The Morrison self-immolation at the Pentagon was front-page news as Catholic Workers gathered for an antiwar demonstration on Union Square in New York City on November 6, 1965, which LaPorte attended shortly after joining the Catholic Workers. Dorothy Day, the leader of the Catholic Workers, addressed the crowd. "I speak today as one who is old, and who must endorse the courage of the young who themselves are willing to give up their freedom," Day said. "This very struggle was begun by courage, even in martyrdom, which has been shared by the little children, in the struggle for full freedom and human dignity." A young Catholic Worker named Tom Cornell had in 1960 become known for burning his draft card at actions and had repeated the act several times, including for national television cameras during the 1962 Strike for Peace. Another Catholic Worker, David Miller, in October 1965 became the first draft-card burner to be arrested under a new federal law banning the practice. Immediately following Day's speech on Union Square, Cornell and four others burned their draft cards on the platform. New York hecklers shouted, "Burn yourselves, not your cards." Three days later, in front of the Dag Hammarskjold Library at the United Nations in New York, LaPorte composed himself in the position of the Buddhist monks of Vietnam, doused himself with gasoline, and set himself aflame. LaPorte died the next day at Bellevue Hospital from second- and third-degree burns covering 95 percent of his body. Despite his burns, he remained conscious and able to speak. When asked why he had burned himself, LaPorte calmly replied, "I'm a Catholic Worker. I'm against war, all wars. I did this as a religious action...all the hatred of the world." At the hospital, Catholic Workers sang "This Little Light of Mine." Dorothy Day responded to the tragedy with an article in The Catholic Worker newspaper entitled, "Suicide or Sacrifice?" "It is not only that many youths and students throughout the country are deeply sensitive to the sufferings of the world," she wrote. "They have a keen sense that they must be responsible and make a profession of their faith that things do not have to go on as they always have–that men are capable of laying down their lives for others, taking a stand, even when the all-encroaching State and indeed all the world are against them." A writer in the National Catholic Reporter wrote that while the Catholic Workers had been important to the Church, they displayed "a sort of built-in rejection of complexity that I hope was not operative in LaPorte's death."
