Philip Berrigan

HAD HE been born in the old Soviet Union, Philip Berrigan would have vanished into the gulag or a psychiatric hospital. He had every credential for the dissident's role; a burning faith in his own beliefs verging at times on zealotry, buttressed by a deep humanity and an immense courage that enabled him to defy governments and challenge the "don't-rock-the-boat" mindset of conventional public opinion.

Philip Francis Berrigan, priest and peace activist: born Two Harbors, Minnesota 5 October 1923; ordained priest 1955, excommunicated 1973; married 1973 Elizabeth McAlister (one son, two daughters); died Baltimore, Maryland 6 December 2002.

Had he been born in the old Soviet Union, Philip Berrigan would have vanished into the gulag or a psychiatric hospital. He had every credential for the dissident's role; a burning faith in his own beliefs verging at times on zealotry, buttressed by a deep humanity and an immense courage that enabled him to defy governments and challenge the "don't-rock-the-boat" mindset of conventional public opinion.

Providence however decided that Berrigan would be a dissident in what he sometimes called "The American Empire". As a very young man he was a promising college baseball player who in 1943 was drafted as an infantryman in the Second World War, and performed competently enough to earn a battlefield commission as a second lieutenant.

But within a decade the fighting soldier – in his own words "a highly skilled young killer, I thought then that's what patriots did" – had become a man totally committed to peace, a Catholic priest who became a passionate and at times violent anti-war activist; first against the conflict in Vietnam and then against nuclear weapons.

The journey would take him on several occasions to prison. Along the way he fell in love with, and later married, Elizabeth McAlister, a nun, which earned both of them excommunication by the Church. Wryly, he would describe his condition as "a Catholic trying to be a Christian". For the last 30 years of his life, Berrigan's base was the Jonah House, a communal home for pacifists the couple set up in Baltimore. There he earned a modest living from writing, housepainting, and lecturing about the causes to which he devoted himself.

War, and the revulsion it bred, was the main driving force in Berrigan's conversion. By 1950 he had committed himself to the priesthood and five years later was ordained as a Josephite. His convictions were fuelled by the evils of segregation, which he had first witnessed in the treatment of black soldiers on the troop ship to Europe. A seven-year stint in New Orleans, teaching theology at an all-black parish school, only increased his determination to root out "the poisonous tree" of racism.

By the late 1960s, Vietnam was casting an ever darker shadow, and Berrigan's views were sealed: racism and war were strangling all that was good in America. "Is it possible for us," he asked, "to be vicious, brutal and violent at home, and to be fair, judicious, beneficent and idealistic abroad?" The priest became so troublesome that he was ordered by his Josephite superiors to stop speaking out against injustice. He refused, and changed his opposition to the war from words into deeds.

His first act of protest came on 17 October 1967 when he and three friends entered a public office in Baltimore and spattered Vietnam draft documents with a liquid made in part from their blood. That offence ultimately earned him a six-year jail term. Exactly seven months later came the incident which turned Philip Berrigan and his brother Daniel into national figures, when they and seven other activists set fire to hundreds of draft cards at Catonsville, Maryland, using a home-made napalm, of petrol mixed with soap.

The 1968 trial of the "Catonsville Nine" resulted in a three-and-a-half-year jail term, to run concurrently with the Baltimore sentence, for which appeals by then had been exhausted. However they did not meekly go to prison, arguing that punishment for an action that had been right was itself wrong.

Within a few days, Philip was tracked down and captured. America being America however, he became a celebrity. Along with Daniel, he featured on the cover of Time magazine and the glitziest writers queued up to profile him. But, America also being a country less tolerant of dissent than its carefully burnished image would indicate, he was widely vilified as a Communist and a traitor.

Berrigan was undeterred. In 1980 he was a co-founder of the Plowshares movement against nuclear weapons and the US/Soviet arms race. The organisation signalled its arrival by breaking into a General Electrics factory near Philadelphia.

His protests continued until the very end of his life. In 1999 he and three other activists broke into a National Guard air base near Baltimore to protest the use of depleted uranium, widely suspected of causing cancer, to strengthen anti-armour shells. He received a jail term that kept him behind bars until December 2001. "I'm going to fight all the way, and hopefully die with my boots on," he said at the time – and he did.

America is again on the brink of launching a war, this time against Iraq. In a final statement released to his friends and supporters a few days before his death, he warned of these "hair-trigger times, with well-manicured barbarians at the wheel and our nuclear strike force armed and ready".

Rupert Cornwell