Just when Fr. Paul-Anthony Halladay thought he was out, they pulled him back in.
Archbishop Timothy Broglio appointed the recently retired Army chaplain to serve as vocations director of the Archdiocese for the Military Services (AMS) in January, so when Fr. Halladay spoke to me this April, he hadn’t been on the job long. In fact, he was just settling into a position at St. Patrick’s Seminary in Menlo Park, California, last year when he got the call from the AMS asking him to mentor seminarians who are discerning becoming military chaplains, a role he describes as a “call within a vocation.”
At St. Patrick’s, Fr. Halladay was applying lessons learned from his twenty years of service as an Army priest to teach leadership classes to seminarians. I sought him out to hear his thoughts on what makes the military chaplaincy unique, what he sees drawing young men to the priesthood today, and why every priest could benefit from thinking of himself as a leader as well as a shepherd.
Teaching leadership to the Menlo Park seminarians was a natural fit for Fr. Halladay, who had taught leadership and ethics to mid-career Army officers at Fort Gordon, Georgia (now called Fort Eisenhower). Both young priests and young officers must learn skills for “leading when [they’re] not ultimately in charge.” For the signal officers in Georgia, that meant serving under lieutenant colonels, colonels, and generals. For the future priests at St. Patrick’s, that meant serving as an associate pastor under a senior priest and a bishop. “You always have to be mindful of your superior’s vision and what their leadership philosophy is,” he said, “and then also be able to nest your leadership philosophy within theirs.”
This vision of priesthood requires a degree of self-knowledge combined with humility that Halladay said the military emphasizes in developing its leaders, a concept known as “servant leadership.” It is a profoundly Christian concept that upholds self-sacrifice and denial on the part of those entrusted with responsibility over people’s very lives. “People in the military have a bond that’s far more familial than other sectors of our society,” Halladay said. “Because of that, you really do have to look at, ‘How do I give myself in service to those people that are in my organization and whom I have to lead without condition, without counting costs?’”
“The same thing that compels them to think about and become a military member ultimately compels them to consider priesthood.”
For him, this translates very easily into a priestly context. “People are sharing parts of their lives with you that are particularly intimate,” he said of the priesthood. “Because of that connection, one has to be very much a servant leader.” Those are the qualities Halladay said recruiters look for in potential chaplains, whom they then refer to him. Many already serve in the military. “They’re practicing their faith; they’re attentive to the needs of others,” he said, “They are volunteering in their Catholic communities on their posts or bases.”
He said many of the men called to military chaplaincy also come from military families themselves. This coincides with recent data showing that 12 percent of new priests ordained in 2023 came from military families, and many new recruits to the military itself tend to come from military families.
Indeed, it is often said that the military is a microcosm of society, and Halladay’s experience appears to bear that out. “One of the things I started to realize as a chaplain is how wounded—traumatized—some people are that come to the military from just life wounds,” he said.
“In talking to seminarians, guys who are already in the seminary but not necessarily going to be chaplains,” said Halladay, “one of the things that comes out so readily in the conversation is this understanding of [the] need to know who we are as men.”
That’s where he sees military service offering a solution for some. “Organizations like the Army, like the Navy, like the Air Force, and through the Navy, the Marines, communicate something of the identity of what it means to be a young man. So that’s where a lot of young men are looking in order to be able to solidify that identity.”
He related a recent experience with West Point cadets, where participants at a retreat were separated by sex for part of the event. The young men were tasked to create mottos for their small groups. “Every last single one of them—without any instruction, without any communication between themselves—every last single one of them came up with some crusader form of a motto,” he said, “And then, they turned what was going to be a banner [. . .] into a flag. They went and got sticks from the woods, and tied those cloths onto the sticks, so that they had flags, and they all did this without communicating.”
This is perhaps unsurprising in a group of future military officers. But motifs of spiritual warfare, putting on the armor of God, and martial symbolism are frequent in men’s devotional literature and spirituality today. Crusader art is very popular among young Catholic men online as well.
What did this mean to Halladay? “You just saw this common reach for ‘This is who we are,’” he said. “We’re crusading knights with a mission.”
Halladay cites two military candidates for sainthood as exemplifying the combination of servant leadership, mission, and sacrifice that makes military chaplaincy attractive to young men discerning the priesthood. Perhaps not coincidentally, both men—Fr. Vincent Capodanno and Fr. Emil Kapaun—are also Medal of Honor recipients.
Servant of God Vincent Capodanno was a Marine Corps chaplain during the Vietnam War who voluntarily joined the outnumbered men of the 5th Marines in the dangerous Que Son Valley. He was killed by enemy fire while administering last rites to the dying and assisting the wounded. Venerable Emil Kapaun was an Army chaplain during the Korean War, often depicted saying Mass in the field on the hood of an Army jeep. Pope Francis recognized Kapaun’s cause for canonization just this year under a new category he himself initiated in 2017: oblatio vitae, “offering of life.” Although Kapaun initially escaped capture by the Chinese, he stayed behind with a medic to care for wounded soldiers and was taken as a prisoner of war. He resisted his Communist captors’ attempts at indoctrination, and he encouraged and prayed with his fellow prisoners.
“[Kapaun’s and Capodanno’s] lives are epitomes of what it means not only to be a chaplain,” Halladay said, “But to be profoundly a priest, all the way to the selfless giving of one’s own life.”
Around fifteen years ago, when Halladay was trying to make the case to diocesan vocation directors to let their seminarians become chaplains, he included leadership training as part of the “benefits package.” “I said that they get good leadership training in the military,” he explained, “and more than one vocation director just kind of rolled his eyes at me and said, ‘That’s the last thing my bishop wants his priest to have!’”
But Halladay sees a mindset shift. “I think more and more, bishops are starting to realize, ‘You know what? I think [seminarians] do need to have leadership training.’” After all, he said, all leadership really means is answering—from the bishop to the parochial vicar to the assistant pastor—the question Halladay poses: “How can we get us all moving in the same direction toward a common vision with a particular understanding of our pieces of that bigger picture?” And that bigger picture is the mission. “That’s always going to be evangelization,” Halladay said. “Proclaiming the Gospel.”
Service members are frequently drawn to the military to be part of something greater than themselves—to be part of a vision and a mission. Halladay sees the same call to service and adventure at work in drawing men to the priesthood. “The same thing that compels them to think about and become a military member ultimately compels them to consider priesthood,” he said of service men who go on to the priesthood. “But it’s primarily because they begin to make that connection between desire to be a part of something bigger, desire to be a part of a mission, and then recognizing that within the Church itself.”
With this in mind, it is perhaps for this reason that St. Paul addressed the kenotic hymn—a striking passage about Jesus emptying himself and becoming obedient to the point of death—to the Philippians, a community of retired Roman soldiers. For what better way to reach this audience of men—who had themselves been subject to authority, with soldiers subject to them—than with the example of the ultimate servant leader?