It was 30 years ago yesterday that a group of nine Catholic activists broke into the offices of the Selective Service on Frederick Road in Catonsville, seized draft records and burned them in the parking lot using homemade napalm.
The action on May 17, 1968, by the Catonsville Nine, who were arrested and tried in federal court in Baltimore, became a nationwide cause celebre that led to as many as 100 similar actions in protest of the Vietnam War.
The leaders were siblings who were Roman Catholic priests, Daniel and Philip Berrigan, who became known colloquially as the Berrigan brothers.
Time has not mellowed the brothers. Both are still activists who engage in civil disobedience, mostly in protest of nuclear weapons.
Philip Berrigan, 74, left the priesthood, married and raised three children at Jonah House, a community of fellow activists in Baltimore. He is serving a two-year sentence at a federal prison in Petersburg, Va., for vandalizing a Navy guided-missile destroyer in February 1997 at Maine's Bath Iron Works.
The Rev. Daniel Berrigan, 77, lives in a Jesuit community in Manhattan. He recently finished teaching a course at Fordham University on "Poets in Torment." He will give a full schedule of spiritual retreats nationwide this summer. He is awaiting the publication of several new books, including a meditation on his namesake, the apocalyptic prophet Daniel. And he is awaiting sentencing for trespassing after he participated in an act of civil disobedience on Good Friday at a war museum on the Hudson River in New York.
Both look back at Catonsville with nostalgia and wonder.
"It was certainly a watershed day," says Daniel Berrigan. "I knew beyond a doubt that my life would never be the same."
"It was the beginning of a large-scale check on the government regarding the Vietnam War and the conduct of the war," says Philip Berrigan in an interview from prison. "It was followed by about 100 raids against the Selective Service here in this country.
"The government couldn't very well replace the files," he says. "They weren't microfilming the files at that time, so they weren't replaceable. So those young guys, I would say thousands of them, did not have to go to Vietnam and kill and be killed. Someone called it the ultra-resistance. It was perhaps the most radical act against the war up to that time."
