CARL KABAT, OMI, 1933-2022

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from St. Louis Magazine

If I Had a Jackhammer

Father Carl Kabat has spent nearly 17 years in jail for civil disobedience. His most common accessory with handcuffs? A clown suit, and a red rubber nose.

A Howard Johnson’s parking lot. The sky’s still dark and full of stars. Eight people stand together: Two priests and a former priest, a nun, a divinity student, a musician, a lawyer, and a housewife. They’re 45 minutes early. Later, the housewife will note she felt perfectly calm, while the lawyer was “deep-breathing like crazy.”

In two cars, they drive to the General Electric plant in King of Prussia, Pa. They need to be there before 7 a.m., before the start of the morning shift. The lot is mostly empty when they arrive. They know exactly in what order they’ll enter Building 9, and what they’ll do once inside; they’ve been role-playing this for more than a year. The Rev. Carl Kabat, in full clerical dress, enters first, followed by tiny, fragile-looking Sister Anne Montgomery, dressed in street clothes. They introduce themselves to 54-year-old Robert Cox, the security guard.

Cox can’t figure out why they’re in the building. Kabat assures him they’re there for peaceful purposes. Cox replies they’re not authorized to be there and they need to leave. They cheerfully refuse. Cox grabs the phone from the wall to call his superior, security Capt. Chester Drobek. Montgomery darts to the cradle and places her fingers on the button, cutting him off.

The other six file swiftly through the lobby, heading toward the doors into the plant. They are Daniel and Philip Berrigan, who made headlines when they set draft records alight in the street with homemade napalm; Elmer Maas, a schoolteacher and musician from New York City; John Schuchardt, a lawyer and former Marine; Molly Rush, a housewife, mother of six, and founder of the Thomas Merton Center in Pittsburgh; and Dean Hammer, who’s just graduated from Yale Divinity School. Montgomery, not wanting to engage in a struggle over the phone, lets go and follows the others.

Cox hollers at them: They’re not authorized to go in there! Kabat wraps Cox in a bear hug until the others are inside.

Cox calls Drobek. Then he hears “this clanging, like metal against metal.” He enters the factory and finds the intruders swinging hammers at the only product made in Building 9, the aluminum nose cones of Mark 12A first-strike nuclear warheads.

The golden nose cones clang like metal drums. The black, carbon-coated ones ring like bells. The noise brings confused employees rushing in. Now Drobek is there, along with the manager of shop operations. Someone calls the police, reporting a riot with hammers and clubs. The protesters put down their hammers and pull plastic baby bottles full of their own blood out of their pockets, sprinkling it over the dented nose cones, the desks, the workbenches, the blueprints and invoices. They hold hands, pray, sing hymns. Kabat remains in the lobby, knelt in prayer, a hammer near his side. It’s all over in minutes.

The trial of the “Plowshares Eight,” as they came to be known—their actions are inspired by Isaiah 2:4, which prophesies that men will beat swords into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks—will not be brief. It drags on for nearly 10 years. Dan Berrigan speaks for the group: “We…wish to challenge the lethal lie spun by GE through its motto, ‘We bring good things to life.’ As manufacturers of the Mark 12A reentry vehicle, GE actually prepares to bring good things to death.”

The Berrigans are held without bail. The other defendants refuse to pay theirs, set at $250,000; that would be an admission of guilt, they feel. Charges include aggravated assault, simple assault, burglary, criminal trespass, criminal conspiracy, disorderly conduct, recklessly endangering another person, harassment, false imprisonment, terroristic threats, and criminal mischief. At the original sentencing, Judge Samuel W. Salus gives the Berrigans and Kabat the stiffest terms—three to 10 years—then adds he’d really like “to send all eight defendants to a leper colony in Puerto Rico to do day-to-day service.” Despite Salus’ determination to set an example, another Plowshares-style action takes place. Then another. And another. And another…

Carl Kabat was born in 1933 in Scheller, a tiny farming town in Southern Illinois. It was a family of boys—Leonard, Paul, Carl, and Bob—until MaryAnn came along 20 years later. Their father farmed a few acres and worked at Southern Illinois Penitentiary. His mother, though deeply religious, was the first in her congregation to defy the mandate that women wear a hat in church. MaryAnn Radake now lives in Tamaroa, Ill., a half-hour from Scheller. Everyone in her family, she says, had a quirky sense of humor.

“We are nut balls, I know,” Kabat cackles. “I’m even more so than most people. Some kid would say, ‘I’d bet you two cents you won’t jump into this pond that’s nothing but mud,’ and I’d do it.”

Radake says that despite the practical jokes, she knows few people who feel things as deeply as her brother does. “He had many alternatives in this life,” she says. That he became a priest was “the hardest thing for people who know him around here—it was like, well, why did he do that? He was going to be a doctor at U. of I. He actually got a speech impediment because of it, because it was not his calling. He couldn’t even talk. He had uncontrollable stuttering.” His brother Paul preceded him into training for the priesthood. “He had mentioned to Paul that maybe he’d like to be a priest. And Paul said, ‘Well—if you want to. Just let me know.’ But then Carl said, ‘But Mom wants me to be a doctor.’ And it was left at that. As he went on about it, he just…it became more than what he mentally could handle, as far as wanting to be a priest and giving it up. It really had nothing to do with the studies, because he’s brilliant. His calling was to be a priest.”

“When I started high school, I thought, ‘I’ll become a doctor and earn enough money and pay what Mom and Dad sacrificed for Paul,’” Kabat says simply. “But then when I was up at the university, I realized that was irrational, a kid’s thinking, eh?”

Kabat was ordained in 1959 by the Oblates of Mary Immaculate in Pass Christian, Miss., one year after Paul. He remembers getting off the bus in New Orleans and seeing two water fountains marked “white” and “colored.” At the time, he says, young priests adhered to “the old way”: Keep your mouth shut. “I should have taken a drink from the black fountain,” he says. Martin Luther King Jr. is one of his heroes—he’s said his only regret is not joining the civil rights marches in Mississippi—along with Gandhi and Franz Jägerstätter, an Austrian peasant beheaded by the Gestapo for refusing to join Hitler’s army. And Jesus, of course. Kabat’s reminded more than one person that Christ was arrested for challenging empire.

“I personally think Jesus had the right method,” Kabat says. “I hate to say it, but Martin Luther King and Gandhi didn’t. Because they went mass-movement. Unfortunately, the followers of Jesus, they went mass-movement, and were co-opted, in my judgment. I think the best thing is people in small groups, doing what they think they should be doing, then letting it go.”

Kabat accepted a mission to the Philippines in 1965. The calling of OMI is to minister to the poor, and they sent Kabat to the right place. “The kids would walk to high school in their bare feet and then put their flip-flops on when they got there,” he says. He returned to Scheller four years later, the day of the moon landing. “Dad and I were watching it on TV,” he remembers. “We walked out to the backyard, and we looked up at the moon, a very clear, bright moon, and Dad said, ‘I just can’t believe it.’”

Kabat ambled into the kitchen, opened the refrigerator. In the Philippines, among his fellow missionaries, only he had a fridge—it ran on kerosene, and the nuns stored their meat in it. Now, back home, the stacks of Tupperware and shrink-wrapped pork chops and jars of condiments stunned him. “That’s a well-stocked fridge!” he exclaimed.

“Mom felt very sheepish about it,” he says. “I didn’t realize that I shouldn’t have said that. When I came back, I realized that I really didn’t fit in… So when there was a possibility of going down to Brazil, I said, ‘Hey, yeah, OK.’”

