Stories like this remind me again we must not only pray for troops but for those that God sends to minister to them. It is truly a calling.
Brigadier pastor gets promotion-
It was night in the desert. The passengers and crew of the military transport plane were tired. They were in Saudi Arabia, far from family and friends, to support air combat operations over Iraq. It was 1993.
Jack Sewell, a Catholic Air Force Reserve chaplain returning from celebrating Mass at a military base, thought his duties for the day were over. Then a crew member approached him.
I am a Catholic but it has been many years since I made confession, he told Sewell. Will you hear it?
Sewell did. That moment in the darkness of a foreign land, over the drone of the plane engine and in the company of a fellow worshiper "highlighted to me the universality of ministry," Sewell recalls.
"We can say Mass for 2,000 people and then we can turn around and do confession for one and experience that same spiritual healing," Sewell says. "That was significant."
The idea that faith has a place even in the harshest settings is not just Sewell's belief. As one of only four Air Force chaplains to achieve the rank of brigadier general in the United States today, it will also be his job.
Sewell's promotion to brigadier general takes place today at Our Lady of Fatima Church in San Clemente, where he is the pastor. Tod D. Brown, bishop of Orange, and the Air Force Chief of Chaplains Maj. Gen. Charles C. Baldwin, as well as up to 1,500 members of Sewell's civilian congregation, will attend.
"It's amazing," says Sewell, 55, a blue-eyed man with the trim build of one who has to pass the Air Force physical fitness test each year (Sewell passed three weeks ago). "I wasn't aiming for the top. I just wanted to be a chaplain. I really truly feel blessed and honored. It's a great opportunity and a great challenge."
Opportunity because Sewell will now be charged with overseeing the training and formation of 560 Air Reserve Chaplains, part of the Air Force's 2,200 chaplains serving about 400,000 servicemen and women around the world.
Challenge Sewell is a senior religious figure within a branch of the military bruised by repeated allegations of spiritual overreach.
In 2005, the Air Force Academy's chief chaplain was removed after complaining about excessive proselytizing by both evangelical chaplains and officers.
More recently, the Defense Department's inspector general concluded that seven Army and Air Force officers improperly participated in a video promoting an evangelical group.
"I'd like to know from Chaplain Sewell is he going to stand in these same shoes?" said Mikey Weinstein, the founder and president of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, a nonprofit advocacy group that says it has received complaints from 5,000 servicemen and women about proselytizing within the ranks.
Concerns about command pressure in support of any one faith group prompted Air Force officials to draft new rules on chaplain conduct that advocate respect for what Sewell calls religious "pluralism."
"We realize that we're chaplains to all kinds of people," Sewell says. "It's not our call to force or require any person to become any denomination."
Military chaplains are overwhelmingly Catholic, Protestant and Jewish, but must be willing to counsel service members of any faith.
Balancing denominational beliefs with the ecumenical military tradition requires judgment and tact, Sewell acknowledges.
It is a balancing act Sewell knows well.
Born on Bolling Air Force Base in Washington, D.C., to an Air Force pilot (his father) and a secretary (his mother), Sewell grew up in the military.
"I was baptized in the Air Force, I went to Air Force chapels all of my life," he says. "The priests that I knew were all Air Force chaplains."
Those chaplains impressed Sewell with their intellect and sense of humor, but also their "holiness, their faith, their willingness to travel all over the world," he says. "I thought, 'wow that's a wonderful experience.'"
Sewell's father, a Baptist, also impressed his son by agreeing to raise his children in his mother's Catholic faith.
"I came from a very Catholic family but I also came from an ecumenical family," Sewell says. "Dad was very supportive of my going to seminary."
The dual lessons of faith and tolerance in a military setting made for a "comfortable" transition into the Air Force reserve chaplain program.
That program requires all chaplains to minister to servicemen and women regardless of faith, denomination or political viewpoint.
Pope Benedict XVI is a critic of the war in Iraq. Sewell cannot be.
"It's not up to us to make policy," Sewell says. "It's up to Congress and our executive authority."
His role, he says, is to support the troops and their families by hearing their concerns. For those in doubt of the mission, his job is to gently "help them understand what is their role."
"They're wearing a uniform. So at some point in life, they made a decision," Sewell says. "(My job) is helping them to come to grips with a deeper understanding of where God is calling them."
He must also minister to families pressured by the increasingly long deployments demanded by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
"Nowadays it's husband and wife, brother and sister and everybody goes more frequently," Sewell says. "The stresses are very much there especially when they have been deployed two or three times."
He must do all this while managing a 2,000-person parish in San Clemente, a balancing act he says he could not do without diocesan support.
Chaplain duty takes priests away from Catholic churches already taxed by a severe priest shortage.
"There are so few Catholic priests, especially in the military," says Sewell, who plans to make recruitment a major part of his job.
Moments of spiritual intimacy such as the confession he heard over a moonlit desert make such challenges worthwhile, Sewell says.
Such moments were "truly a blessed experience," Sewell says. "It helped me understand my priesthood in a different way."
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