Serving where called
On this ordination day for the Archdiocese of Chicago, it’s providential timing for this story to turn up in the Chicago Tribune about how one priest is serving.
RAMADI, Iraq — The Marines called it a chapel, but it really was a conference room in a war zone, with high sandbagged windows, dirty walls behind camouflage netting and sunburned Marines watching a war movie under a blast of air conditioning.
The movie stopped for church, a Catholic mass said by Army Capt. John Barkemeyer. The chaplain had arrived by Humvee, traveling through streets where members of his flock had died, past the place where he had narrowly escaped injury from a roadside bombing himself.
A lanky former pastor on Chicago’s South Side who serves despite his moral misgivings about this war, Barkemeyer paused to trade the body armor and helmet of an Army officer for the white and yellow robe of a Roman Catholic priest. When he raised his arms, the hem of his robe hung incongruously over tan desert boots, and the kindness in his voice competed with grunts from a weight room across the hall.
For Barkemeyer, 43, it was the fifth and final mass he would lead on a day that had taken him through most of Ramadi, the war-torn capital of Anbar province. The trip was shadowed by oppressive heat, the possibility of mortal peril — and an unusual calm.
“I’m supposed to be here,” he said later. “This might not be the place on the face of the Earth that I would choose to be if I could be anywhere, but knowing what I can do, what I can offer soldiers, I believed it then and more strongly believe it now.
This is how they serve, our priests. They are totally self-giving, sacrificing, and they practice…and witness for others…enduring faith.
Last evening I noticed Rocco Palmo’s post over at Whispers in the Loggia about this witness of a good priest and its power to inspire vocations in younger men drawn by that witness.
“The reason the guys are there in the seminary,” Collins said, “is because they met — largely, often — some really wonderful priest, who was just living it to the full.”
Whichever battlefield they’re on, the priests are there for the people. Today, thankfully, we have more.