Tinker tailor soldier priest?

Last Saturday we went to Hayneville, Alabama to commemorate the feast of Jonathan Myrick Daniels, a saint recognized by the Episcopal Church. He was a seminarian and civil rights activist who did just what Jesus talked about in John 15:13 by laying down his life to save another.

After being jailed in deplorable conditions for six days in what can best be described in a dungeon in Hayneville, in August Alabama heat with limited hygiene and poor food, Daniels and three others were released. They went to a nearby store to get cold drinks. Exact details vary, but the indisputable fact is that Jon Daniels took a gunshot blast to the chest after pushing a sixteen-year-old African-American girl named Ruby Sales out of the way. The offender managed to shoot a Catholic priest in the back before heading to the courthouse where he was eventually acquitted of the crimes.

About 300 of us gathered at the courthouse square in August Alabama heat that could have been much worse, and proceeded to the jail, to the store (now an insurance office) and back to the courthouse for Eucharist to honor Daniels and all of the martyrs of Alabama.

It was indescribable to kneel on the spot where another human being died, and the experience was magnified by the manner of his death. I’m overwhelmed by the sickness inside the mind of someone who could perpetrate such a crime, but realize that this is beyond my understanding. The killer continued to live in the community until his death. I wonder if he ever realized the futility of his sin.

The life of Jonathan Daniels, while briefer, was much more interesting. Born in Keene, New Hampshire, his father was a doctor and his family Congregationalist. Daniels attended the Virginia Military Institute and graduated valedictorian. (On a side note, my oldest nephew attended VMI for one year). He then began graduate school at Harvard in English literature, but after an Easter conversion experience, enrolled at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge. He would have graduated in 1966, but took a leave of absence to work in the civil rights movement.

How does a young man go from a relatively privileged life in New England to a military institution in Virginia, where he was evidently very successful in his studies? How does someone who trained brilliantly as a soldier become a seminary student? And how does this person transfer these experiences and skills into revolution through peaceful civil disobedience? There is a dichotomy there that I do not quite understand, but it fills me with awe, respect and admiration.

While contemplating this, I wandered over to Padre Mickey’s website and saw what he posted on Jonathan Daniels and Maximilian Kolbe. I first learned about Kolbe when my dear cousin Ellen had a son named Max; I wanted to learn about his patron saint and discovered that there were choices. Maximilian Kolbe was a Polish priest who had at one time trained for the military, but chose to pursue the priesthood instead. He became a Franciscan and was active in the Franciscan movement in Japan before returning to Poland to open a monastery. Then, the Germans invaded. Kolbe sheltered refuges, including Jews, and ran a printing press. Eventually, he was arrested and sent to Auschwitz. While there, Kolbe literally gave his life for a fellow prisoner; he was murdered by the Nazis by injection of carbolic acid after being denied food and water for 10 days. Think about that. Jeez.

After my visit to Padre Mickey, and thinking about Daniels and Kolbe, my thoughts turned to another soldier and priest, Father Emil Kapaun. When I was a kid in Wichita, Kansas, the exclusive Catholic boy’s school in my part of town was a Jesuit preparatory school known as Kapaun. I remember when the Jesuits decided to pull out of Wichita (and that is how I recall the phrasing; as if the most revolutionary missionary movement in the history of the Roman Catholic Church had determined either that Wichita had been saved to the utmost possible degree, or that we were beyond salvation), Kapaun merged with the East Side girl’s Catholic school to become Kapaun-Mt.Carmel. In spite of their small size, they were able to recruit some real football talent and under the leadership of storied coach Ernie Kriewel, managed to kick a lot of public school ass in the 1970’s and 1980’s. But I digress. The point is that the name “Kapaun,” pronounced “kay’-pun” for those non-Wichitans who may be tuning in, became part of my childhood and youthful vernacular. It was the name of the Catholic school. They may have been good in football and golf, but their band sucked, they had no orchestra, and their musical productions were rather junior-high worthy. But what was behind this word Kapaun that rolled off my Wichita tongue as readily as “Nu-way” or “King’s X”?

It turns out that Emil Kapaun was born to Czech immigrant parents in Marion County, Kansas. He went to the local high school and then to seminary in St. Louis. He first became a chaplain when a WWII-only air base was established near his hometown. He became a full-time chaplain for the duration of the war, was discharged, went to graduate school, and then re-enlisted in 1949. He was sent to Korea when that conflict broke out in 1950, and was captured in November of that year, after being awarded the Bronze Star. He died six months later in a Chinese prison camp. He had pneumonia, gangrene and a variety of the other types of ailments one suffers under such conditions. Then his order opened a school named in his honor near his hometown and it is still a school today.

The Roman Catholic church has a long and involved process to make a person a saint. Father Kapaun has been proposed for sainthood and his life is being debated somewhere in the labyrinthine Vatican bureaucracy. We Episcopalians more or less just vote on saints during General Convention. If it were up to me, Emil Kapaun would be a saint in any church; he did what Jesus said to do. ‘Nuff said.

Still, I’m left with the soldier/server dichotomy.

These three stories are of men functioning under different circumstances and in different ways, but all in the 20^th century and with the same result. How many stories of men and women who have juxtaposed the two positions are lost to history? How many will there be in the future? How many more are active today?