"The priest, the clown and the life of protest" Bill Johnson, Denver Post
Frank Cordaro
By Bill Johnson
Denver Post Columnist
Posted: 08/07/2009 01:00:00 AM MDT
http://www.denverpost.com/billjohnson/ci_13011615?source=email
Father Carl Kabat awoke early Thursday morning, put on his clerical
collar, grabbed his clown suit and quietly strolled out of his
longtime friend's Arvada home.
William Strabala, who has known the Catholic priest since their days
in the seminary more than 50 years ago and had hosted him since he
arrived from St. Louis, simply sighed. It was pointless, he knew, to
attempt to talk the 75-year-old priest out of what he was about to do.
Shortly before 8 a.m. Thursday, Carl Kabat arrived outside a N-8
Minuteman III nuclear missile silo near New Raymer in Weld County. He
donned his signature clown costume and breached the fences that
surround the silo.
He hung banners on the fence. He kneeled in his yellow wig, his
one-piece blue jumper adorned with patches and smiley faces and his
outsized red shoes. And he prayed.
Military authorities quickly arrived.
Carl Kabat, who has spend most of the past two decades in federal
prison for more than a dozen similar anti-nuclear-weapon protests, was
led once again to jail, facing charges of criminal mischief and
second- degree criminal trespass.
"What is the date today?" Bill Strabala asked when I contacted him.
"It is the 50th anniversary of his ordination as a priest, the 64th
anniversary of the nuclear attack on Hiroshima, Japan."
Carl Kabat, he said, loves such symmetry.
Before leaving, the priest placed on the table a typewritten message
he wanted his friend to distribute.
"We are Fools and Clowns for the Holy One and Humanity's Sake," he
headlined it. It is a reference to a favorite saying of his, one he
told me years ago over dinner only days after he'd been released from
a long stretch in prison.
"St. Paul says we are fools for God's sake. I change it to say we are
fools and clowns for God and humanity's sake," he said, explaining the
clown get-up.
"I, Father Carl Kabat, come to this evil place today as a Roman
Catholic priest of 50 years, to show what insanity is in the ground
here and at other silos in our beautiful country," his statement
began.
"President Barack Obama has stated, 'As the only nuclear power to have
used a nuclear weapon, the United States has a moral responsibility to
act . . .'"
With his arrest on Thursday, Carl Kabat wrote that he was just "doing
my little bit in (the president's) effort."
It wasn't clear at this writing whether the priest did what he
normally does during such protests, which includes dropping his own
blood from a vial he carries with him, pounding the silo lid with a
hammer and writing an anti-nuclear message on the lid with black spray
paint.
Over dinner on that long-ago winter night, he explained the blood as
shedding his own so others might live. The first time he went to jail,
during the Jimmy Carter years, he had poured blood on a pillar of the
White House.
The hammer, he explained, was a reference to the prophet Isaiah, who
wrote: "They shall beat their spears into pruning hooks and their
swords into plowshares."
Carl Kabat is a gentle soul, a man who must look at you crooked
because one eye barely works now. When he is not doing time — a bunch
of it, he says, was spent "in the hole" — he devotes his life to
ministering to the poor.
I never will forget his response when I asked him why he does such
things, always landing himself in prison.
"Someone has to do this," he said with a laugh, adding that the
missiles he attacks are 20 times more powerful than the one that wiped
out 100,000 people in Hiroshima.
"Just one of those missiles could kill 2 million human beings. I have
to do this."
William Strabala, 72, late Thursday was trying to figure out how to
post his friend's $2,000 bail.
"I told him goodbye last night," he said. "I just shook my head at
him, and told him I am too old to go on this journey with him. Foolish
or not, Father Carl has guts."
Bill Johnson writes Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at
303-954-2763 or wjoh...@denverpost.com.