As Catholicism is having a moment, “Divine Intervention” explores the beginnings of the faith-driven peace movement still making waves today.

Frida Berrigan 
May 16, 2025
https://wagingnonviolence.org/2025/05/timely-new-podcast-divine-intervention-documents-catholic-left-war-resistance/

I know I am not the only one turning to parasocial relationships to stave off despair and anxiety in the Trump era.

I’m listening to adrienne maree brown, Ezra Klein and Sam, Saaed and Zach of “Vibe Check.” I get a lot out of one-sided conversations with thought-leaders who are focused on contextualizing and complicating the present, lifting up voices of current resistance and poking fun at the absurdity of fascism 3.0.

But I also need some storytelling and inspiration, and I am finding that (and more) in “Divine Intervention.” This 10-part podcast series tells the 50-year old story of a small, marginal group of young, white Catholic pacifists.

I am here to tell you: It is helping me get through it all.

The action centers around Dorchester, Massachusetts and the Paulist Center in Boston — a venerable downtown institution transformed by a cadre of young priests in the mid 1960s. They dusted out the cobwebs of the faith, roused (and rousted) the older priests, embraced the liberatory spirit of Vatican II and made going to church “a happening,” with slideshows (the Instragram decks and PowerPoint presentations of their day), music, Bible study and community engagement.

It was totally consistent and utterly revolutionary, then, that the Paulist Center priests would offer sanctuary to a conscientious objector named Paul Couming — and become the center of the local antiwar movement. There are so many gorgeously captured moments in this series, but one I keep thinking about is the stand off between the Catholic FBI agents outside the Paulist Center — who are uncomfortable entering the sanctuary — and the Catholic peace activists who had made the sanctuary their temporary home.

It took the FBI three days to get Paul Couming out. In that time, hundreds of young people supported him, slept in the sanctuary, had meals and meetings and art making, radicalizing one another and building a culture of resistance that endured long past his arrest and trial. That scene would unfold very differently today, but show host Brendan Patrick Hughes makes the most of this clash within Catholic culture.

Hughes is a Gen X director and comedian. On the pod, he comes off as being in affable awe of his subjects, but he stays an arms length removed — dropping in occasionally to tell the listener that he’s not very religious, that he’s staggered by what his subjects are saying and doing. As I listened along to the podcast, checking back often to see if another episode had dropped, I found myself wondering who he knows in the story, how he is connected, how he got this access? He tells a very personal set of stories with both distance and intimacy. He zooms out to fill in larger geo-political context and zooms in to share archival elements like family letters and a book of meeting notes by a mysterious Father X.

“Divine Intervention” doesn’t have the same “wow, my parents were big activists” vibe that Zayd Ayers Dohrn conveys in the excellent “Mother Country Radicals” podcast about the Weather Underground. But there is an insider/outsider toggle that keeps listeners curious and invested.

Hughes wrote on Instagram, “I have been trying to get this story into the world for 20 years.” In some ways, it is a story I know pretty well — my mom (Elizabeth McAlister), father (Phil Berrigan) and uncle (Daniel Berrigan) walk in and out of the action recounted in the episodes of “Divine Intervention,” but they are not the focus. Some of the characters are familiar, and I have heard some of the stories before, like the “movement” (of hu-manure) that started the actual movement of draft file destruction. But hearing it told so well allowed me to be stunned and inspired by the power of the Catholic left.

From Paul Couming’s sanctuary at the Paulist Center, “Divine Intervention” leads the listener through a series of actions already well documented in the canon of the Catholic left — namely the Baltimore Four and Catonsville Nine draft board raids, which kicked off the hundred or more other draft board actions through the late 1960s and early 1970s. (For those wanting to go deeper, check out Lynne Sachs’s “Investigation of a Flame,” Sue Hagedorn’s “Devout and Dangerous” and Joe Tropea’s “Hit and Stay.”)

From there we hear about the 1970 Women Against Daddy Warbucks action in New York City and the Media, Pennsylvania break-in of 1971 (which Betsy Medsgers recounts with cinematic verve in “The Burglary”) and the now-infamous Harrisburg Conspiracy Trial, where letters my parents wrote to one another were intercepted and used to incriminate a group of activists on fabricated charges. We also hear about the Camden 28 draft board raid (subject of the superb 2007 documentary by Anthony Giacchino).

