BATH – Peace activist Philip Berrigan was remembered outside Bath Iron Works by about two dozen supporters who said his death should not still his message.

“He was a teacher who taught us about consciousness,” said Jack Buzzell of Portland, representing Veterans for Peace. “If we don’t speak up here, we are as complicit as the next man.”

Berrigan, a former Catholic priest, died Dec. 6 at Jonah House in Baltimore, a communal residence for pacifists that he founded in 1973. He was 79.

“We don’t need weapons of mass destruction,” Buzzell said Saturday. “We don’t need to perpetuate world domination.”

Berrigan and five other activists were convicted on charges stemming from a demonstration at BIW in 1997.

The protesters boarded a Navy destroyer, damaged its control panels with hammers and spilled their own blood on it from baby bottles.

Berrigan was given a two-year prison sentence.

Susan Crane, another participant in the 1997 demonstration, said at Saturday’s rally that Berrigan “talked about the need to love our enemies. The commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill’ applies to everybody.”

Crane called Berrigan “an example of how to live one’s faith.”

George and Maureen Kehoe Ostensen of Belfast were among those urging that BIW build hospital ships instead of war ships.

Another protester, Richard Rhames of Biddeford, said, “We’ve got tons of money, but we’re spending it on the wrong things. We’re building more weapons we don’t need, while we can’t afford to build schools we do.”

Contrasting himself with others, Rhames said he was a fair-weather protester who was not willing to go to jail for his beliefs.

“I’m a dilettante compared to them,” he said. “I like to sleep in my own bed at night.”