Month: August 2010

From the article:

Confronted with such a dim future, many chaplains might retire early, resign their commissions in protest, or decline to serve in the first place. More drastically, the bishops, boards or other religious judicatories whose approval is indispensable for clergy to be commissioned as officers might withdraw their official endorsements and pull their chaplains from military service.

In a recent letter to the Armed Forces Chaplains Board, my own bishop, Metropolitan Jonah (Paffhausen) of the Orthodox Church in America, has promised to do precisely that, if any of the two dozen priests under his care “were in any way forced to minister the sacraments” to active, unrepentant homosexuals, or “forced to teach that such behavior is good or acceptable, or prohibited from denouncing such behavior as sinful and self-destructive,” or regarded as purveyors of “prejudice” or “hate language.” It’s at once inspiring and reassuring as a retired chaplain to know that Metropolitan Jonah has, in the peculiar parlance of troops in combat, “got our back.”

Note: Fr. Alexander Webster is an adviser to the American Orthodox Institute.

Source: Stars and Stripes

By Fr. Alexander F.C. Webster

President Barack Obama’s initiative to rescind the “don’t ask, don’t tell” statute of 1993 will, if Congress yields to him later this year, shred the social and moral fabric of our armed forces. The experiment will also test the mettle of the chaplain corps in each of the military services — Army, Air Force and Navy (including the Marine Corps and Coast Guard). Fortunately for the nation and its military defense, many chaplains and their civilian faith group leaders are beginning, at last, to push back on the issue.

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