Text Box: yearly. In Fort Drum, any given year had 60 to 80 confirmations. Same thing with first Communions and adult ed. On a base all those are exactly the same as in any town. The only difference: There is no priest. With such needs, why is it difficult to recruit chaplains? It’s a multicentered problem with no easy answer. In terms of recruiting, to get seminarians and priests to say Yes as a chaplain or chaplain candidate is very doable. But then you’ve got to get the bishop to say Yes for priests and the seminarian’s rector and bishop to say Yes. That’s much more challenging. We’re asking bishops to give up a priest for the military, but they have a shortage of priests in their own dioceses. Almost any diocese is in desperate need of priests. Many dioceses are consolidating parishes and trying to best use the little clergy they’ve got. On top of that, very often the priest winds up staying in for 20 years and never coming back. That makes it a bigger decision for the bishop. It’s almost like trying to get money out of people who don’t have money. Are you finding ways to meet the challenge? One of the programs I thought up is to ask bishops to give us an older priest serving eight to 12 years who is thinking about going on sabbatical. Give us that priest for four years. He would save up $60,000 in GI Bill money to go for a doctorate on his sabbatical. He also would get $3,000 per month to live on while going to college. The priest comes back to the diocese and he has got a doctorate. We’re trying to get the experience seminarians receive in the chaplain-candidate program to be accepted as credit hours by their seminary. And the Army has a new Religious Professional Scholarship Program for which the Army pays for all his tuition while in the seminary. I’m hoping these various modifications might help bishops and rectors be more open to letting these guys come in. The Army is not looking for more soldiers, but for priests. That’s what commanders and the families at the bases are looking for. In 2005 with the 171st Cavalry Brigade in Iraq, you were medevaced to Germany with kidney stones, then to Walter Reed, where a doctor discovered an inoperable cancerous tumor crushing your carotid artery and said you had six months to live. What happened? I was walking down the hall talking about it with some friends who had come from Newark. An officer came out asking, “Who’s talking Portuguese?” “I am,” I said, and told him the whole story. “Why don’t we let God decide that,” he answered. “I just read an experimental idea in a journal to dissolve the tumor.” He had been a missionary in Brazil who became a doctor and joined the Army. It was the hand of God who needed me to get to Walter Reed to get into that hallway so that guy, who knew this experimental procedure that could save my life, heard me. I was in Walter Reed for a year and a half. While recovering, in the dormitory, I became the chaplain by the hand of God. You’re assigned a battle buddy. Mine was a Marine sergeant who was more mobile and went around meeting the different guys, then say, “You got to see this kid in the other room. He has no legs and his wife’s going to leave him.” I’d go down in my robe and try to patch things up. My unit in Iraq would get word back to me to see a guy coming to Walter Reed. I was battling from a different battlefront. I was fighting with the guys whose battle was against death. It’s the difference your presence makes and how God needs you in a certain spot at a certain time. Text Box: Would you share a victory or two you won to show us why dioceses should try to help with a military chaplain? At Fort Drum, near Canada, the base head chaplain got me a house on the street where all the high-ranking officers lived. As it turns out, for a year one other man and I were the only men on the street. The others were in Iraq. In the winter he would plow one side of the street and I would plow the other. In summer I cut all the lawns on one side of the street; he did the same on the other. While doing that, people from those houses asked, “Are you a Catholic priest? I haven’t been to church in so long. What do I need to do to come back?” Others, Baptists, Methodists, asked, “What do you have to do to become a Catholic?” By the time the guys got back from Iraq, I had the entire street Catholic. I completed a handful of annulments; others married in the Church; the kids went to CCD. It all started with blowing snow and cutting lawns. And one day my battle buddy, the Marine sergeant, wanted to go to Mass — the first time in 15 years. He said, “I want you to know you’re the cause of all this: getting me back to church.” I was at Walter Reed being one of the only Catholic priests with all those soldiers, and that’s where God needed a priest. At Fort Drum, I cut grass but had to be there to do it. God needs people in place. So my approach to seminarians is this: You’re already a soldier for Christ. Now be a soldier for Christ in the U.S. Army.