Bruce Kent, who died at the age of 92, was the most controversial Catholic priest of his generation in Britain. To his detractors, his high-ranking involvement in the Nuclear Disarmament Campaign during its 1980s renaissance was inappropriate behavior for an ordained member of a church that accepts arguments for nuclear deterrence. To his admirers — and they were much more than ill-wishers — he was a prophetic and charismatic figure who almost alone shook English Catholicism out of his complacency, studying moderation and instinctively avoiding anything political.
Watch Monsignor Kent drive away the Polaris nuclear submarine base in Faslane on the west coast of Scotland, or lead protests in Greenham Common, Berkshire, against the deployment of American cruise missiles, or allow bailiffs to confiscate his small secular assets instead of paying with his taxes on the proliferation of nuclear weapons were a strong reminder that the Christian gospel is social and radical.
One of the ironies of the ferocious campaign against Kent by selfless God-fearing conservatives, MI5 and Vatican diplomat to Britain Bruno Heim – who in 1983 called him a “useful idiot” who does the Council’s dirty work for them – was that the object of their rage was such a soft man. Kent was not fiery, and even when confronted and abused by his detractors, he was soothing. He followed the example of Christ, often quoted but somewhat difficult in practice, to turn the other cheek.
Bruce Kent protests in front of the Ministry of Defense against the war in Iraq. Photo: Martin Argles / Guardian
However, this did not mean that he was not passionate about his beliefs or effective in exposing them. Maybe he was lucky with the weather. When he took over as CND’s secretary general in the early 1980s, he was nearly dead, with only 3,000 paid members.
Within months, the government’s double announcements of a £ 5 billion program to replace Polaris with Trident and Cruise’s plans to host Greenham revived the organization.
By November, he had turned to 80,000 supporters of Trafalgar Square, and the following year, 250,000 gathered in Hyde Park.
A gifted speaker with natural authority, Kent was equally skilled as an administrator and tactician, successfully resisting Trotskyist efforts to infiltrate the CND’s various governing councils and avoiding the divisions that crippled the organization during its first incarnation in the late 1950s.
One of the most telling compliments for Kent came in December 1982 from Dennis Healy, the Labor’s deputy leader and not a fan of CND policy. He, Healy said, “achieved the most impressive victory for the politics of a single issue in recorded history.”
The Catholic hierarchy watched all this from the sidelines with growing anxiety and a great deal of envy. Cardinal Basil Hume, who gave Kent permission to take on his role in the CND, allowed him a lot of rope and protected him from his accusers. But Hume, for all his monastic unearthliness, had great respect for men in Department of Defense uniforms, and Kent felt worried about the situation.
With the 1987 general election approaching and the nuclear issue back on the agenda, Kent felt he had no choice but to leave the priesthood if he wanted to continue talking about the threat to the world. Hume made the right sounds, but was too willing to accept some.
For Kent, Feb. 11, the day he retired — he would never take advantage of his worldwide resignation, though it was clear he would not return — was one of the worst of his life. He wept as he told the news to those in the church who supported him, and many wept with him. “I knew,” he later wrote, “that I no longer fit into the priesthood as others see it.”
Bruce was born in London in the comfortable world of the suburbs of Hampstead Garden, the son of Molly (born Marion) and Kenneth Kent, who ran the British subsidiary of the American manufacturing company Armstrong Cork company. At a parish dance, Bruce went out with the young Antonia Packenham, later Fraser, whose parents belonged to a group of Labor politicians living in the area. The Kents, however, were more conservative in their political leanings.
Bruce’s parents were Canadians, and for three years during World War II, he and his brother and sister moved back to Canada with their mother. She was a devout Catholic, and upon their return Bruce went to Stonehurst College in Lancashire, the Jesuit school that competed with Amplofort for Catholic Ethan. “It took me,” he said, “at least another 20 years to realize how effectively I was treated for the life and values of the English establishment.”
