IMAGE: CNS photo/Pearl Harbor Museum
By Mark Pattison
WASHINGTON
(CNS) — A Catholic military chaplain and historian says the attack on Pearl
Harbor, even 75 years later, continues to rivet the attention of Americans
because it is “such a powerful event.”
As the
anniversary of the Dec. 7, 1941, attack neared, Father Daniel Mode detailed the
effect of the Japanese attack on the Hawaiian outpost.
“Before
that, we were debating whether to get involved with World War II or not. We
were basically a neutral country, trying not to get engaged in it. It (the
attack) changed the tenor, and the president’s resolve, Father Mode told Catholic
News Service. “It brought our country together to fight a common threat.”
Speaking
in a telephone interview from the Pentagon, where he works for the chief of
chaplains, Father Mode said he can see a parallel between Pearl Harbor and the
9/11 terror attacks.
“They’re
both cataclysmic events that galvanized our country,” he said. “One was more obviously
targeted toward the civilian population, one toward the military population,”
the priest added, “but both certainly were defining moments in our country.”
As a
child, young Daniel Mode lived at Pearl Harbor for four years while his father
was on duty in the Navy.
“I vividly
remember as a young kid — fourth-, fifth-, sixth-grade — going to the (USS) Arizona
Memorial. As an altar server, I served Mass. It made a great impact on me. It
was probably the seeds that were planted in my heart as I discerned my vocation
to the priesthood. Pearl Harbor has made an amazing impact on my life.”
The
lesson to be learned from Pearl Harbor, he said, is “always vigilance, to be
vigilant. To use all sorts of opportunities for diplomacy, opportunities for peaceful
engagement, to use all those opportunities ahead of time to engage with populations
of other countries, but to be ever vigilant. We want to be friends, right? We
have to have friends all over the world. But we have to be aware that not everyone
wants to be our friend.”
Ordained
a priest of the Diocese of Arlington, Virginia, 24 years ago, Father Mode has
spent most of his ordained ministry in the Navy Reserve, and the last 12 years
in full-time chaplaincy, where he has attained the rank of commander. He’s
currently six months into a three-year stint at the Pentagon, where his work,
among other things, includes collecting data on all the work performed by
chaplains.
He took
a brief break from that work in October when he was selected to represent the Chaplain
Corps at a funeral Mass in Dubuque, Iowa, in October for Father Aloysius
Schmitt, a chaplain aboard the USS Oklahoma at Pearl Harbor, who pushed a dozen
men out a narrow porthole to safety during the attack at the cost of his own
life as the ship was sinking. He was the first U.S. chaplain to die in World War II. It was only recently that his remains had been
positively identified.
“It
amazed me, too, that 75 years later, it would be an amazing occasion that
gathered so many people together, but that it made national news,” Father Mode
told CNS.
Another
heroic World War II chaplain Father Mode identified was Father Joseph O’Callahan, a
Jesuit priest who was the Catholic chaplain aboard the USS Franklin, then a
troop transport ship about 50 miles from the coast of Japan in March 1945, five
months before the war ended. Father O’Callahan was awarded the Medal of Honor,
the military’s highest honor, for organizing rescue and firefighting parties,
leading men below deck to soak magazines that had threatened to explode — which
would have catastrophically increased the death toll beyond the 800 who did
perish — and administer last rites.
“He certainly
comes to mind as a hero,” Father Mode said. “He did not die. He served, he went
back to (the College of the) Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, to continue
teaching math, which is what he did as a Jesuit priest. He is buried in the
Jesuit cemetery at Holy Cross.”
Father
Mode does not confine his historical research to World War II. For his master’s thesis
in history, he wrote a book on Father Vincent Capodanno, a Navy Reserve
chaplain who died while serving with the Marines in Vietnam in 1967, was affectionately called “the ‘grunt padre’ for his ability to relate well with soldiers and his willingness to risk his life to minister to the men.” “Grunt” is slang for a member of the U.S. infantry. The cause for his sainthood was formally opened in 2006.
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