Daniel Berrigan was many things — Jesuit priest, poet, teacher, fine cook, good listener, radical thinker, antiwar activist, pacifist. And, for his opposition to the Vietnam War, he was considered an enemy of both state and church.

Of everything he wrote, including more than 40 books, these words stand out as the most memorable and most emblematic of his life: “Our apologies, good friends, for the fracture of good order, the burning of paper instead of children, the angering of the orderlies in the front of the charnel house. We could not, so help us God, do otherwise. … How many must die before our voices are heard, how many must be tortured, dislocated, starved, maddened … When, at what point, will you say no to this war?”

That is what Berrigan said in May 1968 as he and his brother, the late Philip Berrigan, and seven other activists, most of them nuns and priests, burned draft files they had just removed from the draft board in Catonsville, Maryland, and waited for police to arrive to arrest them. These words appear in Berrigan’s most famous writing, The Trial of the Catonsville Nine, a play based on the transcript of the trial. It has been staged throughout the world.

When Berrigan’s sister-in-law, Elizabeth McAllister, read those words at his funeral mass today, the more than 1,000 people in attendance at St. Francis Xavier Catholic Church in New York City responded with a thunderous and sustained standing ovation. They had come from near and far to say farewell. For many of them, these words he spoke at Catonsville had moved them into civil disobedience and resistance many years ago.

By the time Berrigan went to Catonsville, he had become the most visible embodiment of something that had not been seen before: Catholic priests who publicly opposed a war in which the United States was engaged. In response to his calls for an end to the war, top church officials sent him away from the U.S., and a top government official lied about him in congressional testimony that was designed to paint him as a bomber and kidnapper. Ultimately these extraordinary efforts, by church and state, failed to silence Berrigan. After exile abroad and imprisonment at home, he remained a strong voice against war and other violence, official and unofficial, until his death last week at age 94.

The actions that publicly defined Berrigan — non-violent resistance to the Vietnam War and to the use of nuclear weapons — were born in the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council, the historic international gathering of bishops convened in 1962 by Pope John XXIII, who was very similar to Pope Francis. The council’s actions, which included a strong condemnation of anti-Semitism, were considered radical in the post-World War II Catholic Church. One of the council’s reforms urged Catholics to work for peace, including with people outside the church. The church hierarchy in America refused to accept that mandate at first. Berrigan, however, was eager to work for peace.

With his brother Philip and others, Daniel Berrigan helped establish the Catholic peace movement, a very large and amorphous group located primarily throughout the Northeast and northern Midwest. Officials in both the church and the government saw the movement as dangerous.

Francis Cardinal Spellman — the archbishop of New York, the most powerful Catholic official in the United States, and the most visible symbol of the U.S. Catholic Church’s strong official support for the Vietnam War — staunchly opposed the peace movement, especially the participation of Catholics in it. In the earliest days of American involvement in Vietnam, in fact, Spellman was one of the leading voices outside government who urged the U.S. to go to war there.

Deeply angered by Berrigan’s public calls for peace, Spellman in 1965 ordered Berrigan’s Jesuit superiors to exile him to Latin America and ordered him to stop engaging in peace work. The Jesuits did so and kept the priest’s whereabouts a secret. When Berrigan was permitted to return to the U.S. several months later, he and his supporters defiantly marched for peace in New York City, stopping to pray in front of churches and synagogues, including St. Patrick’s Cathedral, where Cardinal Spellman presided.

In 1970, Spellman’s friend and ally inside the government in matters of protest and war, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, took the extraordinary step of publicly and falsely accusing Daniel and Philip Berrigan of conspiring to blow up tunnels under federal buildings in Washington, D.C., and to kidnap President Nixon’s national security adviser, Henry Kissinger. Hoover did this despite knowing that FBI investigators and Department of Justice officials had officially concluded there was no such conspiracy. But to save Hoover’s reputation after his public comments, Justice officials convinced a grand jury to bring charges against Philip Berrigan and others; Daniel Berrigan was named an unindicted co-conspirator. The 1972 trial ended in a hung jury.

For a while, Hoover succeeded in recasting the public image of the Berrigans and the Catholic peace movement into a group of violent extremists. The effort helped Hoover get the extra $14.5 million he wanted from Congress that year to hire a thousand new agents he said were needed because of the crisis created by these activists. But that effort backfired. Within the bureau, these new agents were known as “the Berrigan 1,000” because they resisted spying on political dissidents and asked to be assigned instead to organized crime and other criminal cases — areas of investigation in which, strangely, Hoover had little interest.

It was the writings of Daniel Berrigan that inspired William Davidon, a physics professor at Haverford College, to think of breaking into an FBI office in 1971 to search for evidence of whether Hoover’s FBI was suppressing dissent. That break-in, conducted at great risk by Davidon and seven other people who called themselves the Citizens Commission to Investigate the FBI, led to the historic revelations of Hoover’s widespread suppression of dissent. Years later, Davidon said, “I don’t think I would have even considered such steps had it not been for Dan Berrigan.” Those steps ultimately led, in 1975, to the first congressional investigations of all intelligence agencies and to the establishment of the first permanent congressional oversight of such agencies.