Cody
Onward, Christian soldiers
A few good men who already have answered the call to serve their country are now listening for the call to serve the Kingdom of God. "Military service has tried my faith," admits Private First Class Eduardo Boro, "and yet at the same time it has made it stronger."
Boro was among 33 active-duty members of the United States Armed Forces who traveled to St. Patrick Seminary in Menlo Park, Calif., in early April for a weekend discernment retreat sponsored by the Archdiocese for the Military Services USA, the chaplain corps that provides pastoral care to American service men and women around the globe.
"It is weekends like this that help you escape reality for a brief period to gather your thoughts," says PFC Jacob Rhodes, another serviceman who came looking for answers to his life's next turn.
The retreat - the third of its kind - drew servicemen from as far away as Japan. Catholic Extension played a major role in bringing this group together, providing a $23,000 grant for transportation and lodging of the participants.
A different kind of service
The twice-annual retreats are part of a stepped-up military vocations initiative that includes the arrival last June of Father John McLaughlin, the military archdiocese's first national vocations director.
A priest of the Archdiocese of Boston, Father McLaughlin has never served in the military. However, that matched the archdiocese's desire for someone who had no ties to a particular branch of the service. He spent the summer visiting chaplains in the field and soaking up what he could from those who have been in the trenches - sometimes literally. He'll also follow up on the men who have attended past discernment weekends.
The U.S. Armed Forces has long proven to be a fertile ground for future priests. The need for more chaplains to serve the U.S. Armed Forces is fairly well known, but few people may realize that about 11 percent of all priestly vocations in the United States in recent years comprise men with prior military service.
"So many people have life-changing experiences in the military," Father McLaughlin notes. "God makes the call, and we're just to be used as instruments to reach those He is calling."
One thing that's not going to change is the military archdiocese's unique mode of operation. It has no parishes from which to draw financial support, nor does it have any incardinated priests of its own. Its chaplain corps is made up entirely of priests on loan from U.S. dioceses or religious communities.
As the number of active priests has dwindled in recent years, however, bishops and superiors have been less able to allow their priests to serve in the military. Today just 300 priest-chaplains serve about 300,000 Catholic men and women in the Armed Forces and their 1.2 million dependents."
While that 5,000-to-1 ratio of Catholics to clergy in the military archdiocese is twice as large as the 2,500-to-1 ratio in the nation as a whole, the shortage is felt far more acutely because military chaplains must serve 220 military installations and 172 VA hospitals all around the globe - not to mention the personnel in combat positions in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The vast territory it covers and the challenging logistics of ministry are what make the military archdiocese a true mission diocese.
Discerning soldiers
PFCs Boro and Rhodes both attended the April retreat to pray about and consider whether they had a calling to the priesthood. Each left the weekend with different answers.
Boro, 21, who traveled to the retreat from Fort Richardson in Alaska but is now stationed at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas, says the weekend "helped me to discern that, although a priestly vocation would be amazing, I feel that my true vocation is to be a husband, a father and a teacher."
He won't rule out holy orders completely. He says he would like to learn more about the permanent diaconate, an ordained ministry that is open to single and married men over the age of 35.
Boro says his time in the U.S. Army, which has included a 13-month deployment in Iraq, did play a role in considering his vocation. So did his upbringing, which included 12 years of Catholic schooling and the influence of his father, a Catholic school teacher and principal who later served as director of religious education for the Diocese of Sioux City, Iowa.
"I grew up in the Midwest - a very Catholic place," Boro says. "When I joined the Army, I discovered that most people weren't Catholic, [and] you must be a witness to the Catholic Faith.
"Witnessing is not being a preaching zealot or flaunting your convictions," says Boro, "[but] living a Catholic way of life and showing others by your example that you're a Christian who is a Catholic."
On the right path
The 23-year-old Rhodes says the retreat also helped confirm
his vocation.
"Going into the weekend, I was pretty much done with the discernment phase," he says. "In talking with the seminarians, nuns and priests around St. Patrick's, it really only reaffirmed my calling."
That calling is one Rhodes has felt for several years already. "It's been pretty clear to me since around the age of 17 that the life of a Catholic priest was my calling," he says. "I really don't know how to explain it. It's like an un-natural pull calling me to the vocation.
"The weekend was a way to bolster my thoughts on seminary life and receive more guidance and input on the calling and discernment."
Military life played no small part in shaping Rhodes' vocation. The Illinois native says military life can get stressful, and as a Catholic he has felt the severe shortage of priest-chaplains.
"It is not always certain that there is going to be a time where you can attend Mass, go to Confession, or receive Holy Communion," he says.
The chaplains he has encountered have been inspirational, however.
"Each Catholic priest I have met in the Army offers great wisdom and commands great respect for the duties and tasks they perform on a daily basis," says Rhodes, who presently is stationed at Fort Hood, Texas, but will deploy with his artillery unit to Korea in October.
Coincidentally, both Boro and Rhodes are chaplain's assistants in their respective units, handling diverse duties from coordinating ministry activities to serving as the chaplain's bodyguard. "I like to think that I help ensure one of the four freedoms by doing my job - the freedom of religion," says Boro.
Ministerial boot camp
Father (Capt.) Chad Zielinski, chaplain at Randolph Air Force Base in Texas and one of the facilitators of the Menlo Park weekend, believes military training helps prepare men for the priesthood.
"The structure of military life is regimented and disciplined," he explains.
"These guys are trained to be leaders in life-or-death situations, and it makes them think more deeply about who they are and their relationship with God. If they have a spiritual component, they naturally are going to look more deeply into this calling to serve the Church. The military environment challenges them to do that."
Along with general discussions of spirituality and priestly identity, the chaplains who made presentations during the weekend regaled participants with the particular challenges of their military calling: Celebrating Mass on the hood of a Humvee, or using a military vehicle as an impromptu confessional.
They also discussed the Chaplain Candidate Program, which offers seminarians a chance to spend a summer assisting a military chaplain in any of the Armed Services branches.
Although the military archdiocese co-hosts these events, the discernment weekends are not limited to considering service in the military chaplain corps.
"We encourage these guys to go back to their home dioceses if that's where they're interested in serving," says Father Zielinski. "Then, if they still have an interest in the military, we ask them to talk to their vocation director and bishop to say, ‘This is what I'm discerning. Would you support me in where I feel called to serve?'"