No greater love: On the witness of priests on the battlefield

Nearly sixty years ago, on September 4, 1967, a US military chaplain fell in the fields of Vietnam, killed while attempting to comfort and administer last rites to the wounded and dying. Fr. Vincent Capodanno, born on Staten Island and ordained as a Maryknoll Missionary, had served for several years as a missionary on the island of Taiwan. But he discerned a call within his missionary call.

He saw the young men of his own country being drafted into service in the Vietnam War, and he became a chaplain specifically to minister to the Marines fighting there. Though significantly older than the young fighting men, he quickly won them over by living right alongside them and even marching with them into battle. Soon they were calling him “Father Vinny,” or simply the Grunt Padre. On the battlefield, he offered what medical and spiritual comfort he could. At times of rest, he tried to serve as a moral role model, lifting the men’s spirits, offering them Confession and the Mass.

September 4th was Labor Day in 1967. The unit to which Fr. Vinny was attached, the 3rd Battalion of the 5th Marines, took part in a new American offensive, codenamed Operation Swift. The Battalion came under heavy fire. For several hours, and despite being wounded himself, the priest kept going back to do what he could for the injured. He was urged several times to leave the field of action, but his thoughts were only on those he could comfort. Returning once again to try to reach an injured corpsman, he was machine-gunned down by the enemy. Soldiers who survived the battle spoke of his exceptional courage, especially as he was unarmed.

In 1969, less than two years after his death, Fr. Capodanno was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor. The Navy has named a ship in his memory, and there are several military chapels and similar memorials named in his honor both in the US and around the world. Even more strikingly, the US Archdiocese for the Military Services, which oversees the Catholic chaplains for all branches of the US Armed Forces, has opened Fr. Capodanno’s cause for canonization. He is at the earliest stages of the process, Servant of God, but the Archdiocese holds up this military chaplain as a model of virtue, living a life of heroic Christian witness up to the point of laying down his life in the service of others.

And Fr. Vinny is not the only one. If one wishes to see where God is moving in a particular era, the best indicator is in the saints He raises up. God calls men and women to respond to Him according to the needs of the age they live in. Such saints challenge all believers to deepen our walk with God. In the first centuries of the Church, He raised up countless heroic martyrs who shed their blood in witness to Christ and whose examples of courage and constancy still inspire Christians today. When Christianity became legal, He sent the holy hermits and monks, holy spiritual Fathers and Mothers who, building on the Scriptures, laid down the foundational principles of Christian spirituality and still teach us how to battle against the world, the flesh, and the devil.

The great monastic saints and the canonized kings, queens, and nobles of the Middle Ages give us a glimpse as to what a truly Christian society and culture might look like. This is also the period of the mendicant orders, the Franciscans, Dominicans, Servites, Augustinians, and Carmelites, as well as the lay saints associated with these orders, who re-presented the radical nature of the Gospel to a society perhaps grown too comfortable with the Christian message. The early modern period, an age of so-called Renaissance and Reformation, saw the rise of burning intellects and ardent missionaries, orders like the Jesuits and other clerks regular, who battled for Truth and who spread the banner of the Cross to distant lands, responding to the challenges of religious confusion and a rapidly expanding world.

The twentieth century (and alas, spilling over into the twenty-first) was marked by conflicts and bloodshed greater than any previously seen. While the final judgment is always the Church’s on whether someone is a saint or not, in an era so touched by war, perhaps we should not be surprised that God has raised up several military chaplains for the Church’s consideration. Counting Fr. Capodanno, I am aware of at least five open causes for canonization, and there may be more I do not yet know about.

Perhaps the most well-known may be the cause of Fr. Emil Kapaun, declared Venerable by Pope Francis shortly before the pope’s death. Fr. Kapaun was born in rural Kansas. Shortly after being ordained a priest for his diocese, his bishop assigned him to serve as chaplain for a local Army base during World War II. This taste of chaplaincy led him to see a deeper call to serve, and, with his bishop’s permission, he entered the Army’s Chaplain Corps. He served in Burma and India toward the end of that war. After WWII ended, he served as a stateside pastor, but his heart was always with the servicemen, and he returned to chaplaincy in 1948. He was assigned to a unit stationed in post-War Japan, and when the Korean War started, Fr. Kapaun went to the new front with his unit.

He ministered to the men on the front lines fearlessly, praying with the men and at times even saying Mass on the hood of his Jeep. He would risk his own life to attend to the injured or dying, and would retrieve the bodies of friend or foe alike for burial. In what little downtime he had, he would write letters back home to the families of those he could not save, trying to offer them what comfort he could. On the evening of November 1, 1950, his unit was attacked and, after a long battle throughout which he still ministered to the dying, he was captured along with other survivors on November 2. The prisoners of war were marched over 60 miles to a prison camp at Pyoktong, Korea.

Fr. Kapaun spent the last seven months of his life in this prison camp, trying to give what spiritual and even physical comfort he could to the men. He would pick lice off his fellow prisoners, wash their clothes, or even the bodies of men too sick to wash themselves. He often volunteered for duty digging graves for those who had died, so that he would have the opportunity to pray for the deceased. He would pray with the men, even those who were not Catholic, though he had to do this in secret because public prayer was forbidden by their Communist captors. When he fell ill with pneumonia, his captors took him to a so-called “hospital,” where he was left alone to die. Along the way, he asked forgiveness of his guards if he had wronged them in any way. He died on May 23, 1951.

