On a sunny afternoon in the spring of 1968, a group of nine radical activists struck a uniquely provocative blow against the dysfunctional political system that had enmeshed the United States in the war in Vietnam. They burst into a Selective Service office in Catonsville, Md., seized several hundred military draft records, and then burned what they had looted in a fire fueled by homemade napalm.
The Catonsville Nine, as they would be known, were not the only group of demonstrators to besiege a local draft board in the Vietnam era, but they certainly were the most celebrated. Their notoriety resulted at least in part from the religious dimension of their witness against the havoc wrought by war and imperialism. All of the Catonsville Nine were Roman Catholics, and two of their number -- brothers Daniel and Philip Berrigan -- were priests. The demonstrators explained that they attacked the draft records because they found it impossible to reconcile the central tenets of their religious faith with their country's conduct of the war in Southeast Asia.
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