Daniel Berrigan

Daniel Berrigan lived a faith that was anything but quiet. Ordained a Jesuit priest in 1952, he was a poet and professor whose conscience was forged in the fires of the 1960s. The Vietnam War transformed him from a contemplative into a revolutionary pacifist. With his brother Philip, also a priest, he led actions that were both symbolic and legally devastating. In 1968, they and seven others entered a draft board in Catonsville, Maryland, seized hundreds of Selective Service files, and burned them with homemade napalm in a parking lot. The 'Catonsville Nine' trial turned Berrigan into a national figure, his eloquent defiance from the witness stand framing destruction of property as a moral necessity. He then went underground, evading the FBI while appearing to give sermons, before being captured and serving time in federal prison. For the rest of his life, Berrigan was a steady, unyielding presence in the plowshares movement, repeatedly targeting nuclear weapons facilities. His legacy is that of a man who insisted that true Christianity demanded tangible, costly resistance to the machinery of death.