OMI sent him to Recife, where his parishioners “would go down to this big stream where they would wash clothes,” Kabat recounts in the book Prophets Without Honor. “The stream was filled with their own urine and whatever else. That was also their drinking water.” Kids begged outside his little house every day: “Father, give us some bread.” Always athletic, Kabat became gaunt. He began to throw little church socials for the teenagers, with a battery-powered record player and kerosene lights made from tin cans with wicks. One night, some men in suits appeared and broke up the party. “I told them to get lost,” Kabat says. The next day, OMI flew him out; he’d been charged with inciting revolution.

When he came back to the U.S., in 1973, Kabat felt in his bones that the cost of weapons took food from the poor. He joined Pax Christi USA and Amnesty International. He decided to appeal to the Catholic Church for help, and went to Baltimore for the assembly of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops: “Nobody asked, and nobody invited me, but I thought, ‘Well, maybe I’ll go out and talk to some of these bishops.’” There, he crossed paths with another St. Louis Oblate, the Rev. Larry Rosebaugh, who would soon replace Kabat at the mission in Recife. He sent Kabat to Jonah House in Baltimore, a faith-based political collective founded by former Josephite priest Philip Berrigan and his wife, Liz McAlister, who’d been a nun (they left their orders to marry). Rosebaugh “said, ‘Knock on the door, you can probably sleep on their floor there.’ So I did that,” Kabat recalls. John Schuchardt, who would later take part in the Plowshares Eight action, “took the mattress off his bed. He slept on the box spring… And that was my introduction to that.”

McAlister recalls that Kabat “had come to an understanding in his own life and witness that he needed to be more deeply involved, and in order to do that, he needed others of like mind, and he needed some accountability. And we found that rather fascinating. You don’t often meet people who walk in on you and say, ‘I’m here because I recognize in my own life the need to be accountable to others.’”

Kabat’s first action was an antinuclear picket line in Plains, Ga.—Jimmy Carter’s hometown. Carter had been elected but not sworn in. Jonah House took issue with the new president, Schuchardt says, because “Carter initiated full production of all the first-strike weapons systems that we now have. It was obvious they were not being designed as a deterrent.”

There were nine protesters in Plains, Kabat remembers. “There were three charges: Parading without any permit, blocking traffic, and failure to obey a police officer. Plains had two cops. The closest we could get was about a block away from Carter’s house. And so we unrolled our banner: ‘No more Hiroshimas’ or something like that.” When they’d applied for a parade permit, they’d been told to go to the fourth floor, or the second floor, or come back next week. They finally huddled: “Are we willing to take a bust? And I was one of the nine. So we went back and held our little banner. The cops came…and they booked us.” Then they were tried by “a beggar’s court, a kangaroo court, found guilty on all charges. We were not on the road or the sidewalk, but on the grassy part between. Which is public property, right? And not blocking traffic, unless it was ants going from one side to the other.” But the charge of resisting a police officer? “That’s true,” Kabat says. “Because they said, ‘You can’t do that.’ And we said, well, yes, we could.”

Kabat stayed at Jonah House until 1980, joining the Berrigans on multiple actions, including four where they threw blood on the steps of the Pentagon. In 1984, while the Plowshares Eight case was still working its way through court—the resentencing continued until 1990—Kabat undertook his most radical action to date: Silo Pruning Hooks.

Kabat, his brother Paul, Gaudete Peace and Justice Center founder Helen Woodson, and Larry Cloud-Morgan, a Native American mental-health worker from Minneapolis, breached the fence at Whiteman Air Force Base near Knob Noster, Mo. Using a jackhammer and an air compressor, they battered the concrete cover of a Minuteman II nuclear missile silo, then offered a Eucharist.

“To beat the sword into a plowshare, you need a hammer. Well, jackhammer is just a little bigger hammer,” Kabat roars. “Oh boy. Wow. Helen and I got 18 years, Paul got 10, Larry got eight… The judge said he wanted to set an example.”

Woodson, a mother of 11, served 12 years of that sentence. Three years after being released on parole in 1991, Carl noticed Good Friday and April Fool’s Day would fall on the same day. As luck would have it, he also had a clown suit: his friend Sam Day, publisher of Nukewatch, had rented it for one of Woodson’s kids, then had to buy it after spilling something on it. Kabat borrowed it, packed his bolt cutters, and traveled up to North Dakota. He managed to make some pretty good dents on a silo lid there, and was charged with two Class C felonies, criminal mischief and criminal trespass. Sentenced to five years in prison, he served two and a half.

“Since then,” he says of the clown suit, “I’ve worn it every time I’ve acted against the nuclear business. And I know it’s silly,” he laughs. “Justice is serious. And nuclear weapons are insane, eh? … My principle is to just do what I can do, and then sing and dance.”

For the 20th anniversary of Silo Pruning Hooks, Kabat traveled to missile silo N-8 in Greeley, Colo. He left, but did not use, a jackhammer. He hung banners: “We are fools and clowns for God and humanity’s sake.” And next to the “No Trespassing” sign: “Cessante ratione legis, cessat ipsa lex”—a law that ceases to be rational, ceases to be law.

On an awfully hot August day this year, Carl Kabat, for a change, is not in jail. He’s sitting on the tabletop of the picnic bench outside Kabat House in Old North St. Louis, the Catholic Worker house named after him by friends Tery McNamee and Carolyn Griffeth, who live down the street. He hasn’t been out of jail all that long. Last August, he celebrated his 50th year of ordination at this picnic table with the Catholic Workers. Then, he traveled out to Greeley, Colo., put on his clown suit, clipped open the fence at a Weld County nuclear-missile silo, and waited nearly an hour to be arrested. While he waited, he prayed, fooled around with the silo hatch in an attempt to open it, and hung banners. One read, “We have guided missiles and misguided white men.” Another, pinned to a clown doll that Kabat affixed to the fence, said: “Nuclear weapons are a crime against humanity.” He served four and a half months.

Two Catholic Workers, both named Ben, stop on the street to say hello, addressing Kabat as “Father Carl.” When that title is repeated after they leave, Kabat politely asks not to be addressed that way. “They were just fartin’ around,” he explains, chortling. He continues: “I don’t like to use the term Christian. Christians killed too many people. I’m a follower of Jesus.” He’s fine with Carl, and fine with simple clothes: sweats, sneakers, khakis, shorts. Clerical garments, and clown suits, are for special occasions.

“Tery McNamee and I took Carl out for his last action, in Greeley, and I’ve never seen him so at ease and so calm and so full of peace,” says Chrissy Kirchhoefer, a Catholic Worker friend.

Kirchhoefer stayed for the trial. The jury, though heavily weighted with Air Force personnel, was sympathetic, she says. One chuckled when the “misguided white men” banner was introduced into evidence. Others left the courtroom in tears, not wanting to send a 75-year-old priest to jail. “That really weighed on all of our hearts,” one told the Greeley Tribune. Kabat explained directly to them why he felt the need to do something so extreme: “How many times have you written to your senator, to your congressman? … For some of us, [it’s been] countless times.”

Weld County deputy district attorney David Skarka asked pointedly, “Are you above the law?”

“All wrong law, yes,” Kabat replied. “God’s law is above all these man-made things.”

Kirchhoefer says that when she accompanied Kabat on another action in Denver in 2004, and they went up to the courtroom early, outside the door the marquee read: “USA v. Carl Kabat.”

He joked to her: “So it’s the whole United States against me?”

“But finding that niche and really holding true to it, and pushing and challenging himself and others, I think that really does put him on the fringes,” Kirchhoefer says. “It does a lot of times feel like the U.S. is against Carl Kabat.”

This is part of why Molly Rush, Anne Montgomery, John Schuchardt, and Liz McAlister gathered in Oak Ridge, Tenn., on July 4 to commemorate Plowshares Eight. “You’ll travel great distances at great cost to one’s self to spend time together,” McAlister affirms. “If you feel differently from [the mainstream], you’re going to need to be with people who get it.”

