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.
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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 and — he lived quietly in Ƶ 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 Ƶ — 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 Ƶ 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.