The American Jesuit priest Father Daniel Berrigan, who has died aged 94, formed a radical partnership with his younger brother, Philip, that energised the movement against the Vietnam war in the 1960s and created a tradition of pacifist activism that lasted a generation. Unlike Philip, a former Josephite who gave up the priesthood and married an ex-nun, Daniel remained in holy orders as a Jesuit thinker, writer and teacher, and a well-regarded poet. If Philip was the heart of the anti-war movement, Daniel’s intellectual and theological contributions made him the brains.
He made consistent denunciations of the “war-making sins” of the state, while a strong strain of philosophical anarchism caused him to rage against what he called “American military imperialism”. His detractors, many from within the Catholic church’s liberal wing, maintained that his teachings alienated as many as they recruited. Berrigan, in one of several well-known aphorisms, retorted that “a good peace movement starts out small and gets smaller”.
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