Jesuit priest known for burning draft cards during Vietnam War
NEW YORK — The Rev. Daniel Berrigan, a Roman Catholic priest and peace activist who was imprisoned for burning draft files in a protest against the Vietnam War, died Saturday. He was 94.
Berrigan died at Murray-Weigel Hall, a Jesuit health care community in New York City, after a “long illness,” according to Michael Benigno, a spokesman for the Jesuits USA Northeast Province.
“He died peacefully,” Benigno said.
Berrigan and his younger brother, the Rev. Philip Berrigan, emerged as leaders of the radical anti-war movement in the 1960s.
The Berrigan brothers entered a draft board in Catonsville, Md., on May 17, 1968, with eight other activists and removed records of young men about to be shipped off to Vietnam. The group took the files outside and burned them in garbage cans.
The Catonsville Nine, as they came to be known, were convicted on federal charges accusing them of destroying U.S. property and interfering with the Selective Service Act of 1967. All were sentenced on Nov. 9, 1968 to prison terms ranging from two to 3½ years.
When asked in 2009 by “America,” a national Catholic magazine, whether he had any regrets, Berrigan replied: “I could have done sooner the things I did, like Catonsville.”
Berrigan, a writer and poet, wrote about the courtroom experience in 1970 in a one-act play, “The Trial of the Catonsville Nine,” which was later made into a movie.
Berrigan grew up in Syracuse, N.Y., with his parents and five brothers. He joined the Jesuit order after high school and taught in New Jersey before being ordained a priest in 1952.
As a seminarian, Berrigan wrote poetry. His work captured the attention of an editor at Macmillan who referred the material to poet Marianne Moore. Her endorsement led to the publication of Berrigan’s “Time Without Number,” which won the Lamont Poetry Prize in 1957.
Berrigan credited Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker newspaper, with introducing him to the pacifist movement and influencing his thinking about war.
Much later, while visiting Paris in 1963 on a teaching sabbatical from LeMoyne College, Berrigan met French Jesuits who spoke of the dire situation in Indochina. Soon after that, he and his brother founded the Catholic Peace Fellowship, which helped organize protests against U.S. involvement in Vietnam.
Berrigan traveled to North Vietnam in 1968 and returned with three American prisoners of war who were being released as a goodwill gesture. He said that while there, he witnessed some of the destruction and suffering caused by the war.
Berrigan was teaching at Cor- nell University when his brother asked him to join a group of activists for the Catonsville demonstration. Philip Berrigan was at the time awaiting sentencing for a 1967 protest in Baltimore during which demonstrators poured blood on draft records.
“I was blown away by the courage and effrontery, really, of my brother,” Berrigan recalled in a 2006 interview on the Democracy Now radio program.
After the Catonsville case had been unsuccessfully appealed, the Berrigan brothers and three of their co-defendants went underground. Philip Berrigan turned himself in to authorities in April 1969 at a Manhattan church. The FBI arrested Daniel Berrigan four months later at the Rhode Island home of theologian William Stringfellow.