Labor Day: Real Labor {Responsibility} for Peace

As Battlefields Shift, Old Warrior for Peace Pursues the Same Enemy

The Rev. Carl Kabat inside the fence at a Colorado missile site before his recent arrest.

GREELEY, Colo. — It had been nearly 30 years since the Rev. Carl Kabat and a group of peace activists, including his fellow Catholic priests Daniel and Philip Berrigan, barged into a General Electric weapons plant outside Philadelphia. Known as the Plowshares Eight, they battered missile nose cones with hammers in an effort to disable some of the world’s most fearsome weapons, and sprinkled blood on classified documents to protest the cold war, before they were arrested.

Snip

“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.”

Snip

“You can’t just kill babies and children and old people indiscriminately,” he said. “It should be unreasonable for every human person to accept nuclear weapons............