After finishing his last prison sentence almost exactly a year ago, septuagenarian Philip Berrigan ruefully admitted that doing time was "really a younger person's job". Yet up to the last Berrigan, who has died of cancer aged 79, was still proselytising for peace.
In a statement issued through his wife Elizabeth McAlister on the US Thanksgiving Day holiday at the end of November, the former priest said: "I die with the conviction, held since 1968 ... that nuclear weapons are the scourge of the Earth."
Philip was one half of the famous and militant Roman Catholic Berrigan brothers - Father Daniel Berrigan was the other - who waged a ceaseless campaign against the Vietnam war and were frequently seen on television and in the newspapers being carted off to jail. Philip spent one third of the last three decades behind bars for numerous acts of civil disobedience and estimated his arrests at more than 100.
The pair shot to prominence in 1968 when they and seven others burst into a recruitment office in Catonsville near Baltimore, removed 378 draft records and set them on fire in the parking lot with home-made napalm (concocted from a recipe that they had found in a US commando handbook). Then they recited the Lord's Prayer and waited to be arrested. Both the Berrigans were wearing their priestly garb at the time and their photographs on the front cover of Time magazine startled the nation.
While he was serving his three-year sentence for destroying government property, Philip secretly married Elizabeth, a nun he had met in the anti-war movement. They disclosed their union in 1973 and were promptly excommunicated by the Pope. In 1972, he was put on trial for allegedly conspiring to kidnap Henry Kissinger. But the trial, at which Ramsey Clark, the former US attorney general, served as his defence lawyer, ended in acquittal.
The brothers were the youngest of six sons born in a small town in Minnesota to Thomas, a socialist railway worker of Irish heritage, and a German mother, Frida. When Thomas lost his job the family moved to New York, where he founded the Electrical Workers Union and started a Catholic interracial council.
Philip, who was tall and athletic, joined the US infantry in 1943 and saw action in Europe. He acknowledged that he had killed often.
After demobilisation he graduated from Holy Cross College in Massachusetts, and followed an elder brother into the Society of St Joseph, an order devoted to helping African-Americans. He was ordained in 1955 and went to work in a black ghetto in New Orleans. (Daniel, a Jesuit, survives Philip and never left the church.)
While he was in the south, Philip was drawn to the nascent civil rights movement and its freedom rides, in which whites and blacks would intrude on segregated institutions and often suffer severe beatings from police officers. Stokely Carmichael, the black activist who organised the Student Non-violent Co-ordinating Committee, once described Philip as "the only white man who knows where it's at".
Philip began drawing comparisons with the movement and the escalating war in Indochina, asking: "Is it possible for us to be vicious, brutal, immoral and violent at home, and be fair, judicious, beneficent and idealist abroad?" He thought not.
After his first jail sentence he and 21 others were arrested in 1975 for throwing red liquid on military aircraft and in later years his activities were part of the Plowshares, an anti-nuclear war movement that spread to Europe. His last foray into civil disobedience was taking hammers to A-10 Warthog anti-tank planes at a military base in Maryland, an action he based on his interpretation of the Bible and the quotation from Isaiah about turning swords into ploughshares.
Philip was more impetuous than his brother. He called for the transformation of society "as soon as possible" and tended towards highly political secular action. He wrote his autobiography in 1996, Fighting The Lamb's War: Skirmishes With The American Empire. In addition, the brothers were the subject of a joint biography, published in 1997: Disarmed And Dangerous.
In his final years, Philip and Elizabeth formed Jonah House, a small community of pacifists in Baltimore, where he died. Elizabeth and their three children, Kathleen, Frida and Jerry, survive him.
· Philip Francis Berrigan, former priest and peace activist, born October 5 1923; died December 6 2002.