Biography
An Oblate priest and longtime anti-nuclear resister, Kabat is best known for the 1984 “Silo Pruning Hooks” action in which four activists cut through fencing at a Minuteman II missile silo site in Missouri, damaged the silo’s concrete lid with tools, and conducted prayers as a direct challenge to nuclear weapons policy.
Arrested at the site, he was convicted in federal court (including conspiracy, trespass, and property-damage charges) and sentenced to ten years in prison—one of the longest sentences imposed on anti-nuclear civil disobedience from that period. Father Paul Kabat was an Oblate Catholic priest and the older brother of Plowshares activist Father Carl Kabat. On November 12, 1984 he joined his brother, Helen Woodson, and Larry Cloud Morgan in the Silo Pruning Hooks action at a Minuteman II missile silo near Knob Noster, Missouri. He was sentenced to 8 years in federal prison; he served until 1989. He died on June 22, 2007, age 72.
Catholic priest of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate (OMI) and brother of Carl Kabat, participant in the Silo Pruning Hooks Plowshares action on November 12, 1984 at a Minuteman II silo in Missouri. Convicted of sabotage and depredation of government property and sentenced to federal prison alongside his brother, Larry Cloud-Morgan, and Helen Woodson. Documented in PFOC Breakthrough magazine.
