The Rev. Daniel Berrigan, a Jesuit priest and herald of the Catholic social justice movement whose name – along with his late brother, Philip, also a priest – became synonymous with anti-war activism in the Vietnam era, has died.
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Berrigan grew up in Syracuse, New York, with his parents and five brothers. The Roman Catholic priest and Vietnam war protester, Berrigan has died.
Berrigan gained recognition in 1968 when he traveled to Hanoi to receive three USA military pilots who were the first prisoners of war to be released by the North Vietnamese since the start of the US bombing campaign.
The cause was a cardiovascular ailment, said the Rev. James Yannarell, a priest affiliated with the Fordham Jesuit community.In May 1968, Father Berrigan, along with his brother and fellow priest Philip Berrigan and seven other pacifists, entered a Selective Service office in Catonsville, Maryland. At 92, he took part in the Occupy Wall Street movement in New York’s Zuccotti Park, Jesuits Magazine said. Another brother, Jerome “Jerry” Berrigan, who was also an activist, died previous year at age 95. He joined the Jesuit order after high school and taught preparatory school in New Jersey before being ordained a priest in 1952. He went underground, on the lam from safe house to safe house, and spent four months dodging an Federal Bureau of Investigation manhunt.
Georgetown University theology professor Chester Gillis once said of Father Berrigan: “If you were to identify Catholic prophets in the 20th century, he’d be right there with Dorothy Day or Thomas Merton”.
“It was Philip who came up with the idea”, Mr. Berrigan told America in 2009. “His influence on the peace movement, particularly during the Vietnam War, can not be overstated, but his aim was not simply peace in Indochina, but peace everywhere”. Mr. Berrigan also wrote a play, “The Trial of the Catonsville Nine”.
“[His brother] Philip Berrigan had been the main force behind Catonsville, but it was mostly Daniel who mined the incident and its aftermath for literary meaning – a process already underway when the F.B.I. caught up with him on Block Island, off the Rhode Island coast, on August 11, 1970”.
Among those jailed was actor Martin Sheen, who once said, “Mother Teresa drove me back to Catholicism, but Daniel Berrigan keeps me there”. Together, they began the Plowshares Movement, an anti-nuclear weapons campaign in 1980.
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The two were featured on the cover of Time Magazine in 1971. His brother Philip died in 2002.
