He gained national attention when, in October 2005, he was fired from Kolbe for refusing to display the American flag, the presentation of which he viewed as a "contradiction" to the symbol of the Christian crucifix.
Cavanaugh went on to write: One final irony of Stephen Kobasa's firing is that it took place at a Catholic school named after St. Maximilian Kolbe.
Kolbe was a Franciscan priest who gave himself up to be starved to death at Auschwitz in place of a man who begged to be spared for the sake of his children.
[7]Kobasa appealed unsuccessfully to Church authorities, including William E. Lori, the Bishop of the Bridgeport Diocese, but has ruled out filing a civil lawsuit.
[14] Kobasa, whose "seemingly average existence has been punctuated by a dozen arrests and short stints in jail,"[16] has participated in a range of nonviolent antiwar and human-rights protests since the late 1960s.
While most of the attention generated by the protests appears to have remained in Connecticut, in some cases Kobasa's statements found a larger audience.
[24] In responding to the September 11 attacks, Kobasa imagines ground zero, "for all its horror," as a "miniature of destruction, a fragment of the apocalypse" that would be caused by "the use of a single 475 kiloton warhead.