(C) Common Dreams
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Philip Berrigan, Former Priest and Peace Advocate in the Vietnam War Era, Dies at 79 [1]
['Daniel Lewis']
Date: 2002-12-08
Philip F. Berrigan, the former Roman Catholic priest who led the draft board raids that galvanized opposition to the Vietnam War in the late 1960's, died on Friday in Baltimore after a lifetime of battling ''the American Empire,'' as he called it, over the morality of its military and social policies. He was 79.
His family said the cause was cancer.
An Army combat veteran sickened by the killing in World War II, Mr. Berrigan came to be one of the most radical pacifists of the 20th century -- and, for a time in the Vietnam period, a larger-than-life figure in the convulsive struggle over the country's direction.
In the late 60's he was a Catholic priest serving a poor black parish in Baltimore and seeing nothing that would change his conviction that war, racism and poverty were inseparable strands of a corrupt economic system. His Josephite superiors had hustled him out of Newburgh, N.Y., for aggressive civil rights and antiwar activity there; the ''fatal blow,'' he said, had been a talk to a community affairs council in which he asked, ''Is it possible for us to be vicious, brutal, immoral and violent at home and be fair, judicious, beneficent and idealistic abroad?''
He hardly missed a beat after his transfer to Baltimore, founding an antiwar group, Peace Mission, whose operations included picketing the homes of Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara and Secretary of State Dean Rusk in December 1966. By the fall of 1967 Father Berrigan and three friends were ready to try a new tactic. On Oct. 17, they walked into the Baltimore Customs House, distracted the draft board clerks and methodically spattered Selective Service records with a red liquid made partly from their own blood.
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[1] Url:
https://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/08/us/philip-berrigan-former-priest-peace-advocate-vietnam-war-era-dies-79.html
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