Bruce Kent, who has died aged 92, was the most controversial Catholic priest of his generation in Britain. To his detractors, his high-profile involvement with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament during its renaissance in the 1980s was unsuitable behaviour for an ordained member of a church that accepted the arguments for nuclear deterrence. For his admirers – and there were very many more of them than detractors – he was a prophetic and charismatic figure who almost single-handedly shook English Catholicism out of its complacency, studied moderation and instinctive avoidance of all things political.
To see Monsignor Kent exorcising the Polaris nuclear submarine base at Faslane on the west coast of Scotland, or leading protests at Greenham Common, Berkshire, against the deployment of US cruise missiles, or allowing bailiffs to seize his few worldly possessions rather than pay with his taxes for the proliferation of nuclear weapons was a potent reminder that the Christian gospel is a social and radical one.