“It was nice down in Tennessee,” Kabat says. “They had a bunch who put on a clown—ah, you might say a clown play, and they paraded. There was a bunch of clowns, and a bunch of kids…”

Rush didn’t know Kabat before Plowshares Eight. “I learned about him in the process,” she says, “and really got to know him and love him. Carl put [the security guard] into a bear hug,” she says, laughing, “and was in no way a threat to this man, although it must have terrified him, because he saw the six of us going past. As you know, Carl was with him, and we’re in there, and the men followed us and came into the test room where we found our nuclear missiles, which we hadn’t planned, or hadn’t known how to find ’em. You know, we sort of went on faith.”

Activists also marked the gathering in Oak Ridge with civil disobedience, marching to the Y-12 National Security Complex, where 13 of them cut through the fence, hung peace cranes, scattered sunflower seeds, and waited for arrest. Kabat was not among them. And he wasn’t with McAlister and Schuchardt in King of Prussia for the second Plowshares Eight reunion in August.

This has been a relatively quiet year for Kabat. On Tuesday nights, there are liturgies at Karen House in St. Louis Place. “I do perform Mass,” he says, “when the opportunity comes up. But I’d rather be with a small group of 10 or 12 rather than 1,200.” He spends time with the young Catholic Workers and the refugees who stay at Kabat House. He reads the paper in the sparsely furnished front room, sits down to a communal meal each night, brings flowers to neighbors when they show up with food donations from Trader Joe’s. He’s hung a sketch someone did of him in prison on the living-room wall, bordered by photos—pictures of baptisms at Karen House, friends on the East Coast, his late brothers. There’s one of the Rev. Larry Rosebaugh, who was murdered in Guatemala last year during a carjacking. Over the mantel, there’s a painting done by a friend of a clown on a cross. Beside it, there’s a ceramic figurine of a clown carrying a suitcase with a luggage label reading “V.I.C. (Very Important Clown).” In that simply furnished front room, Kabat devours every new issue of papers such as Nukewatch and the Nuclear Resister, which he’s reading today. He brings up the fact that there are three new bomb-making plants, including Honeywell’s in Kansas City. “If we’re going to denuclearize, well, why build new factories, you know?”

Protests have already started in Kansas City. Kabat went down “to see people and whatever else, to encourage people to put their arse where their words are,” but “for all kinds of reasons” didn’t join the actions. Other than his clouded right eye, which was damaged during surgery, and his habit of having a cigarette and coffee for breakfast, he’s in good health. Still, Kirchhoefer told the Greeley Tribune that Kabat has been frank with her about how, at his age, he may well end up dying in prison.

If Kabat’s actions were confusing to people 20 years ago—“But what does it all really do?”—that’s amplified when they consider his age. McAlister says you can understand it if you think about his actions as “symbolic yet real… It’s the power of poetry. It’s the power of spirituality. It’s the power of something much deeper than the news reports. It reminds me a bit of the reaction of people who say, ‘You poured blood? I find that disgusting.’ My response is to say, ‘Come and see.’ Because you really don’t get it until you see it. You don’t get it unless you put yourself under that Biblical command and say the world does need this. And by gum, I’m gonna find ways of speaking it, the best ways I know how of speaking it. And I believe that’s what Carl does try to do in his actions, even when he makes those serious moments a little bit less than seemingly serious.”

“Basically, I act for me,” Kabat explains. “You do your own thing; you do it for you. As long as the action has been nonviolent, and public, and resistant to whatever evil… I just do my little thing, and let it go. I’ve done what I can do, and then just kind of enjoy life.”

When he chooses to go may always be a mystery, even to Carl Kabat. Something tickles his spirit when it’s time to pack his stuff into 5-gallon plastic drums, dust off the clown suit, say his goodbyes, and catch another ride. It’s a private thing between Kabat and the force he calls the Holy One, his term for God.

The best portrait of her brother she’s seen, MaryAnn Radake says, is And Carl Laughed, a 2007 play produced at Clayton High School, which traveled to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. The brilliance of the play, Radake thinks, is that her brother was portrayed as two characters—Carl the Priest, and Carl the Clown. “Carl is that. Carl is serious. But if you stayed that serious about things, you would go mad. The humor has saved him,” she says. “It would be overwhelming to feel the responsibility he feels toward the world.”

The play was co-written by Kelley Ryan, director of theater at Clayton High School, and Nick Otten, the school’s associate theater director. The two clocked hours of tape interviewing Kabat’s Catholic Worker friends, as well as his sister. “In the tapes,” Otten says, “over and over again, someone would say, ‘And then Carl laughed, and told this joke…’” They also wrote to Kabat—who was serving time for breaking into a nuclear-missile silo in North Dakota—who replied with a crisp, 10-point letter.

“I think there is an element of religious ritual to it,” Ryan says of his actions. “The vestments, the sacraments…the collar, he never did wear.”

“He’s like an antinuclear Francis of Assisi, basically,” Otten says.

Ryan and Otten were invited by OMI to talk at Our Lady of the Snows in Belleville. “We did go, and there was a pretty good group of men there,” Ryan says. “There was definitely a dichotomy between the people who appreciated it, and then the others who were angry, because he costs them money…”

“Dichotomy?” Otten interjects. “It was like a bifurcation!”

“They specifically complained,” Ryan says, “there are court costs. They cover that. Meanwhile, the head of the order there gave us a $100 check,” she chuckles, “towards our trip.”

Kabat has seen And Carl Laughed multiple times, once while wearing a clown nose. The first time, he’d been out of jail only a couple of weeks. The kids were days away from leaving for Edinburgh, and performed it for him in the Little Theater at Clayton High. Kabat wept throughout the performance. Then he got up, went down to the stage, and gave every kid a bear hug. 

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Fr. Carl Kabat, presente!

On August 4, 2022 God called home Fr. Carl Kabat, OMI, age 88, a renowned Catholic peacemaker and a friend to me and many Catholic Workers, members of Pax Christi USA and the wider faith-based nonviolent movement for peace and justice. He died at the Oblate Madonna House in San Antonio, Texas where he was in hospice care since March.  

Born on October 10, 1933 in Scheller, Illinois, the third of five children, Carl grew up on his parents’ farm. He was ordained a priest with the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate in 1959. His ministry including serving in the Philippines and Brazil. In 1976, following his return to the U.S., he became associated with Jonah House, a Christian resistance community in Balitmore, Maryland. During this time, he was arrested for two peace actions at the Pentagon for which he was sentenced to 21 months in prison. Carl had a close affiliation with the Catholic Worker and lived for several years at the Karen House Catholic Worker community in St. Louis. 

In 1980 he took part in the Plowshares Eight action, the first plowshares witness involving the symbolic disarmament of nuclear weapons. I can still see and hear Carl leading the singing of “The Lord’s Prayer” at different time during the Plowshares Eight court proceedings. Carl would go on to do seven other plowshares actions. He spent a total of over 17 years in prison for acts of nonviolent witness calling for nuclear abolition. He also was arrested on several occasions for calling for the abolition of the death penalty.

Carl was involved in four plowshares actions addressing the Minuteman II and Minuteman III missile silos. In 1984, his brother Paul, also an Oblate priest, joined him in the Silo Pruning Hooks action at a Minuteman II missile silo controlled by Whiteman Air Force Base in Knob Noster, Missouri.

Considering himself a “fool for Christ,” he dressed as a clown for two of the Missile Silo actions. On April 1, 1994 (Good Friday and April Fool’s Day), while still on parole for the Silo Pruning Hooks action, he entered the Grand Forks Missile Field in North Dakota dressed as a clown. After cutting through a fence surrounding a Minuteman III missile silo (not scheduled to be deactivated under the START I agreement), he proceeded to hammer on a combination dial for the silo as well as the silo lid. He prayed, sang and hung a banner on the silo fence which said “Stop Nuclear Weapons.”

(A play was done about this action — A Clown, a Hammer, a Bomb and God — by playwright Dan Kinch.)

