Bruce Kent, who died at the age of 92, was the most controversial Catholic priest of his generation in Britain. For his detractors, his prominent involvement with the Nuclear Disarmament Campaign during his renaissance in the 1980s was inappropriate behavior for an ordained member of a church who accepted the arguments for nuclear deterrence. To his admirers, and there were many more than detractors, he was a prophetic and charismatic figure who almost alone took English Catholicism out of his complacency, studied moderation and instinctive avoidance of all politics. .
See Rev. Kent exorcise Polaris nuclear submarine base in Faslane on the west coast of Scotland, or lead protests in Greenham Common, Berkshire, against the deployment of US cruise missiles, or allowing sheriffs to seize his few worldly possessions instead of paying with his taxes for the proliferation of nuclear weapons was a powerful reminder that the Christian gospel is social and radical.
One of the ironies of the fierce campaign against God-fearing Conservative MPs, MI5 and the Vatican’s diplomatic representative in Britain, Bruno Heim, who in 1983 called him a “useful idiot” dirty work of the Soviets for them – was that the subject of their fury was a man in such gentle ways. Kent was no brand of fire and even when his detractors confronted and abused him he was emollient. He followed the example of Christ, often quoted but notoriously harsh in practice, of turning the other cheek.
Bruce Kent protests in front of the Ministry of Defense against the war in Iraq. Photography: Martin Argles / The Guardian
This did not mean, however, that he was not passionate about his beliefs or effective in conveying them. Maybe he was lucky with his timing. When she took over as Secretary General of the CND in the early 1980s, she was virtually dying, with only 3,000 subscribers.
In a matter of months, the government’s two announcements of a £ 5bn program to replace Polaris with Trident and plans to host Cruise in Greenham revived the organization.
In November it was addressed to 80,000 fans in Trafalgar Square, and the following year 250,000 gathered in Hyde Park.
A gifted speaker, with natural authority, Kent was equally adept as an administrator and tactician, successfully countering the Trotskyist efforts to infiltrate the various governing councils of the CND and avoiding divisions that had paralyzed the organization. during his first incarnation in the late 1950s.
One of the most significant compliments for Kent came in December 1982 from Denis Healey, the deputy leader of Labor and a fan of CND policies. He had, Healey said, “achieved the most impressive victory for the politics of a single subject in recorded history.”
The Catholic hierarchy watched all this from the sidelines with growing unease and not a little envy. Cardinal Basil Hume, who had given Kent permission to assume his role as CND, allowed him a big rope and defended him from his accusers. But Hume, in spite of all his monastic anti-worldliness, had a great deal of respect for the uniformed men of the Ministry of Defense, and Kent felt his displeasure with the situation.
With the approach of the 1987 general election and the nuclear issue once again on the agenda, Kent felt he had no choice but to leave the priesthood if he wanted to continue talking about the threat facing the world. . Hume made the right noises, but he accepted too easily for some.
For Kent, on February 11, the day of his retirement, he would never use the world renunciation, although it was clear that he would not return, it was one of the worst of his life. He wept as he broke the news to those who had supported him in the church, and many wept with him. “I knew,” he later wrote, “that he no longer fit into the priesthood as others saw it.”
Bruce was born in London in the comfortable world of Hampstead Garden Suburb, the son of Molly (nee Marion) and Kenneth Kent, who ran the British branch of the American manufacture Armstrong Cork. At the parish dances, Bruce went out with a young Antonia Pakenham, later Fraser, whose parents belonged to the group of Labor politicians who lived in the area. The Kents, however, were more conservative in their political leanings.
Bruce’s parents were Canadian and for three years during World War II he and his brother and sister went with their mother back to Canada. She was a devout Catholic, and on her return Bruce went to Stonyhurst University in Lancashire, the Jesuit school that competed with Ampleforth to be the Catholic Eton. “It took me at least another 20 years to realize how effective I had been for the life and values of the English establishment.”
