Britain's papal nuncio says a peace priest may be a Soviet dupe
Disarm, cried a cleric called Kent.
The same message nice Andropov sent:
Just lay down your arms,
Embrace Socialist charms,
Then wonder where your freedom went.
Delivering that limerick in the House of Commons, Conservative M.P. Robert Adley last month twitted a Roman Catholic priest who particularly nettles the Tories: Monsignor Bruce Kent, 53, the tireless general secretary of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, Britain's most important peace group.
Kent's advocacy of unilateral nuclear disarmament by Britain has touched off a controversy among the nation's Catholics about the proper approach of the church to nuclear arms policy. Kent's main ecclesiastical opponent is Archbishop Bruno Heim, Pro-Nuncio (ambassador) of the Holy See to Britain, who is strongly opposed to unilateral disarmament. In an amazingly candid letter to several British Catholics, which quickly became public, Heim suggested that the monsignor might be either an "idiot" or a conscious agent of Soviet designs.
The sharply polarized views of the two clerics are the latest, and certainly the most dramatic, signs of the growing Catholic debate on nuclear morality. Three weeks ago, the U.S. hierarchy issued a pastoral letter that challenges Administration policy by calling for a halt to the production and deployment of nuclear weapons. West European bishops have been more cautious in their antinuclear pronouncements.
Sharpening the debate in Britain is the fact that the views of Kent and the C.N.D. have become explicitly political issues: they parallel those of the Labor Party in its fight against Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's Conservatives in the June 9 national election. Although the C.N.D. insists that it is nonpartisan, British Defense Minister Michael Heseltine has written to Conservative candidates in marginal constituencies warning that the C.N.D. is out to defeat them.
A lieutenant in a tank regiment before he entered the priesthood, the Oxford-educated Kent became head of the C.N.D. in 1980. He led a drive that has expanded the membership from 3,000 to 50,000—in addition, there are at least 200,000 politically active sympathizers—and mobilized effective mass demonstrations against the Bomb. Last month C.N.D. members and their allies held hands to form a 14-mile chain between Greenham Common in Berkshire, where the first U.S. cruise missiles are scheduled to be installed later this year, and Burghfield, site of Britain's nuclear warhead factory.
Kent is opposed to the cruise missiles because "their accuracy is high and their destabilizing effect on arms agreement is very great." He also contends that the Trident missiles that Britain is obtaining from the U.S. for its submarines "take us to the edge of fear of first strike." Kent wants Britain to get rid of both its nuclear weapons and the U.S. bases, no matter what the U.S.S.R. does in terms of its nuclear weapons. Says he: "We are not waiting for the Soviets to reciprocate." As to which superpower had made the most constructive proposals in the current nuclear arms talks, Kent said last week, "I have the greater sympathy for the Soviet position than for the U.S. position."