On the morning of June 20, 2006, Carl, along with Mike Walli and Greg Boertje-Obed, dressed as circus clowns and walked on to the Launch Facility E-9 Minuteman III nuclear weapon of mass destruction site in McLean County, North DK, on the Fort Berthold Reservation of the Cheyenne Nation. 

In a statement he released explaining his August 6, 2009 plowshares action at a Minuteman Missile silo 30 miles northeast of Greeley in Weld County, CO, he declared: 

“The Roman Catholic Church, of which I am a priest, at the close of its Vatican Council II in 1965 condemned nuclear bombs as a crime against humanity and are to be condemned unreservedly. The World Council of Churches has proclaimed that ‘the manufacture, deployment or use of nuclear bombs is a crime against humanity.’ … The nuclear bomb that is in the ground here is more than 20 times more powerful than the atomic bombs we dropped on the Japanese. Each of those bombs killed more than 100,000 people…The Bible says in the words of Isaiah: ‘They shall beat their spears into pruning hooks and their swords into plowshares.’ May the Holy One have mercy on us for not doing so.” 

On July 4, 2011 and again on July 4, 2012, Carl entered the property at a nuclear bomb plant under construction in Kansas City, MO. The Kansas City National Security Campus (KCNSC) — formerly known as the Kansas City Plant — is a National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) facility managed and operated by Honeywell Federal Manufacturing & Technologies that manufactures 85 percent of non-nuclear components that go into U.S. nuclear weapons. Explaining his July 4, 2011 action he declared: 

“I, Fr. Carl Kabat, OMI, have been pondering an appropriate way to celebrate the fourth of July, commonly called Independence Day. Today it would be more appropriate to call it Interdependence Day since all of us live on this small planet Earth. To show my patriotism and love for my country and the good of my country, I have decided on a pruning hook action in Kansas City, Missouri. The opinion of the 1995 World Court is that weapons of mass destruction are a crime against humanity. Christian churches have said that it is a sin to build a nuclear weapon. Churches have declared that nuclear weapons are a crime against the Holy One and humanity and are to be condemned unreservedly! Some have further stated that the manufacturing, deployment or use of nuclear weapons must be condemned unreservedly. The Nazis during WWII killed and burned six million of our Jewish sisters and brothers and five million sisters and brothers (who were communists, priests, Gypsies, enemy combatants, homosexuals, people with disabilities, etc). Now four of our Minuteman III’s could, in 30 minutes, go halfway around the world and kill 12 million of our sisters and brothers. We have become very sophisticated and efficient in our killing and burning. We have more nuclear weapons than all the rest of the world combined and at one time could kill everyone on this planet fifteen times over. Eighty-five percent of the parts for nuclear bombs are made by the people of Kansas City. May the Holy One have mercy on us all! By my action I wish to enflesh the reversal of our insane actions and hope that we will start to celebrate an interdependence and rid ourselves of nuclear weapons.”

Compelled by the mandate of Gospel nonviolence and the Vatican II documents condemning nuclear weapons, he implored the USCCB to condemn the possession and threatened use of nuclear weapons as immoral, a stance that would later be adopted by Pope Francis. And a new UN treaty would be enacted making nuclear weapons illegal. In 2017 Pope Francis became the first to declare that the possession of nuclear weapons is immoral. Also in 2017, an overwhelming majority of the world’s nations adopted a landmark global agreement to ban nuclear weapons, known officially as the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW). On January 22, 2021, the TPNW was ratified by 50 nations and entered into force, thereby making nuclear weapons illegal under international law. To date 66 countries have ratified the TPNW, however the U.S. and other eight nuclear armed stated refuse to do so.

Tragically, despite enduring long imprisonment for his steadfast Gospel witness, Carl was not supported by the U.S. Catholic hierarchy. His relationship with his own order was lacking in support and difficult. However, later in his peace ministry this relationship changed. During Carl’s 2013 protest, his then-provincial, Fr. Bill Antone, joined him in a witness at the Kansas City nuclear weapons plant, saying he did it to protest nuclear weapons, “but mostly to support Kabat.” “I’m here to be in solidarity with Carl and what he’s done and, in [crossing the line], to show that there is an affirmation and a support and understanding that what he’s done is valid,” Antone said at the time, adding that Kabat had a “heroic persistence” and has been “a real witness to our faith [and is] something that we as oblates can be proud of.”

I first met Carl in the late 1970s and for over four decades he was a great inspiration. In between prison stints, Colleen McCarthy and I were blessed to have him present at our wedding. He was also an athlete who enjoyed playing basketball. It was always great fun to play with him, even if he always invoked the “Kabat Rules.” He was also an avid St. Louis Cardinals baseball fan. 

During the last four months I was able to have several “virtual” visits with Carl through WhatsApp, arranged by two longtime friends, Chrissy Kirchhoefer and Cassandra Dixon, who were accompanying him during his time in hospice. During my time with him his eyes were mostly closed, he was resting comfortably and he didn’t speak. I did make a point to convey to Carl, via Chrissy and Cassandra, the love and prayers from many of his friends and co-conspirators. Chrissy and Cassandra said he could hear what I was saying and was able to open his eyes and smile at me at different times.  

Chrissy, Cassandra, and Carl’s sister Mary Ann were with Carl earlier this week singing, holding his hand and lovingly tending to him. When they were with him on Wednesday (the day before he died), before leaving he was attentive the whole time and even seemed to sing of sorts while his head was being massaged. They conveyed to Carl everyone who was sending their love and prayers. 

Carl’s spirit was indomitable and his steadfast faith in following the nonviolent Jesus was exemplary. During this August 6-9 time marking the 77th anniversary of the criminal U.S. nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, let us recommit ourselves to working for the abolition of nuclear weapons and a disarmed world and making God’s reign of justice, love and peace a reality.

Deo Gratias for the life, friendship and courageous Gospel witness of Carl Kabat who is now among the holy cloud of witnesses advocating for us!

For You Tube Interviews with Carl see: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLATpydLAcc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMx5cyh_zNE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q50ORv453HU

Art Laffin is a member of the Dorothy Day Catholic Worker in Washington, D.C., is co-editor of Swords Into Plowshares, and author of the new edition of The Risk of the Cross: Living Gospel Nonviolence in the Nuclear Age.

xxx

A prophet has died. Long live the prophet.

by Dan Franklin

Rev. Carl K. Kabat, OMI, St. Henry’s class of 1951, died in San Antonio, Texas on Thursday, August 4, 2022.

Carl entered the seminary as a first year collegian. The understanding within the family was that his older brother, Paul, would become a priest, and Carl would become a doctor. One semester at the University of Illinois was enough to convince Carl otherwise: He accompanied Paul to St. Henry’s after Christmas, then followed him to the Oblate novitiate at Godfrey and on to ordination as a Missionary Oblate of Mary Immaculate.

The two Kabat boys grew up on a farm near Scheller, a south-central Illinois hamlet (St. Barbara Catholic Church and a handful of houses, a bit more than an hour’s drive from Belleville). Paul and Carl both played varsity sports at St. Henry’s — Paul played first base, Carl played second, and Carl was also a rebounding forward for the varsity Eagles.

In his second year at the seminary, Carl took on leadership roles, serving as vice president of the Catholic Students Mission Crusade and as the all-important circulation manager of the Gleeman.

Ordained in 1959, Carl joined St. Henry’s faculty in 1960-61. He ran the freshman-sophomore softball league, and his basketball C team posted a record of 10-5; he was also moderator of the Mission Club.

Carl’s missionary work began in Minnesota, but he served in the Philippines in the mid-1960s and then in Brazil from 1969 to 1973. His experience in Brazil transformed him, as it did many others who served in the Oblate delegation there.

