Carmelite Finds an Extended Family as an Air Force Chaplain

From “AMSNews,” the newsletter of the Air Force Personnel Center, Volume 3, Number 5, 2004. Reprinted with permission.

In becoming an Air Force chaplain, Father Joseph Wallroth, O.Carm., may have come closer to the foundations of his religious order than if he had served as a parish priest or a teacher.

	Father Joseph Wallroth, O.Carm. (on right) walks with President George W. Bush at Andrews Air Force Base

The founders of his religious order, the Carmelites, were former soldiers returning from the crusades who gathered at Mount Carmel to continue their brotherhood. “You’re closer to what we were about,” Father Wallroth recalls one Carmelite telling him about his Air Force chaplaincy.

A Colonel and the 89th Wing Chaplain at Andrews Air Force Base, in Maryland, Father Wallroth is the only Carmelite serving in the U.S. military out of about 330 priests and brothers. “I was always fascinated by flying,” he said. He has held a pilot’s license for more than thirty years.

He describes Andrews Air Force Base as a high-powered place, and as chaplain for Air Force One and the presidential airlift group, he ministers to the pilots, logisticians and maintainers who fly President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, National Security Advisor Condolezza Rice, admirals, congressmen, generals and senators.

“You’ve got to be at the top of your game all the time,” Father Wallroth said. He compared his job with juggling five or six tennis balls at once. “It’s a great life and it’s fun.”

“It’s all high rollers trying to negotiate peace (around the world),” Father Wallroth said. “Right now, they’re flying a lot because of the (presidential) campaign.”

But Father Wallroth finds the need to stay rooted by setting aside 40-45 minutes each morning at 7:00 for prayer, and he draws from Carmelite spiritual giants like Saint John of the Cross and Saint Teresa of Avila to reflect on prayer and work. “I enjoy speaking about my mission and my tradition,” he said of being a Carmelite.

“Most of the staff spend time in daily prayer,” Father Wallroth said of the Andrews chapel staff, which includes nearly 20 chaplains, contract chaplains and enlisted support personnel. Father Wallroth is the only Catholic chaplain at Andrews.

Every day except Friday—his day off—he offers noon Mass at the base chapel, a practice that’s another anchor of his spiritual life. He recalled being very moved less than a year ago when a squadron of 35 showed up— including maybe eight Catholics—to attend daily Mass one day because they wanted to pray for a comrade who had suffered a heart attack.

He has also been touched because the Catholic community at Andrews has donated 7,000 bottles of water and soda to comfort as many as 1,700 injured military personnel who have come to Andrews from Afghanistan and Iraq. He has been moved by the example of Catholics who are serving in the Red Cross to comfort the injured.

The injured coming through Andrews have included Father Timothy Vakoc, an Army chaplain severely wounded by a roadside bomb outside of Baghdad. Father Wallroth was moved because Archbishop Edwin F. O’Brien, Archbishop for the Military Services and the Catholic chaplain from Walter Reed Army Medical Center were there to meet the comatose Father Vakoc when he was transported to Walter Reed Hospital.

A New Jersey native who joined the Carmelites after hearing a vocations talk given by a Carmelite when he was in the sixth grade, Father Wallroth said that he was “looking for brothers and sisters” since he was an only child, and he found them in the Carmelites. He has served as an Air Force chaplain for 21 years and plans to retire next year, when he will return to full-time work with the Carmelites.

He had to ask his religious superiors for four years before being allowed to join the Air Force Reserves, and then two years later—as he closed in on what was then the ceiling for becoming an active duty chaplain at 39 years old—they allowed him to become an active-duty chaplain.

His Air Force assignments have included serving as Catholic chaplain at Dover Air Force Base, Delaware (1985 - 1988), a “huge parish” with 375 religious education students. He also served as morgue chaplain on the base. From 1988 to 1991 he served as cadet chaplain at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colorado, where 220 cadets would attend a daily 6:45 AM Mass. If he kept his homily to three minutes each morning, the cades could receive the Eucharist under both species with Mass over in 23 minutes.

He served in Bosnia in 1999 to help the Army, which was short on chaplains, and “wasn’t even thinking about converts.” But a Tuesday evening RCIA (Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults) class he formed eventually grew to include 22 people—most of them were from the 10th Mountain Division from Fort Drum, New York.

“Many of them wanted to be Catholic, but they couldn’t attend classes because they were deployed,” so Father Wallroth condensed the course to three months and found that the military personnel would faithfully attend the class, which would last for two or three hours.

“They would come in the rain and would walk a mile,” with their ponchos and M-16s, he said. “It was the Holy Spirit kind of hitting me on the head.” The All Saints Day Mass on 1 November where he welcomed the new Catholics was a standing-roomonly service with 90 people attending; that was “like Pentecost,” he said.

From his Carmelite perspective, Father Wallroth sees himself as a part of a family. He fondly recalls the Irish priest whom he served under as his first Air Force assignment at Norton Air Force Base, California, Monsignor John T. Naughton, Archdiocese of Los Angeles. “This guy really took care of me like I was his son,” Father Wallroth said.