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The New York Times Sept. 7 profiled resilient anti-nuke protester, Oblate Father Carl Kabat, who last month outside of Denver was arrested for protesting at a nuclear weapon silo.
The Times: "His most recent protest unfolded on a quiet dawn last month, when he drove down a country road outside Greeley, a few hours north of Denver, used the bolt cutters to cut a hole in a chain-link fence, wedged his aging body through and stepped atop the silo of a Minuteman III nuclear missile coming up from the ground. He had enough time — about 45 minutes — to drape antiwar banners from the fence, say a prayer and try without success to open a hatch leading to the silo before he was arrested by Air Force security personnel.
“I thought, ‘What a beautiful place this is except for this damnable thing in the ground that could kill two or three million people,’ ” Father Kabat said later in an interview at the Weld County Jail, where he is being held on misdemeanor criminal mischief and trespassing charges. “It’s insane.”
This is the statement he released at the time:
The World Council of Churches has proclaimed that ‘the manufacture, deployment or use of nuclear bombs is a crime against humanity.’
I support President Barack Obama’s desire and have attempted to do my little bit in his effort.
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. At lest twenty times that number totals more than 2 million 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.
Photos of the protest can be viewed on the Jonah House Web Site.
Kabat considers himself a "fool for Christ." In protesting nuclear weapons as he does, with the costs of spending years in prison, he forces us to ask the question: "Is he the fool or are we the fools for not protesting these immoral weapons as vigorously?"