Later, while at the Oblates’ peace and justice center in Bemidji, Minnesota, Carl translated (from Portuguese to English) José Comblin’s Jesus of Nazareth — the Messiah and Jesus of Nazareth: Meditations on His Humanity. Comblin, a theologian and priest in Brazil, was a champion of liberation theology.

Carl’s life was motivated by words …

Isaiah 2:4   And they will hammer their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not lift up sword against nation, and never again will they learn war.

I Corinthians 4:10   We are fools for Christ!   

The Oblate mission   He has sent me to preach the gospel to the poor.

Pacem in Terris (John XXIII encyclical) 

… but his life was defined by action.

On Dec. 28, 1977, the Feast of the Holy Innocents, Carl poured ashes and his own blood on the entrance of the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. “to expose the bloodshed and destruction coming from the Pentagon.” A Gleeman editorial commended his actions.

A pivotal moment arrived on Sept. 9, 1980. Carl and seven others trespassed on a General Electric plant in Pennsylvania where components were being manufactured for the first-strike Minuteman III missile. The group hammered on two reentry vehicles, poured blood on documents, and prayed for peace. The Plowshares movement was born — a national, then global, movement protesting nuclear weapons.

Months later, the Plowshares Eight went on trial. 

Countless protests, arrests, and imprisonments followed over the next four decades. Carl’s brother Paul often participated in the protests.

Before heading out to Colorado to attack a missile silo in 2009, Carl spoke with St. Louis Post-Dispatch columnist Bill McClellan. Noting that President Barack Obama had announced his goal of eliminating nuclear weapons, Carl said, “Basically, I want to help Obama. I’ll take one offline.” McClellan asked Carl, who typically wore khakis, sweats, and sneakers, if he ever wore his roman collar. “When I break the law,” Carl said with a laugh.

Carl explaining his arrest at that missile silo near Denver: 

He took the stand in his own defense. The prosecutor asked him, “Are you above the law?”

“All wrong law, yes,” Carl replied. “God’s law is above all these man-made things.”

Carl was sentenced to time served and released.

On July 13, 2013, at one of Carl’s last protests, Oblate Provincial Fr. Bill Antone joined him in trespassing on the grounds of a nuclear weapons plant in Kansas City. “I’m here to be in solidarity with Carl and what he’s done,” Fr. Bill said, “to show that there is an affirmation and a support and understanding that what he’s done is valid…. [Carl has been] a real witness to our faith [and is someone] that we as Oblates can be proud of.”

Below, a photo of Carl at that protest, holding the hand of organizer Jane Stoever as they lead protesters onto the property of the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Kansas City plant (National Catholic Reporter/Kate Simmons):

Over his lifetime, Carl spent more than 17 years in federal prison for his protest activities. During one of those imprisonments, he lost sight in his right eye; he had developed complications after a lens implant, and the prison staff was negligent. Carl’s response: “I figure I can see with my left eye, better than 20/20.”

When not in prison, Carl often lived in peace-focused communities, like Jonah House, a Baltimore collective that worked for peace and ministered to the poor residents of their neighborhood, and the Karen House Catholic Worker community in St. Louis. For several years, the Carl Kabat Catholic Worker House in the Karen House neighborhood offered hospitality to immigrants.

In his later years, Carl returned to St. Henry’s grounds to live in the Oblates’ retirement residence where our tennis courts had been. I met him there, in the communal gathering room, one sunny fall day in 2018. “I was a student here at St. Henry’s, like you,” I told him. He opened his left eye and focused on my face. I continued: “You have done such important work in your life, and I think of you as a hero.” He continued to gaze at me, then closed his eye. He said not one word. I assumed he was tired, and left. 

Much later, I realized that rather than being dismissive of my praise, Carl was challenging me: “Carry it on. Do something.”

The Oblates’ current provincial, Fr. Lou Studer, recently said about Carl, “His dedication has been unparalleled to anyone I’ve ever known. He’s always lived simply and close to the poor…. He was just way ahead of his time, trying to draw our attention to the dangers of nuclear war. You only have to think about the talk of nuclear weapons in Ukraine today to know how on the mark Carl has been.”

A funeral mass was celebrated in San Antonio on August 6, 2022, and Carl’s cremains have been returned to Illinois.

Mass of Resurrection

10:30 a.m., Saturday, August 20 at the National Shrine of Our Lady of the Snows in Belleville

Burial will be in the Kabat family plot in Du Bois, Illinois, where Carl will share this tombstone with his brother Paul:

Carl’s actions spoke louder than his (or anyone else’s) words, but let me close with these inspiring words of his:

“Jesus was arrested for challenging the Roman empire.”

“The opposite of love is not hate; it is apathy. I don’t want to be apathetic.”

“Justice is serious. And nuclear weapons are insane…. My principle is to just do what I can do, and then sing and dance.”

Fraternally yours,

Dan Franklin ’66

xxx

from Catholic Review

Father Carl Kabat, a former Baltimore resident, spent 17 years in prison for anti-nuclear protests

August 9, 2022
By Dennis Sadowski
Catholic News Service

WASHINGTON (CNS) — Oblate Father Carl Kabat, a former Baltimore resident who routinely described himself as a “fool for Christ” for his many faith witnesses challenging U.S. nuclear weapons policy, died Aug. 4 at his religious order’s Madonna Residence in San Antonio. He was 88.

His witnesses and acts of civil disobedience spanned more than four decades and included what was the first plowshares action in 1980 to symbolically dismantle nuclear warheads.

A funeral Mass was celebrated Aug. 6 in the chapel at the residence.

Father Kabat devoted most of his priesthood to protesting what he considered to be misguided government and military preparations for nuclear war. In addition to the Plowshares Eight action, he joined seven other plowshares and civil disobedience symbolic disarmament protests, for which he served more than 17 years in prison.

The 42-year-old plowshares movement takes its name from the Book of Isaiah’s call to beat swords into plowshares and for nations to end war.

Father Kabat told Catholic News Service in 2009 that being jailed did not bother him. He spoke to CNS as he awaited sentencing for cutting a hole in a fence surrounding a missile silo in rural Colorado and hanging banners with joyful message of peace. He was turning 76 at the time.

The priest regularly reminded people that Jesus was arrested for challenging the Roman empire.

During one of his imprisonments, Father Kabat became blind in his right eye when complications developed after cataract surgery. Even so, he remained an avid reader.

Father Kabat was born Oct. 10, 1933, to the late Nick and Anna Kabat on a farm in Scheller, Ill., the third of five children.

He decided to become a priest after leaving college, following the path of his older brother Paul, who also had joined the Oblates. He professed his first vows as a Missionary Oblate of Mary Immaculate in 1957 and was ordained a priest in 1959. Early in his priesthood he was assigned to ministries in Minnesota and Illinois and then was sent to Philippines and Brazil.

Reading St. John XXIII’s 1963 encyclical “Pacem in Terris” (“Peace on Earth”) influenced him to begin peacefully protesting the possession and potential use of nuclear weapons. Father Kabat joined his first nonviolent protest in Plains, Ga., the home of President Jimmy Carter, who supported production of first-strike nuclear weapons systems.

The priest later moved to Jonah House, a collective in Baltimore, which worked for peace and ministered alongside poor residents in their neighborhood. It has been the home of several plowshares participants over the years. It’s where he met attorney John Schuchardt, who also was one of the Plowshares Eight.

Schuchardt recalled Father Kabat as a person who was determined to call out what he considered the misguided military and government policy regarding the potential use of nuclear weapons in war.

“Looking at Carl’s 17 years in prison, here was someone whose greatest gift was hope,” Schuchardt, 83, told CNS Aug. 8. “What do you manifest when you are imprisoned again and again and again? You act for truth for the eventuality of humanity waking up. You wake up every day with the gift of hope.”

Schuchardt, director of House of Peace in Ipswich, Massachusetts, said the Oblate’s life “was a ministry.”

