He was one of Daniel Berrigan’s attorneys.
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He died after a battle will illness at Murray-Weigel Hall, a Jesuit healthcare community in NY.
“He died peacefully”, Benigno said.
Berrigan, his brother and fellow priest Philip and Trappist monk Thomas Merton founded an inter-ecclesiastical coalition against the Vietnam War. Together with seven others they burned the files.
They were dubbed the Catonsville Nine, convicted on federal charges that accused them of destroying USA property and interfering with the Selective Service Act of 1967, The Associated Press reported in The Guardian. All were sentenced on November 9, 1968 to prison terms ranging from two to 3.5 years. He also wrote a play, The Trial of the Catonsville Nine.
Asked in a magazine interview for an inscription for his gravestone, Fr Berrigan said: “It was never tiresome”.
“For many, many American Catholics, what it meant to be American and what it meant to be Catholic was radically altered by the witness of Daniel Berrigan”, wrote James Carroll, a former priest who was friends with Berrigan, in a reflection for The New Yorker. He joined the Jesuit order after high school and taught at Prep in Jersey City before being ordained a priest in 1952. He is Berrigan’s literary executor and the editor of five books of his writings, including Daniel Berrigan: Essential Writings as well the poetry collection And the Risen Bread.
He more than 50 books, and his first volume of poetry, Time Without Number, won the Lamont Prize in 1957.
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.
Maguire said that as a young man, Berrigan knew the cost of war, when his four brothers left home to join the Second World War.
“I was blown away by the courage and effrontery, really, of my brother”, Fr Berrigan recalled in a 2006 interview on the Democracy Now radio program.
Their case was unsuccessfully appealed, which led the Berrigan brothers and three co-defendants went into hiding. Daniel Berrigan was released in 1972 after serving about two years.
“It was Philip who came up with the idea”, Mr. Berrigan told America in 2009.
The Berrigan brothers continued to be active in the peace movement long after Catonsville.
Father Berrigan later helped found the Plowshares Movement and engaged in protests against nuclear weapons.
In 1980, the Berrigans and six others broke into a GeneralElectric nuclear missile site in Pennsylvania, and damagedwarhead nose cones and poured blood onto documents and files.
Fr Berrigan moved into a Jesuit residence in Manhattan in 1975.
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“I owe him my heart, my life and vocation”, said Bill Wylie-Kellermann, pastor of St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Detroit”, to America.
