Religion: A Navy Chaplain Takes Inventory

This report was written for TIME by Captain Maurice S. Sheehy, District Chaplain, Pearl Harbor. Chaplain Sheehy is on wartime leave of absence from his teaching post at the Department of Religious Education of the Catholic University of America.

Fantastic though the statement may sound, I believe I have served with two distinct U.S. Navies. Between the Navy which fought in the Aleutians in 1943 and the Navy of 1944, any similarity is purely coincidental.

This statement is based upon the assumption that the most important thing about a Navy is not its ships, its aircraft, or its guns, but what is going on in the hearts and minds of its men.

To be more specific, when I bade farewell to my shipmates on June 10, 1944, after ten months’ service aboard a large aircraft carrier, I think I was the same Chaplain who reported to them—but the crew had changed radically in its social and religious consciousness.

I remember the morning of May 19, 1944, when I took my battle station for the second time on the bridge and was immediately conscious of tense excitement there. Our Air Group had been launched shortly before dawn to fly over 14 Jap airfields, hit the great oil refinery and naval manufacturing works of Java, and, incidentally, to shoot down any planes that might be in the air and to sink any ships that might be in the harbor (ten were destroyed that day).

However, this was not the occasion of excitement. The Captain’s eyes were riveted on the flight deck from which he had launched 45 strikes in a period of a few months. His eyes glisten when he becomes excited and they were glistening now. And the imperturbable Commander Henry Howard Caldwell, who calmly flew his plane back from Rabaul on Nov. 5, 1943 with a dead photographer and a wounded gunner aboard, a plane with 154 bullet holes and one wheel and half an aileron gone, was behaving like an Annapolis plebe at one of the Navy football games—which also helped to make Caldwell famous.

Ball Games in Battle. The cause of the excitement was a touch football game in which the yellow-shirted Gas Detail was playing the pink-shirted NAPs (naval airplane pushers).

There was a tense moment when the loudspeaker said, “Fighter pilots, man your planes.” No orders were given to the crew because none were necessary. If the bogies were Jap planes, our gunners were ready and eager. But they were friendlies, and a moment later Commander Caldwell said “Relax,” and then, “Relax on the double,” and the game was on again.

An hour later our Air Group was aboard. “Give us one more crack at those Jap airfields,” they pleaded,”and there’ll be no more Jap planes on Java.” The Captain’s sympathies were with them but he was acting under orders—and the job on Surabaya had been completed.

Within 30 minutes, another tense battle was going on—this time a volleyball match—and the scene might have been more appropriate to a college gymnasium than to a spot 90 miles from Jap bases.

To the U.S. Navy the discussion about atheists in foxholes is purely academic. Fear is an inadequate basis for religion. Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, but only the beginning. And at tendance at religious services motivated by proximity of danger can scarcely demonstrate the religious quotient of a man. The change of outlook in the U.S. Navy is due to a heavy dose of Vitamin A—A for action. And that is not irrelevant to the discussion of religion among servicemen.

Profane Prayer. I saw lips moving in prayer one day when Jap torpedo planes were coming toward our ship. And I also heard a gunner say as the last was shot down within our vision, 20 miles away: “Goddam those pilots. They never gave us gunners a chance.” The profanity was, I believe, in this instance a prayer of thanksgiving.

In the last analysis, the scriptural test “By their fruits you shall know them” is the only adequate criterion for evaluating the function of religion in the life of the serviceman. I do not think the language of men living in a barracks or aboard ship mirrors their philosophy of life. It is rather shocking at times because speech is an outlet—inadequate, of course—for repressed energies. But if the supreme test of religion is unselfishness, the young man who is unhesitatingly risking his life on all the battlefronts of the world must be given a 4.0 rating —if he sees his act in its proper perspective. The Chaplain’s business is to help him see his daily effort as reflected upon the screens of eternity.

Happiness: from Pillar to Post. The Navy has treated me rather roughly the past 43 months; it has shifted me from pillar to post without ever consulting me (no university would do that); it has curtailed my liberty in many ways. It has routed me out of bed at the most ungodly hours for general quarters, some times when I saw no necessity for it ; and I much prefer my mother’s table to G.I. fare.

And yet I have it to thank for the most precious opportunities of priestly service in my life; for a rich treasury of friendships among men of all faiths; for a deep and abiding faith—not in God, because I had that previously—but in American youth, which has been challenged as never before. And I have derived more happiness from 43 months in the Navy than from my previous 42 years of life.