Philip Berrigan

Philip Berrigan, the patriarch of the Roman Catholic anti-war movement whose conscience collided with national policy for more than three decades, died last night of liver and kidney cancer. He was 79 and had lived at Jonah House on the grounds of a West Baltimore cemetery for much of the past decade. He led the Catonsville Nine, who staged one of the most dramatic protests of the 1960s. They doused homemade napalm on a small bonfire of draft records in a Catonsville parking lot and ignited a generation of anti-war dissent.

Phyllis Brandt has a different take on the act of civil disobedience performed by the nine men and women who became known as the Catonsville Nine in 1968 after they destroyed and burned draft records with homemade napalm. Brandt - who was then Phyllis Morsberger - is the last survivor among the three clerks who were working May 17, 1968, when the Catonsville Selective Service Local Board No. 33 was raided by a group led by the Rev. Daniel Berrigan and his brother, Philip, a Josephite priest.

Edenton, N.C.--At age 70, Philip Berrigan doesn't retire, he does jail time.Defrocked priest, civil rights activist, anti-war protester, constant thorn in the side of the American defense establishment, Berrigan deals in theology, symbolism and action.He will not be silenced, and he will not go away.So here he sits inside the Chowan County Detention Center on the banks of Albemarle Sound, serving part of a one-year sentence for taking hammer and blood to a fighter jet last Dec. 7 at Seymour Johnson Air Force Base in Goldsboro.

Philip Berrigan's grave sits inside an overgrown West Baltimore cemetery, giving inspiration to members of Jonah House who continue to protest war, violence and U.S. military spending from a house they built there. Eight years ago, Jonah House's war resisters, led by Berrigan and his wife, Elizabeth McAlister, became the official caretakers of St. Peter's graveyard, the final resting place of former parishioners of St. Peter the Apostle Roman Catholic Church, at Hollins and Poppleton streets.

Longtime Roman Catholic peace activist Philip Berrigan has been sentenced to five years in prison for contempt of court because he wouldn't apologize for a remark he made to a Howard County District Court judge.Mr. Berrigan, 68, a former Josephite priest and a leader in the peace movement since the Vietnam War, had accompanied eight of his colleagues to an Ellicott City courthouse for their trial yesterday on charges of trespassing at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab in Columbia.The charges against the protesters, from the Baltimore Emergency Response Network, stemmed from a Dec. 5 protest at the lab.Group members have been convicted several times for protesting at the lab.The group admitted entering the grounds of the lab to protest development of nuclear weapons systems.

Philip Berrigan's grave sits inside an overgrown West Baltimore cemetery, giving inspiration to members of Jonah House who continue to protest war, violence and U.S. military spending from a house they built there. Eight years ago, Jonah House's war resisters, led by Berrigan and his wife, Elizabeth McAlister, became the official caretakers of St. Peter's graveyard, the final resting place of former parishioners of St. Peter the Apostle Roman Catholic Church, at Hollins and Poppleton streets.

In the warm, comfortable living room of Jonah House, the "community of conscience" he calls home, 75-year-old Philip Berrigan greets a visitor, then settles back into a rocking chair. He looks for all the world like a fellow ready to simply sit and rock and whittle. He's not.Berrigan has spent half a lifetime fighting for what he calls "peace and justice." He's preached, protested, demonstrated and been arrested in myriad actions against war and nuclear weapons. He has no plans to stop now. Barely five months off a two-year prison stretch he did for an anti-war protest, what Berrigan wants to talk about this day is a demonstration that could land him right back in the federal pen.In the morning, he'll be out in front of a federal office building, protesting on behalf of members of the Jonah House community who have been barred from returning home by the federal probation system.

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.

The mourners filled the street yesterday in West Baltimore because Philip Berrigan gave focus to the anti-war movement 40 years ago. They packed a black parish because Mr. Berrigan confronted racism and patriarchy and injustice long after the civil rights movement. They braved sub-freezing temperatures to say farewell to an artilleryman and infantry lieutenant turned Roman Catholic priest, remembered as a husband, father, peace activist and prisoner. "I didn't know him but I've been a longtime admirer of him so I came here out of respect," said Michael Redmond, 50, who drove from Philadelphia to join several hundred mourners.

