"I have a brief message to you who have come from far and near to share our agony over the fate of good men and women in a desperate time.
"The tawdry, grotesque proceedings of the past months are over, and they have taught us a great deal: that human goodness is a mortally dangerous liability for Americans, even as human evil is a marketable asset. Philip Berrigan is in chains today; Boyd Douglas is a free citizen. That simple news must stick in your throat and mine, reading as we do this week the Passion story: 'Then Judas, one of his friends, went to the chief priests and magistrates in secret and said, "What will you give me and I will betray him" And they appointed to him: 1500 dollars for the capture of the Flower City people, 200 dollars for a letter leading to the capture of Daniel Berrigan, some thousands of dollars marked in their ledgers "For services rendered." Which is to say, he entered an agreement with them to deliver Jesus in secret.'
"When goodness is punished and evil rewarded, when the Son of Man goes to his death and the betrayer pockets his silver — when, moreover, Catholic FBI agents, Catholic prosecutors and Catholic informers savage the lives of nuns and priests — we may be sure that a new page has indeed turned in the history of our people and the history of the war.
"Read with me the heading of that new page. It is entitled the twenty-four chapter of the gospel of Matthew. It says: 'And Jesus was led from church to state, and condemned by both . . . And informers came forward to condemn him, but their testimony did not agree; and Pilate washed his hands and said, "I am innocent of the blood of this just man; look you to it" . . . And they crucified him there.'
"Which being translated to Harrisburg might read: 'Domestic Vietnamization is complete. The pacification of peacemakers is successful. The war has come home.' In the case of these troublemakers, in an older German phrase: 'A definitive solution has been arrived at.'
"Dear friends, this is not a day to intoxicate ourselves with a rhetoric of power. If any of us were so retarded as to require still another lesson in the methods of war, Harrisburg would bring it home to us: Before the overwhelming American assault on the rights and lives of innocent peoples, we Americans are as powerless and as expendable as the Vietnamese.
"Go tell that to your sons and daughters. Tell them Philip Berrigan has undergone nearly three years in prison for the crime of burning papers instead of children. Tell them the Harrisburg Seven thought of your children as they endured the Kangaroos and their court. Tell them the Passion story of Harrisburg, how perhaps it struck home to parents, teachers priests who gathered here why this day is different from all other days. Tell your children that, in such times, prison may be honorable and freedom a disgrace. Share with them the bitter herbs which are the daily portion of those in exile, those in jail, those in courts, those in resistance, those in underground — those in graves.
"And above all, for Christ's sake, tell them that no man or woman was ever raised from the dead who had not first tasted death. How you came to understand this; how at Harrisburg you died a little, and got born a little. How you began to see, at least I measure, that the fury loosed on the Harrisburg Seven was rattling above you also. How, in Harrisburg, you began to grope along the narrowing passage into a human future; a choice, that is, between the conniving, guilt-ridden 'good German' and the resisting criminal of peace.
"Tell the children, please, that Philip and his friends and his brother embraced them at Harrisburg, and wished them well. Tell them we prayed that they might someday choose prison before killing, lives before property, official disgrace before bloodstained silver.
"All of you, Jews and Gentiles, women and men and children, pass over with us, from death to life!"