The characters in “Divine Intervention” experience and participate in all these resistance efforts, and Hughes has the time and the first-hand accounts to thread them (and more) all together to tell a bigger story than any one of these extraordinary episodes in American social movement history. The bigger story is one of romance and family, culture and resistance.

As he tells the story of the Camden 28 — where the activists were entrapped by a very helpful and handy provocateur on the FBI payroll — Hughes is able to emphasize that these are very real and very scared people risking everything for their beliefs. He documents how the action and its aftermath ripped families apart (including peace activists with FBI agents for brothers). The activists faced down FBI guns, decades in prison and courts that seemed stacked against them. They weren’t master strategists, they didn’t have high-paid PR people and they went to trial mostly representing themselves. They were smart and dedicated people flying by the seat of their pants — or held fast by faith (or a little of both) and working in community.

Spoiler alert: They also had the enviable experience of knowing they were right, experiencing vindication and exoneration in real time. I sobbed as I listened to the conclusion of the Camden 28 story, thinking of something my uncle, Daniel Berrigan, would always say, “Friendships are stronger than battleships.” Perhaps he learned that lesson while supporting the defendants in the Camden 28 courtroom.

Most of the people who share their lives and stories with Hughes are not the bold-faced, front-page names that have endured for the history books. I love that “Divine Intervention” centers the women of the movement, who keep the work moving, the efforts focused and laugh the whole time. Hughes celebrates the women who weave together mothering, grocery shopping, storytelling and resistance — holding the practical and the possible, the prophetic and the principled all at once! Women like Sister Anne Walsh, Anne Tobin, Cookie Ridolfi and Marianne Woodward rail against the clericalism and the sexism of the Catholic left. Hughes bolsters this with commentary from Charles Meconis, a dedicated Catholic war resister who was trained as a sociologist and wrote “With Clumsy Grace: The American Catholic left, 1961-1975.”

The Catholic left was never big, but “Divine Intervention” reminds us that the movement had a big impact. It is a lesson worth remembering as Catholicism is having “a moment.” The death of Pope Francis on Easter Monday and the appointment of the first American Pope, Robert Prevost of Chicago, aka Pope Leo XIV, means there is more curiosity about all things Catholic than usual — and an opportunity for Catholic social teaching, liberation theology and Gospel nonviolence to have a moment too. We need it as a counter to white Christian nationalism and the prominence of Catholics like JD Vance and Marco Rubio within the Trump administration.

It is worth remembering that the Catholic left is still here. We might not be front page news or on the newscrawl during the endless cycle of depressing updates from Fox News or MSNBC, but we are still doing the work. We are part of the pro-immigration/anti-ICE, anti-deportation movement. We are war tax resisters who redirect our money to worthy causes or risk jail time and foreclosure. We are in local parishes throughout the country led by lay people and women. We are part of the Catholic Worker and the labor movement and Veterans for Peace. We are present in feminist and queer movements and the anti-nuclear movement and every facet of the environmental movement. Organizations like Pax Christi and Call to Action draw inspiration from the legacy of the Catholic left. Occasional conspiracies like the Plowshares movement — where people trespass onto military bases or the campuses of weapons manufacturers to symbolically transform their destructive equipment into tools of peace — that’s the Catholic left too.

We don’t have a leader or a website, you can’t follow the Catholic left on Instagram or Facebook, but you can become a part of it. We run soup kitchens and pantries and shelters for the unhoused. We go on fasts, we march and we picket. We make art, music and liturgy. We block bombmakers, interrupt ICE assaults, hang banners and hold signs as religiously (if not moreso) as we go to church. Many of the people who share their stories in “Divine Intervention” are still doing all of this too.

My mother was always fond of pointing out that the Latin root of the word conspiracy is “breathe together” (con: together, spira: breath). Whenever she said this, I was reminded of a play on the old adage “You can take the woman out of the convent, but you can’t take the convent out of the woman.” But that is the heart of the Catholic left: People breathing, praying and studying together — and discovering their courage and following their conscience in community. Hughes’s storytelling in “Divine Intervention” gives us a piece of our history to cherish, celebrate and move us forward into the conspiracies and community called for by today’s crises.