D-Day and the Church – why we must remember the sacrifices made by so many
Bishop Paul Mason, the Catholic Bishop of the Forces, was among those who travelled to the north coast of France to Normandy to stand in solidarity with and pray for the veterans of D-Day and World War II.
In a reflection he wrote: “Connection with the past is fundamental to such an occasion, taking hold of our history, owning it, for fear it may disappear into the mists of the collective memory. We have a common identity as the lucky generations who had our freedoms protected, paid for by the brave men who stormed the beaches that day.”
There were prayers for the dead and for their eternal rest.
Bishop Mason said: “Many have commented that this will no doubt be the last time we are able to honour the fallen of the D-Day landings while veterans are still with us. From what I saw, I believe we did our best to show our gratitude and love. No-one was a spectator on Thursday but standing shoulder to shoulder in solidarity and prayer with our veterans, both living and dead.”
D-Day commemorations outside Westminster City Hall in London involved a blessing from Fr Christopher Colven, Catholic chaplain to the Houses of Parliament.
Fr Christopher, also chaplain to Westminster City Council Lord Mayor Robert Rigby, joined RAF Cadets and councillors outside the council HQ in Victoria Street. After the blessing, the Lord Mayor raised the special #DDay80 flag.
The Lord Mayor said: “Across the country people have paused to raise #DDay80 flags and remember the start of D-Day, the unprecedented military campaign to free Europe from Nazi occupation. So many young lives were lost on French beaches so Europe could be liberated and we could all live as free people.
“As the generation which took part in D-Day fades and the ranks of the surviving veterans thin, it is more important than ever that we remember their sacrifice and teach that to our young people.”
The leaders of the Catholic and Anglican Churches in Ireland commended Irish D-Day chaplains and said that as war again threatens the world, “we stand for peace and reconciliation”.
The Church of Ireland Archbishop of Armagh, Dr John McDowell, and the leader of the Catholic Church in Ireland, Archbishop Eamon Martin, delivered addresses at the Royal Irish Regiment Service of Remembrance at Ranville Commonwealth War Graves Cemetery, near Sword beach in Normandy on Friday afternoon. Ranville was the first village in France to be liberated on D-Day.
At the prayer service to mark the 80th anniversary of the D-Day landing in June 1944, Archbishop Martin said, “As war and violence once more threaten to destabilise our continent and our world, Archbishop John and I stand here together at Ranville, witnessing to peace and reconciliation, to fraternity and common humanity.”
In his address, Dr Martin said, “Fraternity and common humanity: that is what our brave and generous chaplains stood for in 1944.”
The leader of the Irish Church spoke of the witness of Fr John Patrick O’Brien from Co Roscommon. He brought with him a “treasured” family photo of the priest, who joined the Columban Missionaries in Ireland when he was just 17.
Fr Jack, as he was known, planned to become a missionary and serve in the Far East. However, due to World War II, he was unable to take up his assignment. Instead, he opted to train as an army chaplain and was assigned to the Royal Ulster Rifles, to accompany the D-Day invasion, landing here with the Allies on Sword Beach, eighty years ago.
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Archbishop Martin painted a pen picture of the popular Catholic chaplain.
“The troops called him ‘the fighting padre’ because Jack had been a boxer in his student days, and several anecdotes are recorded of his positive attitude and good humour. They say he sometimes ‘visited the men in their dugouts for a few hands of poker, often with rum scrounged from the quartermaster,’ and once, when a newly arrived officer fainted and almost fell into an open grave during a burial, Fr Jack grabbed him saying, ‘Now, there’s no need to be in a hurry. All in good time.’”
Within six to ten months of D-Day, the RUR Battalion he belonged to had helped to liberate village after village across northern France, Belgium, Holland, before reaching Bremen in Germany.
After the German surrender, Fr O’Brien travelled on to Egypt, where the Battalion was helping to guard the Suez Canal, and by 1946 he was with them in Palestine.
In 1948 he was assigned by the Columbans as a missionary priest in Mokpo, on the southern coast of South Korea.
“Father Jack O’Brien’s story of courage and self-denial continued well beyond D-Day. In 1950, when the communist forces began to invade South Korea and were approaching his parish, he refused an offer from American troops to be evacuated to safety, preferring instead to remain with his people and serve them to the end. He was captured and imprisoned, and after a long march at gunpoint towards North Korea, he was executed in the massacre at Taejon, a month before his 32nd birthday. His body was never found or identified - he was martyred for his faith and belief that ‘neither death nor life can ever separate us from the love of God,’” Archbishop Martin told the service in France on Friday.
He also highlighted how soldiers of the Royal Ulster Rifles 1st Division were also called to Korea in 1950, suffering many losses in the Battle of Happy Valley. In 2013 a memorial stone was erected in Seoul to record and honour their contribution.
“Fittingly it includes the name of their former chaplain, one Fr John Patrick (Jack) O’Brien who had served and prayed with them on these roads and fields of Normandy, 80 years ago today.”
In his address, Archbishop McDowell recalled growing up in a housing estate in Belfast alongside veterans of the Second World War. All of the residents had been left physically disabled usually having lost a limb. He said he could not remember any sense of bitterness among them.
He paid tribute to the Revd James McMurray-Taylor, a Church of Ireland chaplain who landed on Sword beach, on 6 June 1944. “Although in every sense a hero, there is nothing of the heroic in his style and manner. He was a man dutifully doing his job. He received no special treatment when he returned to the Church of Ireland in 1947.”
This sense of duty was to his country and, overwhelmingly, duty to his God and to his vocation as a priest.
“He was certainly someone who did not seek the limelight. All the accounts of how he conducted himself as a chaplain – blessing soldiers from every Christian tradition and none before battle, burying the dead, both British and German, with the respect due to human dignity, toiling in the warm stench of death and hot sun of a battlefield to recover name tags and personal effects also from German and British alike, to be returned to their loved ones – are evidence of deep faith and dedication.”
He received no special treatment when he returned to the Church of Ireland in 1947. He was curate in charge of a small parish in County Donegal and then one in County Derry before ending up with two rural and parishes in County Fermanagh, where he stayed until he retired in 1980.
“The moral case for the destruction of Nazi Germany was unambiguous even before the men we are remembering today fought their way across Europe and found the horrors of Belsen and Auschwitz,” Dr McDowell said and added, “Perhaps the remarkable energy and clear-sightedness of that generation who fought in the war and then went on to create the welfare state in health and housing was a consequence of that moral clarity, so unlike the dark years of the 1920s and 30s when many of those who had fought in the Great War were left in poverty and misery by a system of class privilege which had not yet been broken.”
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