The New York Times profiles Father Carl Kabat, one of the Catholic clergy known as the “Plowshares Eight.”
Kabat continues to crusade against nuclear weapons nearly thirty years after he and seven others illegally trespassed onto the General Electric Nuclear Missile facility in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, dented nose cones made there with hammers and then poured blood onto classified documents.
The cold war ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall 20 years ago this November and the splintering of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. Three of the Plowshares Eight, including Philip Berrigan, have died, and scores of other activists have turned their attention to the Arab-Israeli conflict, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the terrorism suspects held at Guantánamo.
Not Father Kabat, though. At 75 he continues his crusade against nuclear weapons at missile silos across the United States, armed with a hammer and a pair of bolt cutters. He usually wears a clown suit, in homage, he says, to St. Paul’s words: “We are fools for Christ’s sake.”
Though his actions are mostly symbolic — the authorities have always seized him before he could damage a live missile — he has spent half of the last three decades in state and federal prisons.
Read the rest here.