“He was a witness to the risen Christ. He had experienced the risen Christ. He was the resurrection,” Schuchardt said.

Art Laffin, a member of the Dorothy Day Catholic Worker in Washington, recalled Father Kabat in a reflection posted on the Pax Christi USA website, saying his priest friend considered himself a “fool for Christ.”

The reference comes from the First Letter to the Corinthians, which says: “We are fools for Christ, but you are so wise in Christ! We are weak, but you are strong! You are honored, we are dishonored!”

Laffin said the priest at times would dress in a clown suit to demonstrate the absurdity of U.S. nuclear weapons policy. At his protest actions, he often would display peace banners on fencing surrounding the target of his angst, Laffin said.

Schuchardt said Father Kabat would often break into song during his trials, singing spiritual hymns that highlighted calls for peace and belief in the Resurrection.

Father Kabat continued to protest nuclear weapons until 2014. [note from Nuclear Resister: Carl’s last arrest was at the Kansas City nuclear weapons plant on July 4, 2019.]  He lived at a Catholic Worker house in St. Louis until moving to the Oblate residence in his later years.

Survivors include a sister, Mary Ann Radake of Tamaroa, Ill., nieces and nephews. Brothers Paul, Robert and Leonard preceded Father Kabat in death.

xxx

Father Carl Kabat, RIP

by Frank Cordaro, in Via Pacis

News of Plowshares activist Father Carl Kabat’s Aug 4 death reached us just as we were editing articles and laying out this via pacis. We went through our version of “Hold the presses!” to make room for Carl’s RIP.

Fr. Carl was 88 years young when he died. I say ‘young’ because the spirit I got from talking and listening to Carl over the years, about his witness against nuclear weapons and years of prison time, was always childlike ((Matthew 18:3). For Fr. Carl,when it came to nuclear weapons, there was nothing complicated or dogmatic about what was needed. For Fr. Carl, nuclear weapons were evil. They had no right to exist. And because Church and State were not taking responsibility for their disarmament, he and everyone else must do everything they can to nonviolently disarm them at our own personal risk. 

Fr. Carl has the distinction of serving more prison time than any other nonviolent  U.S. nuclear resister – a total of 17 years!

I first learned about Fr. Carl when his name was on the original 1980 Plowshares 8 Witness list of actors. Father Dan and Phil Berrigan were the best known of course. And I knew something of everyone else, except for who Fr. Carl Kabat was.

That all changed in November 1984, with the Pruning Hooks Plowshares witness. Fr. Carl was one of four protesters who cut through a chained fence and broke into the N5 missile silo 30 miles east of Kansas City, Missouri. Along with Carl was his older brother, Paul, Larry Cloud-Morgan (Chief White Feather), and Helen Woodson. They had entered the silo grounds and jackhammered a slab of concrete before being arrested.

The use of a jackhammer got my attention, and the Federal Government’s attention as well. When asked about this at  the time Fr. Carl said “To beat the sword into a plowshare, you need a hammer. Well, a  jackhammer is just a little bigger hammer.”  For that protest, Fr. Carl received an 18-year prison sentence; he served 10. Carl would go on to do five other plowshares actions.

I took to writing Fr. Carl while he was locked up after this Pruning Hooks Plowshares witness. We put him on our via pacis mailing list. There must be a small pile of postcard notes from Fr. Carl in the DMCW Archive boxes in the CW Archives at Marquette University. And over the years, when he was not locked up, Carl started to attend our Midwest CW gatherings at Sugar  Creek and the yearly Faith and Resistance Retreats. For a number of those years until his retirement, Fr. Carl lived with the St. Louis Catholic Worker. He was our preferred Eucharist presider at all our CW gatherings.

Though childlike, he wasn’t perfect. Sometimes Carl’s hard headedness, stubborn ‘going my way’ attitude did not serve him well. Fr. Carl was at his best for us Midwest Catholic Workers when he celebrated Mass for us. It was easy to pray with Fr. Carl. Great scripture reflections, shared bread and wine duties, personal and humble. And there is  that time we were at a Fr. Carl Mass and he managed to skip the whole Cannon. We all took it in stride and knew the bread and wine was Jesus.

A giant “Thank-you” to St. Louis Catholic Worker Chrissy Kirchhoefer for being one of Carl’s primary support persons, being there for Carl when he needed help. Chrissy was with Carl when he died. 

Here is childlike Fr. Carl in his own words explaining to a Federal Judge why he was part of a August 6, 2009 plowshares action at a Minuteman Missile silo in Colorado: “The Roman Catholic Church, of which I am a priest, at the close of its Vatican Council II in 1965 condemned nuclear bombs as a crime against humanity and are to be condemned unreservedly. The World Council  of Churches has proclaimed that ‘the manufacture, deployment or use of nuclear bombs is a crime against humanity.’ … The nuclear bomb that is in the ground here is more than 20 times more powerful than the atomic bombs we dropped on the Japanese. Each of those bombs killed more than 100,000 people…The Bible says in the words of Isaiah: ‘They shall beat their spears into pruning hooks and their swords into plowshares.’  May the Holy One have mercy on us for not doing so.“

(A play was done about this action — A Clown, a Hammer, a Bomb and God by playwright Dan Kinch.)

xxx

from the Washington Post

Rev. Carl Kabat, nuclear arms opponent with Plowshares Eight, dies at 88

by Brian Murphy

August 11, 2022 

The Rev. Carl Kabat, a tireless opponent of nuclear weapons whose decades of protests included damaging warhead nose cones with a group known as the Plowshares Eight that gave new focus to the disarmament movement, died Aug. 4 in San Antonio. He was 88.

The death was announced by the Oblate Madonna Residence, a senior community home affiliated with Rev. Kabat’s religious congregation, the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate. No cause was given.

Rev. Kabat was repeatedly jailed — spending a total of nearly 20 years in jail since the 1970s — but remained steadfast in his belief in civil disobedience and symbolic vandalism to bring attention to the threats from nuclear arsenals.

Much of his influence came from his unbending commitment to public protests, even as his health declined, and a defiant spirit with a touch of sly wit. He verbally dueled with judges in court — calling some “brother” instead of your honor — and sometimes broke into military bases dressed as a clown, an homage to Saint Paul’s admonition in Corinthians to be valiant yet humble: “We are fools for Christ.”

“You have to put yourself where your words are,” Rev. Kabat said in a 2010 interview. “Otherwise you’re just kind of like flapping your jaws.”

While assigned to an Oblate mission in Brazil from 1968 to 1973, Rev. Kabat was introduced to developing currents in religious activism through liberation theology and its emphasis on economic and social justice. A crystallizing moment for Rev. Kabat came as he contrasted the grinding poverty in parts of Brazil with the huge money spent on arms by the richest nations.

After returning to the United States, he found a home among anti-nuclear demonstrators, drawing personal inspiration from Vatican statements against the arms race and nuclear war including Pope John XXIII’s 1963 encyclical “Pacem in Terris,” or Peace on Earth.

Rev. Kabat started big. On the White House portico and outside the Pentagon in 1978, he splashed human blood, which would become a hallmark of many of his protests over the decades. In 1980, he then gained national attention as part of what became known as the Plowshares Eight, a group that entered a General Electric facility in King of Prussia, Pa., and used claw hammers to damage part of the nose cones on Minuteman missiles and pour blood on documents in the plant.

The trial became a rallying point for the nuclear-disarmament movement with star defendants, antiwar clerics the Rev. Daniel Berrigan and his brother, the Rev. Philip Berrigan. The group took its name from the biblical lines of nations one day beating “swords into plowshares.”

The proceedings also were an ideological tug of war. Prosecutors tried to stick to the burglary and other charges at hand, while the Plowshares Eight sought to make the trial a question over the morality of nuclear weapons and their threats to humanity.

