Twenty years ago, the Berrigan brothers and seven other Roman Catholic pacifists marched into a draft board office here, grabbed files from the drawers, then took them out and burned them with homemade napalm. The May 17, 1968, protest by the ``Catonsville 9'' inspired similar protests elsewhere and marked the entry of radical Catholics into the anti-war movement. Two decades later, most members of the Catonsville 9 have joined other anti-war protesters in society's mainstream, although they continue to espouse the ideals that prompted them to go to prison. But three of the eight surviving members are still defying the U.S. government in the cause of nuclear disarmament. This town of 48,000 west of Baltimore housed the draft board offices for Baltimore County, the suburban area that surrounds the city. On the day of the protest, the group, led by priests Daniel and Philip Berrigan, walked into a second-floor office, yanked 600 files from the drawers, took them out to the parking lot and burned them. They then joined hands and said the Lord's Prayer as they waited to be arrested. ``We were tired of hearing the government trying to discredit the peace movement as long-haired, hippy, fag kids. It was not just a movement by people who were draft dodgers,'' said defendant George Mische, now a 50-year-old labor organizer in St. Cloud, Minn. The symbolic burning, coming just five weeks after Martin Luther King Jr. was shot and a month before Robert F. Kennedy would meet an assassin's bullet, threw tinder on opposition to the Vietnam conflict, and sparked similiar draft record burnings in Milwaukee, Washington, Chicago and elsewhere. Thousands of people, many of them priests and nuns as well as anti-war activists such as Tom Hayden and Abbie Hoffman, marched in the streets of Baltimore during the week-long trial in October 1968. The nine defendants argued that the evil of the Vietnam War required persons of conscience to fight it. But they were convicted of destruction of federal property and spent anywhere from 9{ months to 3{ years in prison. Defendant Philip Berrigan spent the longest time in prison. Now a former priest, married and the father of three, he said recently that he has no intention of retiring from his career as a peaceful violator of U.S. laws. ``We can't very well do that because of the state of the world, '' he said. ``We're killing ourselves, and some of us are not making a murmur about it.'' Berrigan, 64, is incarcerated in a York County, Va., jail for throwing blood on Tomahawk nuclear weapons aboard the USS Iowa in Norfolk. His brother, the Rev. Daniel Berrigan, 66, lives in a Jesuit community in New York. He is free on bond appealing a prison sentence for damaging missile warheads at a General Electric Co. plant in King of Prussia, Pa., in 1980. Philip Berrigan is appealing the same conviction. Artist Tom Lewis, 48, of Worcester, Mass., is the only other Catonsville 9 member still actively practicing civil disobedience. Last month, he was sentenced to 100 hours of community service for hammering on military weapons during a demonstration on the 42nd anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima last August. He said he has dedicated his life to living among the poor and to peace work. The other surviving Catonsville defendants are living quieter lives. Mary Moylan, 52, a nurse who went underground for nine years before surrendering in 1979, now reportedly works again as a nurse in the Baltimore area. Thomas Melville, now 57, a former Maryknoll priest, and his wife, Marguarita, a former nun, said they joined the Catonsville protest because they were concerned about U.S. actions in Guatemala, where they had served before being expelled. Today, Mrs. Melville teaches at the University of California-Berkeley, while her husband is writing a book. Both have given speeches and demonstrated against U.S. intervention in Central America, he said. Defendant John Hogan, a former Maryknoll brother, was expelled from Guatemala with the Melvilles. He now lives in New Haven, Conn., and works as a carpenter. Mische moved to St. Cloud in 1976, where he ran successfully for the city council. The conservative Minnesota town eventually became the first in the state to declare itself a nuclear free zone. The ninth defendant, David Darst, 26, a Christian Brother who taught at a St. Louis high school, died in an automobile accident while the case was on appeal.
