own and his church’s moral judgments, their shared concern for life and for the lives of others, and his own felt love of humankind.
He was a priest and a poet before he was a protester, and reading him, or hearing him speak, one was always aware that his interest looked beyond the particular issue in which he was invested to those whom it would affect, and in whose interest he lived and worked.
Even when the issue was war and peace, as it often was, he had a kind of clarity of purpose shared with Dorothy Day, the other great Catholic activist of his day, that was both deeply and personally felt, and rooted in a sure understanding of Catholic social teaching.
JOHN C. HIRSH
Washington
The writer teaches medieval literature at Georgetown University."
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