The Stuff Priests Are Made of...........

June 4, 1962. Navy chaplain Luis Padillo was walking around giving last rites to dying soldiers as sniper fire surrounded him. A wounded soldier pulled himself up by linging to the priest’s cassock, as bullets chewed up the concrete around them. Hector Rondón Lovera, who had to lie flat to avoid getting shot, later said that he was unsure how he managed to take this picture. [See all pictures he took that day]. Norman Rockwell eeriely used this photograph as a template for his Southern Justice painting, “Murder in Mississippi“.

It was taken in Puerto Cabello Naval Base, Venezuela, the city of 80,000 beside the nation’s largest naval base 75 miles west of the capital Caracas . In June 1962, Puerto Cabello was the scene of one of the bitterest fighting in modern Venezuelan history, now known as the Porteñazo.. The bloody struggle between government forces and guerrilla rebels in the naval base who had the support of the residents of Puerto Cabello. Official casualty figures for the military were 47 dead, 89 wounded. But unofficial estimates put the toll, including civilians, at more than 300.

I am struck by the sense of absolute calm in that image of the priest. There is something grounded there, and unflappable, and even daring.

This makes one think of the “Grunt Padre”, aka, Fr. Vincent Capodanno, who was killed in Vietnam:

Father Capodanno went among the wounded and dying, giving last rites and taking care of his beloved Marines. Always watching out for them, as they watched out for him. Wounded in the face and suffering a severe shrapnel wound that nearly severed his hand, during the epic battle of Dong Son in September 1967, Father Vince moved to help a wounded Marine only yards from an enemy machine gun. Father Capodanno died from a machine gun blast taking care of this young Marine. When his body was recovered, he had 27 bullet wounds.

Capadanno

A priest with weary eyes. Fr. Capodanno reminds many of Army Chaplain Fr. Tim Vakoc, who recently died of injuries sustained in Iraq.

Fr. Vakoc stirs ones synapses to recall St. Maximilian Kolbe, the brilliant Franciscan priest who died at Auschwitz, after volunteering to take the place of a man with a family:

In July 1941 a man from Kolbe’s barracks vanished, prompting SS-Hauptsturmführer Karl Fritzsch, the deputy camp commander, to pick 10 men from the same barracks to be starved to death in Block 13 (notorious for torture), in order to deter further escape attempts. (The man who had disappeared was later found drowned in the camp latrine.) One of the selected men, Franciszek Gajowniczek, cried out, lamenting his family, and Kolbe volunteered to take his place.

During the time in the cell he led the men in songs and prayer. After three weeks of dehydration and starvation, only Kolbe and three others were still alive. Finally he was murdered with an injection of carbolic acid.

Kolbe’s murder puts in the mind of Bishop Oscar Romero, who was assassinated at the altar in the midst of political upheaval.

Speaking of Romero, let's look at Cardinal Ignatius Kung Pin Mei, who spent thirty years behind bars, in China, much of it in solitary confinement.

Cardinal Ignatius Kung Mim Mei, in exile.

Cardinal Kung, of course, reminds us of the pope who lived under the jackboots of both nazism and communism and who understood that the answer to flawed, imperfect capitalism or unjust societies was not the crushing of human liberty:

John Paul, naturally, reminds us of this gentle shepherd, the last great man of the 20th century to stride into the 21st with strong effect:

Where do we get such men? Their parents raise them, but as Archbishop Timothy Dolan -himself a man of clear, unambiguous, joyful and powerful faith- tells us, their priesthoods, their willingness to put themselves out there and at risk for the gospel, and for ministry, is a pure gift from God…

The following H/T from The Anchoress:

I especially love the words of Archbishop Timothy Dolan, “This is a pure gift from God, and not an earned trophy. . .His grace lifts up our nature.”

A simple-sounding yet profound mystery. And what he says about the priestly vocation is true for all of our vocations, including the vocation of marriage, the vocation of the single life, even the vocation of the “necessary other,” called to live in an altogether different way than most, with a great deal of sacrificial suffering that -one trusts- may lead to gladness. Our lives are not accidents; we are all of us born for a specific purpose, we are called to particular lives, any and all of which, to be honest, involve service to others before ourselves. We are born who we are. His grace lifts up our nature, and makes living out the lives we are called to live both possible and fruitful, if we let him. If we trust.

Trust is huge. We all think we do it; that we “trust” God. In truth “trust” is difficult and unnatural and something we need to work on, ponder, surrender to, every single day – sometimes every five minutes.

Dolan says, “you will have the very Character of Christ, the High Priest, the Good Shepherd, branded on your heart, as your very identity” and we Catholics understand this to be peculiarly so for our priests. But truly, if we accept our individual callings to live out the vocation unique to each of us – whether that be as a spouse or parent, as a consecrated person or a layperson whose life might even seem to be kissed from the cross with loneliness – and live them out in trust, in faith, and hope and gratitude – but mostly in challenging, difficult, absolute trust, then we will be the people we were meant to be.

And as Catherine of Siena told us, “if you are who you are meant to be, you will set the world on fire.”

This was actually the message of the Second Vatican Council, but it got rather lost in the translation -instead of people understanding just how serious is the call to vocation for each of us, it got mistaught “in the spirit of Vatican II” until it was understood that the priesthood and the consecrated life were “nothing special, no better than being a layperson, or married or anything else.” In fact, what we were supposed to learn was that marriage and the single life were every bit as much pure gift, pure vocation, pure calling, as the priesthood and religious life. Somehow, instead of all being lifted up, together, in the powerful notion of call-and-response, adventure, gift and destiny, the message got garbled until there was instead, diminishment, in everything.

May God, who has begun this good work in all of us, now bring it to fulfillment. And may be pray for each other, and for all of our priests, as we journey.