Many Are Called: Rediscovering the Glory of the Priesthood by Scott Hahn

Author:Scott Hahn [Hahn, Scott]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
ISBN: 9780307590770
Amazon: 0307590771
Publisher: Image
Published: 2010-06-02T06:00:00+00:00

7

LOVE IS A BATTLEFIELD

The Priest as Warrior

MY FRIEND Father Jim Farnan is a fighter. Please don’t get me wrong. He’s not a hothead or a brawler, but he is a warrior, as a priest should be.

Before he was ordained in 2000 he worked professionally as a bond trader and served in the United States Air Force. Both jobs prepared him well for the priesthood. He learned to negotiate, and he learned to follow orders. But nothing prepared him so well as his family’s stories about a collateral ancestor, Father Lawrence Lynch.

Father Lynch was Jim Farnan’s grandfather’s cousin, and he died two full decades before Jim was born. Father Lynch died young. He was only thirty-nine, but he lived long enough to earn the name “Father Cyclone” and inspire a book about his life and heroic death.

Father Lynch was an Army chaplain in the Second World War. In April 1945, he was crouched in a foxhole on Iwo Jima with shells exploding all around him. A soldier nearby let out a cry. Father Lynch could see the man was mortally wounded, so he began to scramble out of the hole. His commanding officer ordered him to stay down, but Father Lynch rushed forward to give the man the last sacraments. As he held up the communion host, another shell exploded, this one tearing through the priest’s helmet. The commander heard the blast and ran to catch Father Lynch as he fell. Gently he pried open the dead chaplain’s fingers and forced them to place the sacrament on his own lips to prevent its desecration.

The commander lived to tell the story, as the chaplain’s family told it during Jim Farnan’s childhood, and as Father Jim tells it from the pulpit today.

It’s the story of a priest and a warrior, and there are many more like it. Consider Maryknoll Father Vincent Capodanno, better known as “the Grunt Padre,” because he worked among Marine infantrymen, foot soldiers who called themselves “grunts.” Serving in Vietnam in 1967, he found his battalion suddenly outnumbered five to one. There were heavy casualties, and Father Vince himself was wounded twice, but he refused to be evacuated, saying, “I have work to do.” Bullets flew, and he scrambled among the fallen, using his healthy arm to support his injured arm as he gave the dying men absolution or Holy Communion.

It caught up with him. He saw a man fall and rushed to his side, placing himself between the wounded man and the North Vietnamese gunner. When the gunner opened fire again, Father Vince was riddled with bullets. His men remembered him, of course, and they told the story of a warrior and a priest. In 2002 the Church opened his cause for canonization, and in 2006 he was declared “Servant of God,” a step on the way to public recognition of sainthood.

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