Daniel Berrigan, priest imprisoned over Vietnam protest, dies

NEW YORK — The Rev. Daniel Berrigan, a Roman Catholic priest and peace activist who was imprisoned for burning draft files in a protest against the Vietnam War, died Saturday.

The Rev. Berrigan died at Murray-Weigel Hall, a Jesuit health care community in New York City after a long illness, said Michael Benigno, a spokesman for the Jesuits USA Northeast Province.

The Berrigan brothers entered a draft board in Catonsville, Md., on May 17, 1968, with seven other activists and removed records of young men about to be shipped off to Vietnam.

The Catonsville Nine, as they came to be known, were convicted on federal charges accusing them of destroying U.S. property and interfering with the Selective Service Act of 1967.

The Rev. Berrigan, a writer and poet, wrote about the courtroom experience in 1970 in a one-act play, “The Trial of the Catonsville Nine,” which was later made into a movie.

Much later, while visiting Paris in 1963 on a teaching sabbatical from LeMoyne College, the Rev. Berrigan met French Jesuits who spoke of the dire situation in Indochina.

Soon after that, he and his brother founded the Catholic Peace Fellowship, which helped organize protests against U.S. involvement in Vietnam.

The Rev. Berrigan traveled to North Vietnam in 1968 and returned with three American prisoners of war who were being released as a goodwill gesture.

Both were arrested that year after entering a General Electric nuclear missile site in King of Prussia, Penn., and damaging nuclear warhead nose cones.