Portrait unveiling will honor the Rev. Daniel Berrigan, legendary peace activist and prophet who opposed Vietnam War

The Rev. Daniel Berrigan, a legendary peace activist who led protests against the Vietnam War and nuclear weapons that landed him in jail, has been memorialized in a portrait by a Philadelphia-born artist that was unveiled Sunday at Villanova University.

A Jesuit priest and poet, Berrigan was known for defiant acts of civil disobedience that inspired others to follow suit in protesting the war. Along with his brother Philip and six others -- they were known as the Plowshares Eight -- Berrigan was arrested in 1980 after a raid at the General Electric missile plant in King of Prussia, where they hammered missile warheads. They poured blood on plant documents, joined hands, and chanted hymns. Police quickly arrested them.

“The day after I’m embalmed,” Berrigan said on his 80th birthday in 2001, “that’s when I’ll give it up.”

Berrigan died in 2016 in New York. He was 94.

A 4-by-5-foot oil portrait of Berrigan by artist Ruane Manning was unveiled Sunday afternoon at a celebration of his life held at Villanova in the Driscoll Hall Auditorium. The event was sponsored by Orbis Books, a publisher of religious works that commissioned the painting, and Villanova University’s Center for Peace and Justice Education, which focuses on social justice and peace issues.

Manning, of Mays Landing in South Jersey, grew up on Rising Sun Avenue, event planner Sabina Clarke said.

Clarke said no decision had been made on where the portrait would be displayed; it would be at Fordham University in New York City or one of the other schools where Berrigan taught. "We’re not at that point yet,” she said in an interview.

The celebration will include a book-signing by Jim Forest, author of At Play in the Lion’s Den, a memoir and biography of Berrigan. James Carroll, an activist and former Catholic priest who was Berrigan’s spiritual brother, is scheduled to speak.

Berrigan and younger brother Philip, a Josephite priest, were repeatedly arrested to draw attention to the causes they opposed. After the Vietnam War, Daniel Berrigan spoke out against poverty and violence.

In one of their most daring protests, the Berrigan brothers, wearing their clerical clothing, in 1968 led a group of activists into a facility in Catonsville, Md., where they seized draft records. They burned the papers with homemade napalm. “Better the burning of paper than of children,” Daniel Berrigan told a federal judge who sentenced the brothers to three years in federal prison.

In a quote cited in the program, Daniel Berrigan wrote: “There is no peace because there are no peacemakers. There are no makers of peace because the making of peace is at least as costly as the making of war, at least as exigent, at least as disruptive, at least as liable to bring disgrace and prison, and death in its wake.”