“Nuclear warfare is not on trial here, you are,” said an exasperated Judge Samuel Salus II. (A 1982 film, “In the King of Prussia,” starred Martin Sheen as Salus with Rev. Kabat and the other defendants playing themselves.)

The Eight were convicted and given sentences up to 10 years. (Rev. Kabat received three to 10 years.) They all appealed and were paroled in 1990 covering any previous jail time served. Meanwhile, Plowshare groups were formed around the country for anti-nuclear protests, occasionally copying Rev. Kabat’s use of blood as a vivid display of dissent.

“That first Plowshares action set off a chain reaction,” wrote Frida Berrigan, the daughter of Philip Berrigan from a relationship with a Catholic nun that led to their excommunications from the Catholic Church, though they were later reinstated.

“People are attracted to, and inspired by, the alchemic mixture of symbolic disarmament and real transformation that carries through the action, jail witness, courtroom saga and time in prison,” said her 2020 essay.

Brazil as turning point

Carl Kenneth Kabat was born Oct. 10, 1933, on a farm in Scheller, Ill., the third of five children. He began pre-med studies at the University of Illinois but never felt it was his calling, his sister, MaryAnn Radake, told the National Catholic Reporter.

He decided to leave school and follow his brother Paul to the Oblates, a global religious community founded in the early 19th century in France with a focus on helping the poor. Rev. Kabat was ordained in 1959, a year after his brother.

He was assigned to the Philippines in 1965 and then Brazil, where he came under the influence of liberation theology thinkers such as Joseph Comblin. But Rev. Kabat’s increasing outreach to the poor in Recife brought warnings from Brazil’s military dictatorship, said his sister.

He was moved back to the United States and built ties with groups such as Pax Christi USA, Amnesty International and the Catholic Worker Movement.

For many years, Rev. Kabat led a revolving-door life of protest, arrest, trial and jail — and then back against to protests. There were periods of tensions with Oblate leadership, but Rev. Kabat managed to keep his activism alive.

In 1984, he and three others, including his brother Paul, cut through a chain-link fence and used a rented jackhammer to damage the cover of a nuclear missile silo at Whiteman Air Force Base outside Knob Noster, Mo. They then sat in a circle, singing and holding hands. Rev. Kabat was sentenced to 18 years in prison and served 10.

Rev. Kabat and two others, dressed as clowns, disabled a missile silo cover in 2006 at the Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota, pouring their own blood on the site; Rev. Kabat was sentenced to 15 months in prison. Three years later, he cut through the fence around a Minuteman III nuclear missile silo outside Greeley, Colo. — one of several such incursions in Colorado over the years — and unfurled antiwar banners.

“I thought, ‘What a beautiful place this is except for this damnable thing in the ground that could kill 2 or 3 million people,’” he said later in a jailhouse interview with the New York Times. He was convicted and sentenced to 137 days, the time he already served behind bars.

Survivors include a sister, MaryAnn Radake of Tamaroa, Ill., and nieces and nephews.

After one of his last major protests in 2016 — splashing red paint on entry sign at the National Security Campus in Kansas City, Mo. — he appeared in Kansas City Municipal Court leaning on a cane. He had only limited vision in his right eye after complications following lens surgery while in prison years before. Still, he remained in feisty form, acting as his own attorney.

He cross-examined security guard John Falcon, the chief witnesses against him from the Honeywell-linked facility. Rev. Kabat asked if he was old enough to remember the Hiroshima atomic bombing in 1945. The prosecution objected.

Judge Katherine Emke asked if he had any more witnesses. Rev. Kabat didn’t miss a beat, reaching back to President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s 1961 warnings about the influence of the “military-industrial complex.”

“Yeah,” he told the judge. “Eisenhower.”

xxx

from the New York Times

Rev. Carl Kabat, Peace Activist and ‘Fool for Christ,’ Dies at 88

An associate of the Berrigan brothers, he spent nearly two decades in prison for his relentless protesting, often in a clown suit, against nuclear arms.

by Ed Shanahan 

Aug. 17, 2022

The Rev. Carl Kabat, a Roman Catholic priest and tenacious yet joyful foe of nuclear weapons who spent nearly 20 years in prison for protests that involved bolt cutters, human blood and clown costumes (red nose included), died on Aug. 4 at a retirement home affiliated with his religious order, the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate, in San Antonio. He was 88.

His death was confirmed by the Oblates. No cause was provided.

Father Kabat, citing Corinthians, called himself a “fool for Christ,” but his cause was serious: sounding the alarm about the doomsday threat posed by the world’s nuclear arsenal.

He “heard a call to be a prophet against the proliferation” of nuclear weapons, the Oblates said in announcing his death. In answering that call, he joined a broader campaign being waged under the Catholic Worker banner against injustice, war, racism and violence of all kinds.

“You can’t just kill babies and children and old people indiscriminately,” Father Kabat said in a jailhouse interview with The New York Times in 2009, while awaiting trial in Colorado after a protest there. “It should be unreasonable for every human person to accept nuclear weapons.”

Perhaps the best-known example of Father Kabat’s approach to civil disobedience came on Sept. 9, 1980, when he and seven others entered Building 9 at a General Electric factory in King of Prussia, Pa.

Arriving before the morning shift began, the group, which included the Rev. Daniel Berrigan and his brother Philip, walked past a security guard and into the plant. Once inside, they used claw hammers to damage nose cones for Minuteman missiles and sprinkled their own blood from baby bottles onto blueprints and other documents. They then joined hands, prayed and sang hymns, one of the eight, Molly Rush, recalled in an interview.

The episode, among the most prominent antiwar protests since the Vietnam War, led to burglary and other charges against the participants, who called themselves the Plowshares Eight after the Bible’s reference to nations that “shall beat their swords into plowshares.”

The group’s members were tried and convicted in 1981. Father Kabat, who had helped distract the security guard as the others entered the plant, received among the harshest sentences: 3 to 10 years in prison. After lengthy appeals, his sentence and the others’ were reduced in 1990 to their time served before trial. Along the way, the Pennsylvania protest inspired people around the country to form Plowshares groups and employ similar tactics.

Carl Kenneth Kabat was born on Oct. 10, 1933, in Scheller, Ill., a farming hamlet about an hour and a half from St. Louis, the third of five children. His father, Nick Kabat, was a farmer; his mother, Anna (Skorczewski) Kabat, was a homemaker.

Mary Ann Radake, Father Kabat’s sister and only immediate survivor, said that he had planned to become a doctor but decided against it after enrolling at the University of Illinois as a pre-med student.

“He must have had a calling at that time,” Ms. Radake said in an interview.

Dropping out of college, he followed his brother Paul into the priesthood and joined the Oblates, an order founded in France in the early 19th century to minister to the poor. He was ordained in 1959.

He was later assigned to the Philippines and then to Brazil. It was in South America that the teachings of liberation theology, with its emphasis on addressing social, political and economic inequity in the service of ultimate salvation, began to take hold.

“He was subjected to real poverty there,” Ms. Radake said.

He returned to the United States in 1973. The Cold War was grinding on, the Vietnam War was nearing its end and the impact of the reforms introduced by the Second Vatican Council in the early 1960s was still rippling through the country’s Catholic ranks.

The Oblates said that Father Kabat had embraced a statement included in Pope John XXIII’s 1963 encyclical “Pacem in Terris”: “Justice, right reason and the recognition of man’s dignity cry out insistently for a cessation of the arms race.”

Father Kabat spent several years translating the works of the liberation theologian José Comblin into English. He also made common cause with groups like Amnesty International. He joined Jonah House, a Baltimore collective founded by Philip Berrigan, by then a former priest, and his wife, Liz McAlister, a former nun. Soon he was protesting at the Pentagon, splashing blood on the steps in a precursor to the Plowshares Eight episode.