Chicago. -- The end of the Cold War has taken the doomsday note out of our politics. We have relaxed a bit. We have begun to cut defense spending (but not enough). There is talk of bringing our troops home, from various places and at various stages.But one thing we tend to forget, until given sharp reminders from Ukraine or from North Korea, is that the world is still chock full of nuclear weaponry, and access to nuclear material and knowledge is growing fast. For instance, all those nuclear experts suddenly out of work behind what was once the Iron Curtain may want to do something with their investment of time and intellect in the creation of destructive implements.

THE YOUNG black woman, dressed in black jeans and a tattered Maryland Terrapins jacket that had its best days behind it, entered the doors of St. Peter Claver Church right after I did. Had she followed me? Perhaps. I had parked in the next block of Fremont Avenue shortly before 7 p.m. Sunday and trekked a short but frigid half-block to the church. It had been years since I'd been here. And now I confronted the woman with a look of desperation in her eyes. She was HIV positive, she told me. Homeless and hungry.

The mourners filled the street yesterday in West Baltimore because Philip Berrigan gave focus to the anti-war movement 40 years ago. They packed a black parish because Mr. Berrigan confronted racism and patriarchy and injustice long after the civil rights movement. They braved sub-freezing temperatures to say farewell to an artilleryman and infantry lieutenant turned Roman Catholic priest, remembered as a husband, father, peace activist and prisoner. "I didn't know him but I've been a longtime admirer of him so I came here out of respect," said Michael Redmond, 50, who drove from Philadelphia to join several hundred mourners.

Philip Berrigan, the patriarch of the Roman Catholic anti-war movement whose conscience collided with national policy for more than three decades, died last night of liver and kidney cancer. He was 79 and had lived at Jonah House on the grounds of a West Baltimore cemetery for much of the past decade. He led the Catonsville Nine, who staged one of the most dramatic protests of the 1960s. They doused homemade napalm on a small bonfire of draft records in a Catonsville parking lot and ignited a generation of anti-war dissent.

Philip Berrigan uses a walker to hobble slowly to the lectern in the library at West Chester University in southeastern Pennsylvania. He seems frail, but perhaps that's because he's always been so robust. He's lost weight and his hair is white and his voice soft and hollow when he begins to speak. Thinness has given his face a craggy, monumental look. His deep-set eyes are shadowed by the overhead lights in this elegant, wood-paneled library room. At 78, he has perhaps earned the face he deserves.

THE BIBLICAL OBSERVATION about the prophet without honor in his own country has taken a sadly ironic turn for Philip F. Berrigan, Baltimore's immutable peace activist. Berrigan remains locked in a Maryland prison for protesting the use of depleted-uranium ammunition by American and NATO troops during the war in Kosovo. But last week health fears surged across Europe about possible depleted-uranium-caused cancers among soldiers serving as peacekeepers in Kosovo. Leaders of a half-dozen European countries demanded inquiries into the potential for cancer among their soldiers exposed to dust or debris from radioactive depleted-uranium anti-tank projectiles.

Peace activist is a peculiar target for a judicial crackdown Local jurists, battered by much criticism of alleged lenient sentencing practices, must be buoyed by a recent decision by one of their colleagues. Soft on crime? Not James T. Smith Jr. a Baltimore County Circuit Court Judge who demonstrated his machismo by sentencing activist Philip Berrigan to 30 months in the pokey for yet another of any peace protests ("Activist sent to prison for warplane damages," March 24). Even the prosecutor in the case suggested guidelines ranging from probation to one year, but the intent of the bench was clearly to remove this troublesome priest and his dedicated colleagues from our midst for a long while.

Phyllis Brandt has a different take on the act of civil disobedience performed by the nine men and women who became known as the Catonsville Nine in 1968 after they destroyed and burned draft records with homemade napalm. Brandt - who was then Phyllis Morsberger - is the last survivor among the three clerks who were working May 17, 1968, when the Catonsville Selective Service Local Board No. 33 was raided by a group led by the Rev. Daniel Berrigan and his brother, Philip, a Josephite priest.

Philip Berrigan is the great enduring figure of resistance to his admirers, who gather at his trials like a vast extended family. He is the non-patriarchal patriarch of a clan whose totem might be the dove of peace. A kind of shudder ripples through his supporters in the courtroom when Judge James T. Smith sentences Berrigan to 30 months in prison with the crisp dispatch with which he imposes a life sentence on a murderer. Berrigan is 76 years old, so you ask Elizabeth McAlister, his wife of 31 years, if she's ever thought he might die in jail, perhaps alone.