On the last Monday in May, the country pauses for the men who fell. Catholic memory adds a quieter pause for the priests who fell with them — chaplains who carried no rifle and went forward anyway. Three names should be on every Catholic man's lips this Memorial Day.
Father Emil Kapaun · Korea, 1950–51
An Army chaplain from the Diocese of Wichita, Father Kapaun was at the Battle of Unsan on 1–2 November 1950 when the Chinese flooded the American column. He moved from foxhole to foxhole pulling wounded men out of fire. When the order to withdraw came, he refused — staying behind with the men too badly hit to walk. He chose captivity.
On the death-march to the prison camp at Pyoktong, he carried wounded soldiers on his back. In the camp, in temperatures that fell below zero, he heard confessions. He celebrated Mass with stolen pine sap for wine. He smuggled food to the dying. He stole pots and cooked. He prayed publicly in defiance of camp orders. The Chinese put him in the "death house" — a cold room reserved for prisoners they wanted to break.
He died of pneumonia on 23 May 1951 — three days shy of the seventy-fifth anniversary you are reading this on. He was buried in a mass grave the Chinese never marked. In 2013 he was awarded the Medal of Honor. He has been declared a Servant of God; his cause for canonization is open in the Diocese of Wichita.
Father Vincent Capodanno · Vietnam, 1967
A Maryknoll missionary who had served in Taiwan and Hong Kong before joining the Navy Chaplain Corps, Father Capodanno was deployed with the 1st Marine Division in Vietnam. On 4 September 1967, during Operation Swift in the Que Son Valley, his unit was hit hard. He had been wounded by mortar fragments — his right hand torn, a chunk of his right arm hanging by a tendon. He was told to medevac out. He refused.
He moved through the killing zone administering Last Rites to dying Marines. Crossing open ground to reach a corpsman pinned by a North Vietnamese machine gun, he was hit by twenty-seven rounds. He was thirty-eight years old.
He was awarded the Medal of Honor posthumously. He has been declared a Servant of God; his cause for canonization is open.
The Four Chaplains who received the Medal of Honor
Father Capodanno and Father Kapaun stand alongside two other Catholic priests who received the Medal of Honor as American military chaplains:
Father Joseph T. O'Callaghan, S.J. — Navy chaplain aboard the USS Franklin, World War II. After a Japanese bomb struck the carrier on 19 March 1945, with the ship burning and her ammunition cooking off, he organized firefighting parties, administered Last Rites to the dying on the flight deck, and helped jettison live ordnance until the fires were contained. The first Navy chaplain awarded the Medal of Honor.
Father Charles Joseph Watters — Army chaplain, 173rd Airborne Brigade, Vietnam. At the Battle of Dak To, 19 November 1967, he ran into fire repeatedly to recover wounded paratroopers and administer the sacraments. He was killed by an air strike. Medal of Honor awarded posthumously.
The full institutional history — from Father Pierre Gibault, who served with George Rogers Clark on the Illinois Campaign of 1778, to the priests still serving today through the Archdiocese for the Military Services — is at /chaplains/.