From 1977 to 2002, his official assignment with the Oblates was “peace activist,” a title he carried to small towns like Graterford, Pa., and Sandstone, Minn., and cities like Baltimore and Bismarck, N.D. His itinerant life followed a pattern: protest, arrest, prison, repeat.

In 1984, as appeals in the Plowshares Eight case continued, Father Kabat, his brother Paul and two other people cut through a chain-link fence at an Air Force base in Missouri, used a jackhammer to damage a missile silo’s concrete cover and then offered a Eucharist. Father Kabat served about six years in federal prison as a result.

“To beat the sword into a plowshare, you need a hammer,” he told St. Louis magazine in 2010. “Well, jackhammer is just a little bigger hammer.”

He explained in the same interview that he had begun dressing as a clown for protests rather than in his typical sweatshirt and khakis in 1994 after realizing that Good Friday and April Fools’ Day fell on the same day.

“I know it’s silly,” Father Kabat said.

“Justice is serious,” he added. “And nuclear weapons are insane, eh?”

In 2006, he and two other men, all dressed as clowns, disabled a missile silo cover at a launch site near an Air Force base in North Dakota. Father Kabat was sentenced to 15 months in prison. Three years later, he was arrested after cutting through a fence around a Minuteman silo near Greeley, Colo., and displaying antiwar banners. He was convicted of criminal mischief and trespassing and spent 137 days behind bars.

He was still committing acts of civil disobedience in his 80s. In 2016 and again in 2019, he splashed red paint on an entry sign at the National Security Campus in Kansas City, Mo., a federal Energy Department facility that makes non-nuclear parts for nuclear weapons systems. In both instances, he was charged with trespassing and damaging property.

Interviewed by The Greeley Tribune of Colorado in 2009, Father Kabat said he wanted his tombstone to say, “He really lived.”

“Joyfulness is very, very important,” he said. “Do what a person can do, then sing and dance.”

xxx

from the St. Louis Post/Dispatch

Protester priest’s spirit lives on

The Rev. Carl Kabat had a thing about nuclear weapons. He hated them.

Few among us even think about them. We might — or might not — worry about AR-15s or AK-47s or even high-capacity magazines, but we draw the line at worrying about thermonuclear bombs. That way lies madness.

Kabat, who died last month at age 88, was bothered enough to stage symbolic protests. In 1984, Kabat and three others, including his brother, who was also a Roman Catholic priest, cut through a chain-link fence at the Whiteman Air Force Base near Knob Noster, Missouri. They pounded away with a jackhammer at a cover for a nuclear missile silo and then sat in a circle holding hands and singing as they waited to be arrested.

Kabat, the ringleader, was sentenced to 18 years.

That might sound stiff to 21st-century ears, but in those days, federal judges did not consider compassion a virtue. They were mostly old men, almost all of them white, and many looked and acted like Old Testament prophets. They considered their authority to be absolute and righteous. They believed in an eye for an eye. Kabat was a New Testament man. He believed in turning the other cheek, but not before he had challenged authority.

Plus, Kabat already had a reputation. In 1980, he was among eight protesters, including fellow priests Daniel and Phillip Berrigan, who poured blood on documents and took hammers to missiles under construction in a General Electric plant in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania. That action was celebrated in the movie “In the King of Prussia.” Martin Sheen played the judge. The protesters played themselves.

Kabat did 10 years on his 18-year sentence from the Knob Noster case, but there were other actions. Sometimes he wore a clown costume when he attacked a silo. The costume was in reference to the words of St. Paul: “We are fools for Christ.”

In total, he spent almost 20 years in prison.

Despite his notoriety — his death merited obituaries in the New York Times and the Washington Post — he lived quietly in St. Louis since about 2000. He was greatly admired by the liberal Catholic Workers who live and work on the city’s Near North Side. I met him through them. I asked about all the years in prison, and he said he had not found prison too bad. He said he much preferred the higher-security prisons — despite their harsher conditions — to the federal minimum-security camps.

 

The poorer the inmates were, the more supportive they were of him, he explained. He said there were a lot of rich businessmen in the camps, and they tended to be less sympathetic toward his ideas.

Kabat was born in 1933 and grew up on a farm in Southern Illinois. He started college at the University of Illinois with the thought of perhaps becoming a doctor but instead joined the church. He belonged to the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate. He was ordained in 1959 and was later sent to Brazil, where he became radicalized, which is a word he would not consider pejorative. He became an adherent of liberation theology.

His political leanings never changed, and they put him out of step with some of the more conservative leaders of the church in St. Louis — that understates things — and he was not part of the local church establishment.

 

I remember sitting with him in the front yard of a Catholic Workers house in the summer of 2009. He was 75. He was wearing raggedy clothes. He could have been mistaken for a homeless man. I asked if he ever wore his Roman collar.

 

He seemed to consider it for a moment. “When I break the law,” he said, and he laughed. That is something else about him. He laughed. He was not a dour man.

In February 2011, I invited him to ride with me to the prison in Bonne Terre. I was serving as a state’s witness at the execution of Martin Link, who had been convicted of murdering Elissa Self-Braun. Kabat was an ardent opponent of capital punishment and made it a point of getting arrested at the prison on the night of an execution. I suggested I could drop him off in front of the prison and then pick him up later at the county jail. I explained he’d be doing me a favor. The drive to and from the prison on execution night can be depressing. It would be much easier with good company. He thought about it but eventually declined my offer.

 

When I went to the prison that night, I stopped by the “designated protest area,” but not surprisingly, Kabat was not there. Designated protest areas were not his style. I spoke to the guards when I entered the blocked-off parking lot. Kabat had already been there. A car had stopped briefly in front of the prison, and Kabat had jumped out wearing a sandwich sign. “Thou Shalt Not Kill” was on the front, “Stop the Murder” on the back. He was taken to the county jail and kept for the night.

 

 

He had other causes, too. He was committed to helping the least among us. But nuclear weapons were his signature issue. When I spoke with him on that summer day in 2009, he told me he was leaving for Colorado in the morning to attack a missile silo. I wrote a column about that discussion that was published the day after our talk.

 

“Carl Kabat will be 76 in October and he figures to be in jail again by then. In fact, he’s headed to Colorado today to commit a crime, the same crime he’s been committing for the last 25 years …”

Somebody from the St. Louis FBI office read that column and called somebody from the FBI office in Denver, and Kabat was arrested at the fence before he could break through to attack a missile. He was not happy about that, but on the other hand, his intention was never to destroy our nuclear arsenal with a sledgehammer, but to remind people of a potential and looming catastrophe. I do this out of love, he told me.

 

 

Of course, whenever I wrote about him, I would hear from practical people who are impatient with dreamers of any sort. What was the point of his life? What was he actually accomplishing?

He died in August at a “senior residence” in San Antonio affiliated with his order. A couple of weeks later, a service was held at Our Lady of the Snows in Belleville. I was one of about 300 people in attendance. As I sat in the church I wondered, what was the point of all his sacrifices?

That is too heavy a question for me to answer, but let me say that his colleagues from the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate were present in force to show their solidarity with his commitment to his ideals. I saw a couple of Catholic Workers I recognized. I admire them. (I am old-fashioned and miss the days when devout Christians were, by definition, kinder and more committed to social justice than I am.) Mostly, though, the congregants were people I didn’t recognize. Ordinary-looking people whose lives Kabat’s spirit had somehow touched.

 

That’s not nothing.

 

His spirit will live on, too. The Catholic Workers long ago named one of their residences the Kabat House. I went there looking for Kabat one day. I knocked and heard rustling inside, but nobody answered. I knocked again. A young man finally answered the door. He looked nervous. I asked if Carl was there, and he shook his head. “No inglés,” he said. “Soy un amigo de el,” I said, and I was pleased with myself because I figured it was mostly true. I was a friend of Carl.