by Marian Pallister

It wasn’t so much that Bruce Kent had a finger in every peace pie, but that he had grown the ingredients, harvested them and baked the pies. A master baker whose continued kneading of the dough of the UK’s peace organisations will be sorely missed.

Much has been said and written since his death in June, just two weeks short of his 93rd birthday. Despite his great age, he was still a Vice-President of CND, a Vice-President of Pax Christi England and Wales, and Emeritus President of the Movement for the Abolition of War. For Pax Christi Scotland, he had put the yeast in the dough, encouraging Scottish members of what was then Pax Christi UK to go it alone. He and Pat Gaffney, the general secretary of Pax Christi UK at the time, attended meetings in Scotland – one in Musselburgh stands out in the memories of some who went on to become members of Pax Christi Scotland – always recognising that our issues were, if not unique to Scotland, then certainly were coloured by our mindset north of the border. And of course, Faslane had always been a focus of Kent’s CND peace pie. He once conducted an exorcism there that, who knows, may in time be what rids us of Trident.

Bruce Kent was born on 22 June 1929 in Blackheath, south-east London. His main schooling was at the Jesuit Stonyhurst College and he spent his National Service in the Royal Tank Regiment from 1947 to 1949. He read Jurisprudence at Brasenose College, Oxford, then went to St Edmund’s seminary in Hertfordshire to study for the priesthood. He was ordained in 1958 and served in a number of parishes in the Diocese of Westminster. He was secretary to Cardinal John Heenan, and from 1966 to 1974 was Catholic chaplain to the University of London. In the mid 1970s he chaired the charity War on Want.

Then came the paradox in the Kent career – a paradox that is interesting from the perspective of the 21st century justice and peace stance in Scotland, where Bishop William Nolan, now Archbishop of Glasgow, reminded us in his January 6, 2019 letter to parishes as Bishop President of Justice and Peace Scotland that: ‘Pope Francis has repeatedly said that “political engagement is one of the highest expressions of charity”. He urges those who follow Christ to engage in politics and says that to do so they need to be “courageous, because politics is a sort of daily martyrdom: to seek the common good without allowing oneself to be corrupted”’.

Bruce Kent became increasingly involved in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). He was the organisation’s leading spokesperson in the 1980s, crossing swords with Margaret Thatcher on her defence policy. And it was that increasing involvement that led to him to, as he put it, ‘retire’ from active ministry. He had been influenced by his faith to reject nuclear weapons as immoral. This was also the stance taken by the Scottish Bishops’ Conference in their 1982 statement – a statement that Archbishop Nolan told a Pax Christi Scotland webinar marking the statement’s 40th anniversary that the English Bishops did not embrace wholeheartedly. Yet here he was, ‘retiring’ from the priesthood, and it was often suggested that the late Cardinal Basil Hume instructed Kent to desist from this politicking on nuclear weapons. We could perhaps assume that this was because the English Bishops were not convinced by the argument that nuclear weapons were immoral to use and indeed to possess. Kent insisted this was not the case: ‘I never did receive instructions from Cardinal Hume to desist from involvement in the 1987 election. Nor did he ask me to resign from my position with CND, though I knew he was being put under huge pressure to tell me to do that. ‘I was not forced. I was not sacked. I was not given an ultimatum. The decision was mine, made because of the tension I felt in my dual role: as a priest representing a Church where many of its leaders thought my position in CND was too political’.

And in his autobiography, Undiscovered Ends, published in 1992, he goes into the machinations behind the scenes and comments: ‘I had had enough of being prodded and dissected by every journalist and politician with half an hour to spare. If there was a problem for the Church it lay in the contrast between the official idea of what a priest ought to be and what a priest actually was in many parts of the world. Support for Solidarnosc in Poland was priestly. Support for the Sandinistas in Nicaragua was not. To be Bishop of HM Forces was not political. To be CND Chairman was. My position was an impossible one. Many of my fellow Catholics, and other Christians, told me that what I was doing as a priest gave them hope, though I knew that most of my bishops did not think my work was priestly.’ The priesthood’s loss was the peace movement’s gain.

The obituaries have reminded us of Kent’s continued campaigning for the abolition of nuclear weapons, his dedication to the nonviolent option, to raising awareness of the links between conflict and climate change, his work on behalf of prisoners of conscience and his interfaith work, especially challenging Islamophobia. As an organisation, Pax Christi Scotland was proud to have him as a friend and ally.

Marian Pallister is Chair of Pax Christi Scotland