In a society that worships entertainment, it seems fitting that last week's funeral of Roone Arledge, who invented Monday Night Football, glowed far brighter in the media than the same day's funeral of Philip Berrigan, whose signature innovation was a bolder form of antiwar protest that earned him long years in prison.

This is not to speak ill of Arledge. It is simply to say that we Americans prize the distractions of sport and celebrity too much to pay attention to the grubby labors of a mere prophet. We accept violence, even the violence of possessing nuclear weapons, too readily to embrace those who reject it. So, for most Americans, Berrigan seemed little more than a marginal memory from the 1960s. But he was so much more.

To summarize the grand arc of his life: Berrigan was a soldier in World War II; a priest and a civil- rights activist among poor African-Americans; a fiery witness against war in Vietnam; a favorite prey of J. Edgar Hoover and his FBI; an implacable inspector of America's weapons of mass destruction; an inmate; a husband; a father of three.

In 1968, he and his brother Daniel, a Jesuit priest, joined seven others in burning draft records at Catonsville, Md. The flames ignited by the Catonsville Nine, as they came to be called after their arrests, illuminated the evil of the war and helped build the movement against it. In the 1980s and 1990s, the Berrigans and others built a nonviolent movement, named Plowshares for the swords-into-plowshares imagery of an earlier prophet, Isaiah. These activists symbolically confronted the nation's nukes with small hammers, vials of blood and courage.

"Someday, somebody will think about the heroes," said Murray Polner, a leader of the Jewish Peace Fellowship and co-author with Jim O'Grady of "Disarmed and Dangerous," a biography of the brothers. "He was a hero." Polner recalled Phil as a very human hero, who liked to read pulp mysteries and to cook ample breakfasts at Jonah House, the Baltimore home of his family and his movement.

The core of Berrigan's heroism was his willingness to accept imprisonment for civil disobedience, even when it became obvious that few outside the movement were paying much attention to the Plowshares activists sitting in prison. But then, he wasn't in it for the publicity.

What drove Berrigan was the Gospel. He saw it as nonviolent, as the first three centuries of Christians did. The actor-activist Martin Sheen, who stars in "The West Wing" as a president willing to use military force but haunted by it, told a radio interviewer that Berrigan took the Gospel very personally.

The day after Berrigan's funeral, a more flawed peacemaker, whose grasp of Gospel nonviolence was not as firm as Berrigan's, accepted the Nobel Peace Prize. Though Jimmy Carter's post-presidency has been consistently dedicated to nonviolence, his presidency fell well short of that ideal. It's hard to begrudge Carter the prize, but it would have been grand to see the Berrigans accepting it.

The death of Berrigan raises anew the question haunting the peace movement: How can it replace its dominant older generation? Another example is Joop van der Grinten of Brookhaven, a mentor to Long Island peacemakers: Illness has forced him to curtail his activities at age 83. Like Berrigan, he was a combatant in World War II, fighting the Nazis from the underground in the Netherlands. Moving to America, he overcame his wartime hatred and became a great white-haired lion of peace, known for his draft-counseling during Vietnam and his advocacy for the environment and for the poor.

Despite those signs of the movement's age, I take courage from youthful prophets like Frida Berrigan, Phil's daughter, and from the thousands of young people who show up every year to protest the former School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Ga.

The school has a new name, but the same shame: a long list of Latin American soldiers who studied there and later committed atrocities in their own countries. The leader of that protest is another warrior-turned-peacemaker, the Rev. Roy Bourgeois, who fought in Vietnam, joined the Maryknoll order, and is now nurturing the future of antiwar activism.

Phil Berrigan is gone, but there's reason to hope that his Spirit-led prophetic witness will continue to express itself in the willing young hearts and hands of a new generation of peacemakers.

Bob Keeler is a member of Newsday's editorial board.

Copyright © 2002, Newsday, Inc.

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