And his life afterwards was initially conformist. He spent two years in the army and then went to Brasenose College in Oxford, where he graduated in law in 1956. However, he had long had an interest in the priesthood and, after overcoming the opposition of his non-Catholic father, was ordained in 1958. There, again, was no rocking of the ship, and after a few years in the parish work he became in 1963 the principal secretary to Cardinal John Heenan, Hume’s predecessor as the Catholic leader.
Her assignments were many and varied, handing out rosaries to a maid at 10 Downing Street, attending Winston Churchill State Funeral with her head, and dealing with the violent mood swings of the unpredictable, selfish Heenan. . Although his relationship was strained after two years, especially by Kent’s growing radicalism, caused by the Vatican’s intransigence on the issue of artificial birth control, Heenan still had enough faith in his assistant to appoint him. Catholic chaplain at the University of London.
In his tenure (1966-74), Kent came of age. In no particular order did he discover ecumenism, abandon all the ideas that the priest was at the head and the laity following meekly, he was forced by the questions of the students to question the traditional antipathy of the church for sex and became more and more deeply involved in the struggle for a better world.
This had begun shortly after his ordination when he accepted to be chaplain of Pax Christi, the small British branch of the international Catholic peace movement, but flourished during his time at the University of London. He became involved with the CND, the Campaign Against the Arms Trade and War on Want.
He traveled to Biafra and India and saw first-hand the damage caused by Western wars and weapons there. And he began to criticize his own church for its attitudes toward the sand. His letter to the Times in October 1967, attacking the Catholic naval chaplain for blessing the launch of the Polaris, was the beginning of his national reputation and the controversy that followed.
Heenan was horrified by the change in Kent and the two repeatedly clashed. Other figures in the establishment, senior officials who had been with him at Stonyhurst or Oxford, saw him as a traitor. However, the Cardinal’s death in 1975 and his replacement by the less contentious Hume produced a kind of reconciliation between the Archdiocese of Westminster and its turbulent priest.
It was especially the notable Victor Guazzelli, one of Hume’s auxiliary bishops, who did more to keep Kent in the fold, appointing him as rector of St Aloysius, Euston, in 1977, but allowed him space. enough to continue his work in the peace movement. Like Kent, Guazzelli took the lead in the 1971 Synod of Bishops of Rome, which taught that the gospel “has the power to deliver us, not only from sin, but from what sin has done to our society “.
When Kent took over as secretary general of the CND, the pressure of work forced him to resign from his parish, although he continued to live and say Mass at St John’s in Islington. Those were drunken years. His face was seldom off the television screens, forever defying the cold war.
Bruce Kent, center, with Jonathon Porritt, left, and Jeremy Corbyn at a Walk for the Earth demonstration in front of the U.S. Embassy in London in 1992. Photo: Fiona Hanson / PA
He argued that the Warsaw Pact countries posed little or no threat to the West, that the Soviet Union was collapsing internally, and therefore unlikely to attack, and that deterrence could never work because it involved the will. to attack first.
History, since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, has proved him right: only with the Russian invasion of Ukraine has much thought been given to the nuclear conflict. But at that time Kent was howled by anyone, from Conservative Cabinet Minister Michael Heseltine to the fan who sent him an incendiary bomb (fortunately intercepted).
After leaving the priesthood, Kent continued to work in the peace movement. He spent a brief summer in India as a commentator during the Gulf War in 1990, but his profile dwindled as the nuclear argument faded from the top of the political agenda. In 1992 he ran as a Labor candidate in Oxford West and Abingdon, but many members of the Labor hierarchy already considered him too left-wing.
Professionally, it was a pity that his formidable energy and intellect were never later called upon by a Catholic church that did not want to leave the past behind. However, if their last years were quieter than before, they were also much happier. In 1988, 14 months after retiring as a priest, he married Valerie Flessati.
Through her work with Pax Christi, they had known each other for several years, but they both struggled to point out that she had nothing to do with him turning his back on sacred orders. In fact, she did not even know that he was actively contemplating this movement. As he continued to be considered a priest and never applied to Rome for secularization, the couple were unable to marry in the church, but theirs was nevertheless a very blessed union, based on a shared commitment …