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The Challenge of the Chaplaincy
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14605 |
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CULTURE
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5 / 1988 |
5,563 Words |
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Lesley A. Northup
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One day during physical fitness training, a student chaplain missed his landing in a commando pit and fell, clutching his ankle. "Get up and get going!" screamed the Marine gunnery sergeant. "Get up and get going!" screamed the Marine gunnery sergeant.
"I can't, Gunny," moaned the victim, "My ankle's broken."
"Well, don't just lie there. Start doing pushups!"
This anecdote, recounted in Chaplain James V. Claypool's World War II-vintage memoirs, God on a Battlewagon, rings just as true for today's chaplains as it did fifty years ago. I well remember my own training, in which classroom work, close-order drill, and officer indoctrination seemed only a backdrop for the painful lessons inflicted by a gunny who evidenced all the intimidation and none of the charm of the ferocious sergeant in the movie An Officer and a Gentleman. Gunny Carter ran us ragged, interspersing his demands and pithy pointers with Vietnam stories and language that often left more sensitive students' ears burning.
Some gung-ho young chaplains reveled in this gritty slice of military reality; others, maybe a bit older, understood the regimen and its purpose, and smiled quietly at the gunny's antics. But there were others whose religious convictions clashed loudly with Carter's offhand profanities and rough tales. More acutely than the rest of us, perhaps, they sensed the inherent cultural conflict in having clergy who are also soldiers and sailors.
The origins of the military chaplaincy, like those of many other cultural institutions, disappear into the shadows of prehistory. Tales abound in our earliest writings of warrior-priests and gods that march before their beloved heroes into battle. But legend has it that true chaplains have as their prototypical forebear St. Martin of Tours. This fourth-century soldier encountered a shivering beggar one cold night and sliced his own cloak in half, giving one piece to the pauper. Later that night, Martin dreamed that he saw Christ wrapped in the cloak; he was promptly baptized. Shortly thereafter he resigned from the army, saying, "I am Christ's soldier; I am not allowed to fight," and devoted the rest of his life to the church.
In the Middle Ages, Martin was the patron saint of the French monarchy, and the famous cloak was carried before the French army into battle. A priest went along as custodian of the sacred relic, incidentally tending to the king's religious needs; he was called a cappellanus, from the Latin for cloak (cappella). The place where the cloak was stored became the "chapel."
Throughout the reign of the Church in Europe, the institution of the chaplaincy flourished. National identity and religious identity were one: It seemed both logical and inevitable for priests to accompany armies, especially as the church's rules for liturgical observance became increasingly more demanding on the faithful, and--more tellingly--as superstitions proliferated about the consecrated host and other holy objects. Even after the Reformation, the chaplaincy was rarely questioned; nations still were divided along religious lines, and it was just as important for a German prince to take his Lutheran pastor with him to war as it was for the French or Spanish kings to bring along their priests. The English, with the
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