The Servant of God Fr. Joseph Verbis Lafleur, ordained a priest for the diocese of Lafayette, Louisiana, served as a military chaplain during World War II, captured in the Philippines in 1942. He spent two years in various prisoner-of-war camps, trying to bring a sense of comfort and healing to the other prisoners, and even building a small chapel with his own hands. In 1944, with the war turning against the Japanese, he was among 750 prisoners locked in the hold of the “hell ship” Shinyo Maru, bound for the Japanese home islands. En route, the Shinyo Maru was torpedoed by a US submarine on September 7, 1944. As the ship was sinking, instead of evacuating himself, he insisted that the others in the hold find a way to freedom first. Eighty-three men survived. The last anyone saw of him as the ship went down, he was still trying to help men up the ladder out of the hold. His cause opened in 2020.

The Servant of God Fr. Ignatius Maternowski, a Franciscan friar (OFM Conv), was also a military chaplain during World War II. With the permission of his superiors, he volunteered for service when war was declared, and wound up serving with a regiment of paratroopers in the 82nd Airborne Division. He engaged fully in the life of these men when they were deployed to Ireland and England, going through the same rigorous training as they went through, until on June 6, 1944, at thirty-two years old, he parachuted with them into Normandy. The regiment landed near the occupied town of Picauville and immediately came under heavy fire. Fr. Maternowski established a first aid station in one of the local buildings, which was soon overwhelmed with both Allied and German casualties. He chose to go speak to Germans about establishing a joint field hospital, pooling the resources of both sides, when he was shot and killed, even though both his chaplain corps insignia and Red Cross armband were clearly visible. He is the only Allied military chaplain to have died on D-Day. The French established a memorial to his sacrifice at the spot of his death shortly after the war, and his religious order opened an investigation into his cause around 2019.

Nor are American military chaplains the only ones under consideration for sainthood. The Servant of God Fr. Willie Doyle was an Irish Jesuit priest. Growing up in a large Dublin family known for its care for the poor, he entered the Jesuits having barely turned 18, undergoing their long path of formation, made somewhat longer by bouts of ill health, until he was ordained in 1907. During this time of formation and of the earliest years of his priesthood, he was especially devoted to preaching to the working-class Catholics of Ireland and striving to help these often-neglected people live lives of true Christian holiness. He was a prolific letter-writer and was often sought out as a confessor and spiritual advisor. Some years before his ordination, he made a special request of Mary that he be granted the grace to be a Jesuit martyr, and in return, he promised to live a daily “martyrdom” in fulfilling his duties with diligence and self-denial.

He longed to be a missionary in Africa, but when the “war to end all wars” began, he felt called to a different mission field, ministering to the young men in the trenches. In November 1915, he was appointed chaplain to one of the Irish battalions. Although being a chaplain gave him an officer rank, he preferred to spend most of his time with the enlisted men, experiencing with them in turn the stultifying boredom, horrendous lack of sanitation, and terrifying death and chaos of trench warfare. He was at the Battles of the Somme and Messines Ridge, doing what he could to aid the injured and dying, both physically and spiritually. His fellow soldiers saw him as a man who never rested in his duty, and who usually performed it under the harshest of conditions with a smile on his face.

During one of the waves of the Battle of Passchendaele, on August 16, 1917, a group of soldiers from his battalion found themselves in advance of the front line and under heavy fire. Fr. Doyle ran to offer assistance and to administer last rites to the dying. Accounts say that he was about to run for shelter when a German shell hit him and two other officers. His body was never recovered. After the war, tributes poured in from soldiers, Catholic and Protestant both, whose spirits were lifted during the horrible experiences of the war due to Fr. Doyle’s faith, good humor, and courage. Devotion to Fr. Doyle’s memory surged in the 1930s, though the cause for his canonization did not officially open until 2022.

There are many priest saints who were military chaplains for part of their lives and survived the various engagements during which they took part. To cite just one prominent example, Pope St. John XXIII was also a military chaplain in the Italian army during World War I. Catholic priests have served as military chaplains at least as early as the Crusades. Yet it still seems significant to me that we have these active causes of canonization for military chaplains who died in the midst of their service now, at this time. What might God be trying to tell us in the twenty-first century by their heroic examples?

We live in an age that so often seems to have forgotten about God. Of greater number than the self-professed atheists are those who live their lives as if God makes no difference in their day-to-day existence—the practical atheists, so to speak. Yet God does exist. Heroic men such as Fr. Doyle, Fr. Maternowski, Fr. Lafleur, Fr. Kapaun, and Fr. Capodanno remind us that, even in the darkest moments of human experience—even amidst the horrors of war—Christ is with us. In the story of each of these Servants of God, we have seen how their faithfulness in the little things, in living their lives being totally present to the men they served, helped prepare them to make the ultimate sacrifice of charity.

We may not find ourselves in the heat of battle or in a prisoner of war camp as they did, but we can learn from their examples and pray for their intercession that will may be faithful day to day. And doing so, please God, we will bring the love of Christ to those around us.

May they be raised to the honor of the altars soon.