Longtime anti-nuclear activist and Catholic priest Carl Kabat has died at the age of 88.  

San Antonio, August 23 (RHC)-- The longtime anti-nuclear activist and Catholic priest Carl Kabat has died at the age of 88.  

In 1980, he took part in the first Plowshares action when he, along with Dan and Phil Berrigan and others, broke into a General Electric missile plant in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania.  They hammered on missile nose cones, damaging them beyond repair, and poured their blood on the damaged parts. 

During an interview given while in prison, 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.”

Father Carl Kabat, dead at the age of 88, spent more than 17 years in prison for his social activism and work against nuclear weapons.