And his life after that was initially conformist. He spent two years in the army and then went to Brasenose College, Oxford, earning a law degree in 1956. However, he had long been interested in the priesthood and was ordained in 1958 after overcoming opposition from his non-Catholic father. Again, he was not a member of the boat, and after a few years in the parish, in 1963 he became General Secretary to Cardinal John Hyannan, Hume’s predecessor as Catholic leader.
His tasks were many and varied, manually delivering rosaries to a maid at 10 Downing Street, attending Winston Churchill’s state funeral with his boss, and dealing with the turbulent mood swings of the unpredictable and selfish Heannon. Although their relationship strained two years later, especially with Kent’s growing radicalism stemming from the Vatican’s intransigence over artificial birth control, Heinan still had enough faith in his assistant to appoint him a Catholic priest at the University of London.
By the time he was in office (1966-74), Kent was coming of age. In no particular order did he discover ecumenism, abandon all ideas of the priest to lead and the laity who meekly followed him, was forced by student questions to question the church’s traditional antipathy to sex, and became increasingly involved in the struggle for better world.
This began shortly after his ordination, when he agreed to be a priest of Pax Christi, the small British branch of the International Catholic Peace Movement, but it flourished during his time at the University of London. He is involved in the CND, the anti-arms campaign and War on Want.
He travels to Biafra and India and sees first-hand the damage caused by wars and Western weapons there. And he began to criticize his own church for its outspoken attitude. His letter to the Times in October 1967, attacking a Catholic naval priest for the blessing of the Polaris launch, marked the beginning of his national reputation – and the controversy that followed.
Heanan was horrified by the change in Kent, and the two clashed repeatedly. Other more prominent figures, senior government officials who have been to Stonihurst or Oxford with him, see him as a traitor. However, the cardinal’s death in 1975 and his replacement by the less confrontational Hume led to a sort of reconciliation between the Archdiocese of Westminster and its tumultuous priest.
Above all, the remarkable Victor Guatzelli, one of Hume’s auxiliary (or assistant) bishops, did his best to keep Kent in his bosom, appointing him parish priest of St. Aloysius, Euston, in 1977, but allowing him enough a place to pursue his work in the peace movement. Like Kent, Guatzelli took over from the Synod of Bishops in Rome in 1971, which taught that the gospel “has the power to set us free not only from sin but also from what sin has done to our society.”
When Kent took over as CND’s secretary general, the pressure of work meant he had to give up his parish, even though he continued to live and officiate at St. John’s in Islington. It was an intoxicating year. His face rarely appeared on television, forever challenging the Cold War.
Bruce Kent, center, with Jonathan Porit, left, and Jeremy Corbyn at the Walk for the Earth rally in front of the U.S. Embassy in London in 1992. Photo: Fiona Hanson / PA
He argues that the Warsaw Pact countries pose little or no threat to the West, that the Soviet Union is in internal disintegration and therefore unlikely to attack, and that deterrence can never work because it implies readiness to strike first.
History, after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, proved him right: only with the Russian invasion of Ukraine is much thought about the nuclear conflict. But at the time, Kent was being summoned by everyone from Conservative Secretary Michael Hezeltain to a fanatic who sent him an (thankfully intercepted) incendiary bomb.
After leaving the priesthood, Kent continued to work for the peace movement. He had a brief Indian summer as a commentator during the Gulf War in 1990, but his profile declined as the nuclear argument faded from the top of the political agenda. He was a Labor candidate in Oxford West and Abingdon in 1992, but was already considered too left-wing by many in the Labor hierarchy.
Professionally, it was a sin that his enormous energy and intellect were never subsequently called upon by the Catholic Church, which stubbornly refused to leave the past behind. But if his last years were quieter than before, they were much happier. In 1988, 14 months after retiring as a priest, he married Valerie Flesati.
Thanks to her work with Pax Christi, they had known each other for several years, but they both struggled to point out that it had nothing to do with him turning his back on the holy commandments. In fact, she didn’t even know he was actively considering such a move. Because he was still considered a priest and never applied to Rome to be consecrated, the couple could not marry in a church, but their union was very blessed, built on a shared commitment …
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