When Phil Berrigan died last December, I was reading Chris Hedges' wise and angry new book, War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning [available from FOR]. Hedges, a veteran New York Times war correspondent, describes how "myth makers - historians, war correspondents, filmmakers, novelists, and the state" - can manipulate the populace and encourage support for "our boys" at war. In the end, Hedges says, war "gives us purpose, meaning, a reason for living" - until, that is, disillusionment arrives, too late to bring the dead and haunted back to life.

The thesis was hardly novel to Phil Berrigan. He read voraciously, and understood very well that the seeds of future wars were planted with the myths and lies offered up by our governments, spread by much of our media and entertainment industry, and taught in our schools. Opinionated he certainly was, but the thing to remember about him was that he was more often than not correct when he warned of the calamities states armed to the teeth could bring about. Another thing to remember about his luminous life was that, to the end, he was an absolute, unapologetic pacifist. His pacifism was born of "a faith that passeth understanding," his unyielding belief in the many biblical affirmations of peacemaking and justice.

For him and his wife Liz, and their Jonah House companions, it was a fairly simple proposition. "For a long time I've been astonished by the fact that the human family has not caught on, not caught on at all, to the bankruptcy of violence and killing," he told the Philadelphia Inquirer just weeks before his death. "Violence is, was, always will be, bankrupt, anti-human, criminal - always!" Not for him esoteric rationalizations about allegedly just wars or specious debates about national security. For him, true security meant no weapons of mass destruction, including the vast numbers stockpiled and still being developed by the US. Then, too, as Dan once put it about Phil's outlook, he passionately fought the "vile social triage being worked against the poor," among whom Phil and his wife and three children lived in Baltimore.

Is it any wonder that our government sought to silence this civil rights and antiwar crusader in the courts, which almost always refused to even hear him explain why he had acted against state military property? Many of us remember Dan's famously memorable remark after Catonsville: "Better to burn paper than babies." Phil's advice was just as simple and direct when he quoted Thoreau: "Dissent without resistance is consent." He was of course talking about resistance without violence. For him that mostly involved going to prison.

A few days before his death, I received a card from Phil, sent by Jonah House. After quoting Luke 18.1 ("Then he told them a parable abut the necessity of praying always and never losing hope"), he wrote: "These are hair-trigger times - with well-manicured barbarians at the wheel, and our nuclear strike force poised and ready. The American people will prevail, so will all thoughtful and decent people throughout the world. "Thank you for your love and prayers. Gandhi used to claim that prayer is more important than action. What is certain is that neither is a substitute for the other." - Richard Deats

There are many other ways of nonviolently battling warmakers that do not include prison. Personally, I have always wondered if Phil and Liz couldn't have done far more on the streets and in schools, churches, and synagogues than penned up in government cages. Could they and their colleagues have accomplished more by teaching, hectoring, lecturing, picketing, and arousing and inspiring the broad American center that also feared and hated war, than by accepting prison, as the recently deceased Jesuit pacifist Richard McSorley, Phil's friend, once suggested to me?

All the same, right or wrong, that wasn't Phil's way. He was, after all, a nonviolent revolutionary and peacemaker in open rebellion against his country's perpetual war policies and his church's rigid bureaucracy. No wonder his government and his church tried desperately to keep him quiet.

"Whatever became of Phil Berrigan?" Dan once asked rhetorically, sardonically, in the late Seventies or early Eighties, well after the brothers' lionization in the media and among opponents of the war in Vietnam had come to an end. His answer is now all too relevant. While the "uglifiers, yuppies, developers, corporate pirates are positively celebrated," (not to mention today's bellicose war party) Phil remained "unrepentantly opposed to nuclear violence and its lethal spin-offs..."

When Jim O'Grady and I completed our biography of Phil and Dan Berrigan, we concluded that when they passed from this life we would need a new generation of Berrigan brothers who tried to follow the way beckoned by the prophet Amos (5:14): "Seek good, and not evil, that ye may live." I believe Phil was a prophet who on his deathbed rightly and honorably described nuclear weaponry for what it really is: "a curse against God, the human family, and the earth itself."

That's Phil's legacy to the millions of Americans of all political persuasions who today proudly and fearlessly resist the drums of war that threaten our present and our future.

Murray Polner chairs the Jewish Peace Fellowship. He wrote No Victory Parades: The Return of the Vietnam Veteran and co-authored with Jim O'Grady, Disarmed and Dangerous: The Radical Lives & Times of Daniel & Philip Berrigan (Basic Books, 1997; Westview Press, 1998. Available from FOR).