Free Republic

BALTIMORE (AP) _ Carrying puppets, signs and roses, hundreds accompanied a pickup truck carrying the coffin of peace activist Philip Berrigan as it wound its way Monday through the rough neighborhood where he once served as a priest. Family members stood in the back of the truck along with the plain wooden coffin, hand-painted with red roses, as bagpipers played ``Amazing Grace'' while the procession marched to the funeral at St. Peter Claver Catholic Church in west Baltimore. ``He was bigger than life _ extremely human and heroic and committed,'' said actor Martin Sheen, who marched in the funeral...

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. He was 94. Berrigan died at Murray-Weigel Hall, a Jesuit health care community in New York City after a "long illness," according to Michael Benigno, a spokesman for the Jesuits USA Northeast Province. "He died peacefully," Benigno said.

"Diogenes, who searched high and low for an honest man, might as well have taken his lamp in search of a pacifist. As opposed to those who disguise themselves as such, in America, real pacifists are almost as rare as virgins in a whorehouse. Every aggressive pacifist I have ever come across, understood pacifism to mean, 'My friends and I can kill, but our enemies may not.'"