BALTIMORE (Dec. 7) - Philip Berrigan, the former Roman Catholic priest who
with his Jesuit brother Daniel led a generation of religious opposition to
the Vietnam War and the nuclear arms race, died of cancer at the age of 79,
his family said on Saturday.
Berrigan died late Friday at Jonah House, his communal living facility for
pacifists in West Baltimore, after being diagnosed with liver and kidney
cancer in October. He stopped chemotherapy after one treatment and received
last rites at a Nov. 30 ceremony officiated by the Rev. Daniel Berrigan.
''These are hair-trigger times, with well-manicured barbarians at the wheel
and our nuclear strike force poised and ready,'' he said in a statement to
friends and supporters issued earlier this week.
''The American people will prevail. So will all thoughtful and decent people
throughout the world,'' added the message, sent to well-wishers on a Jonah
House card.
Berrigan, who spent at least 11 of the past 35 years behind bars for acts of
civil disobedience, was ordained a Josephite priest in 1955 and assigned to
teach black children in Louisiana, where the Civil Rights movement inspired
him to a lifelong commitment to peace and social justice.
He and Daniel Berrigan became national figures of the anti-war movement
during the Catonsville Nine protest on May 17, 1968, when they and fellow
activists poured homemade napalm onto hundreds of Selective Service cards
outside a draft board at a Knights of Columbus hall in Catonsville, Maryland.
''I die with the conviction, held since 1968 and Catonsville, that nuclear
weapons are the scourge of the earth; to mine for them, manufacture them,
deploy them, use them, is a curse against God, the human family, and the
Earth itself,'' Berrigan said in a statement given to his wife, the former
nun Elizabeth McAlister, during the weekend before Thanksgiving.
Howard Zinn, Boston University historian and Berrigan friend, credited the
brothers with forging a path of religious civil disobedience for U.S.
Catholics from the Vietnam War to conflicts in Latin America and the Persian
Gulf.
In a statement to Reuters, Zinn described Philip Berrigan as ''one of the
heroes of our time, a man of immense courage and commitment'' whose devotion
to peace ''stands in such stark contrast to the war-makers who hold power in
Washington.
''He lived his life in an exemplary way, in a community of people who worked
with him for peace and justice, sharing their worldly goods, demonstrating
what a decent society might be like,'' Zinn said.
PLOWSHARES FOUNDER
Philip Berrigan, a World War Two veteran, helped found the Plowshares peace
movement against the modern arms race in 1980, on the Biblical ethic of
beating swords into plowshares. The group's first act was to break into a
General Electric defense plant near Philadelphia, smash the nose cones of
Mark 12A warheads and douse blueprints with blood.
''The deep, deep sense I have of him is really beyond praise, beyond words,''
Daniel Berrigan, a fellow Plowshare, said of Philip in an interview last year.
In his final clash in December 1999, he and three other Plowshare activists
broke into an Air National Guard base near Baltimore and attacked two A-10
warplanes with blood and hammers to protest the military's use of depleted
uranium in armor-piercing shells.
He was imprisoned for the act and remained behind bars until Dec. 14, 2001.
''There are times when I'd like to just sit back in my rocking chair, but I'm
going to fight all the way and hopefully die with my boots on,'' Berrigan
told Reuters in a May 2001 interview at a federal prison in Ohio.
His public appearances against violence and militarism continued into this
autumn, though he needed a walker to get around.
''Right to the end, in the midst of his dying, he was unflinching and
unswerving in his call for a world without war,'' said Richard Deats of the
Fellowship of Reconciliation, an interfaith peace group that helped Catholics
including the Berrigans, Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton unify the peace voices
of the church.
In his 1996 autobiography, ''Fighting the Lamb's War,'' Berrigan described
Jesus as a revolutionary committed to social justice and Washington as a
plantation where minorities live in shoddy housing and work at lousy jobs or
wait to be herded into prison as members of a neglected surplus populace.
''I see no point in working within an evil system. Christ was never a
reformer. He didn't advocate voting for one corrupt politician over
another,'' Berrigan wrote. ''He preached that we should dismantle, not
attempt to patch, the state.''
Born Oct. 5, 1923, in Two Harbors, Minnesota, Philip Francis Berrigan is
survived by his wife, two daughters, a son and four brothers.
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