Priests discuss chaplains in military
By TIM LOGAN
Senior Staff Writer
One Wednesday evening almost 10 years ago, Father Bill Dorwart went for a walk along the flight deck of the aircraft carrier where he served.
It was a calm and peaceful evening, eerily so, and the usually talkative aircraft mechanics moved silently among their planes, which sat on the runway, engines off, wings folded.
As the orange sun set down into the Persian Gulf that evening, Dorwart watched three young sailors fasten a bomb to the wing of one of those quiet planes. Before morning came, that bomb would be dropped on Iraq in one of the first sorties of the Gulf War. Dorwart knew this, and he said a prayer.
Dorwart served as a chaplain in the U. S. Navy from 1985 until 1991. Wednesday night he talked about his experiences, and shared his reflections on being a chaplain during the Gulf War, when he was one of three clergy members for 5,000 servicemen on a carrier in the Gulf.
Father Tom Doyle, a chaplain for Notre Dame's ROTC program, also spoke, and the two discussed the call to minister for the military.
They focused on the importance of pastoral care of young soldiers, of being there for them to talk to, and of being a messenger of Christ among them.
"I think it's important to tend to the hearts of these people who will have a lot of responsibility," Doyle told the audience, a mix of Pax Christi members, ROTC students, seminarians and others at the Center for Social Concerns. "People who are good people, made in the image and likeness of God."
Doyle also discussed the role of a chaplain in the ROTC program. He meets individually with Notre Dame freshmen who are training to be officers, to discuss why they are in the program and what they hope to gain. He and the other three ROTC chaplains also make themselves available to students who have questions about their faith and the military, and who seek guidance.
Dorwart, who had served in the Navy before entering the priesthood, said that he had wrestled with moral questions as a Catholic chaplain during the war. He is personally a pacifist, but said that the call to care for the men fighting, and struggling with the ramifications of that fighting, overrode any anti-war sentiments which might have led him elsewhere.
"I did find myself on occasion wondering whether I should be there, because of the kind of war it was," Dorwart said. "But in the bottom line, it came down to pastoral care of the people there."
"I couldn't abandon those sailors and say `I'm outta here because I don't believe in what you're doing.'"
The talk was sponsored by Pax Christi - Notre Dame, as part of their ongoing series of dialogues about military service titled "A Way to Peace, or Peace is the Way?" The group will have more dialogues in the spring semester.
All News Stories for Thursday, November 30, 2000
