Battlefield Chaplain: Korea circa 1952

On this date, August 23, in 2006, Father Richard Wersing, CSSp, died at age 96. We met four years earlier and developed a friendship. He shared many fascinating stories of his life — a street preacher in Oklahoma and Kentucky in the late 1930s, an active-duty Army chaplain through WWII and Korea and reservist during Vietnam, a university professor of literature and poetry in the 1970s, an archivist in the 1980s, a lifelong lover of the theater — several of those stories can be found in a 2015 profile, “The Many Missions of Father Richard F. Wersing” written for Gathered Fragments.

In the photo above, Father Wersing is celebrating Mass with the Third Infantry Division in Korea, circa 1952. “Chaplains fostered good morale in a variety of ways,’’ wrote Martin Blumensen in Battlefield Chaplains (Univ. of Kansas, Press, 1994). “They held religious services for soldiers and sailors and preached to them. They counseled and advised those who sought help. They were everywhere they deemed their presence to be necessary — in battle, that meant with the combat troops, and there the chaplains often acted above and beyond the call of duty.”

Father Wersing was no exception — he once celebrated Mass under hostile fire. Several years ago, an eyewitness and fellow soldier, shared the story:

We met several times on the front lines of Hill 355. Wherever he went he always gathered as many GI’s as he could to say Mass; sometime there were only a few, and other times over 100.

On one occasion he said Mass on the reverse side of Hill 355.

All of a sudden, the enemy started shelling our position and all of us GI’s had been trained to duck and put our helmets back on. They had been off because we were in ‘church’, so we put them back on and kept them on for the remainder of the Mass.

As I looked up at Father Wersing, there he was still standing up continuing to say Mass like nothing else mattered except the completion of the Mass. Some enemy shells had landed nearby and fortunately no one was hit, however dirt and mud had splattered his vestments.

Later, he was nominated for and awarded the Bronze Star for valor.

When I asked Father Wersing about this episode, he said that he heard a shell fly past during the consecration but thought since it didn’t hit him that “God wanted me to finish.”

His mortal remains are interred in Arlington National Cemetery. May he rest in peace.