Read Online Mission at Nuremberg by Tim Townsend - Free Book Online Page B

straightener; and at the Hagenbeck-Wallace Circus in Peru, Indiana, where he worked—and sometimes bunked—with the performers. Arnold was ordained in 1908 and sent to the Philippines as a chaplain in the First World War.
    In December 1937, Roosevelt appointed Arnold to head the Chaplain Corps, and at the end of the war—just before Gerecke was tapped for the job in Nuremberg—Pope Pius XII made him a bishop. Arnold later served nearly two decades as an aide to New York Cardinal Francis Spellman and as the Catholic Church’s delegate to the military.
    In his last days leading the Chaplain Corps, in 1945, Arnold wrote about his love for his fellow military priests, ministers, and rabbis in his book, Soldiers of God . For many soldiers, he wrote,
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    Chaplains of all faiths have been their sole link between the battlefield and home. These Chaplains volunteered to be with your men, to share the dangers of battle so they might help to keep alive the spiritual values for which we went to war—spiritual values without which lasting peace cannot be attained. In the performance of their duties, some of them have been wounded; others have died. The War Department has given to many of these clergymen the highest honors. These are your Chaplains. These are clergymen from your community. You have good cause to be proud of them.
    Arnold’s letter to Gerecke at Harvard began: “With hearty congratulations and best wishes we welcome you to active duty with the Regular Army.” This might have been a form letter, but it also served as a pep talk from the top chaplain in the country, and it gave Gerecke a good sense of what the chaplaincy expected of him and what he could expect from the army in return.
    â€œInconveniences, difficulties and hardships will be your portion,” Arnold continued. “Military life is a life of discipline, and the essential military virtues of courage, loyalty, obedience, devotion, and self-sacrifice are also religious virtues.”
    Arnold spoke of “the alarming increase” in the number of young soldiers unfamiliar with God or religious worship. “How shall they know if they are not taught, and by whom shall they be taught if not by an able and zealous chaplain?” he asked.
    Each chaplain’s responsibility was tremendous, he wrote, and each chaplain’s own salvation would be determined “by the efforts and sacrifices you make to teach and train men.”
    â€œYour earnest words, pregnant with Divine wisdom and power, will establish convictions and train consciences in these young men that will strengthen and comfort them every hour of every day,” Arnold wrote, “in daylight or in darkness . . .”
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    EARLY IN THE FOURTH century, probably in 316, a boy named for Mars, the god of war, was born to a soldier and his wife in the village of Sabaria in modern-day Hungary. Only a few years before the birth of the boy, who would later be known as Martin of Tours, Constantine freed the Christians from two centuries of secret meetings, persecution, and murder. By declaring the Edict of Milan, Constantine—the leader of the Roman Empire—had allowed Christians to practice their faith openly.
    While his parents worshipped and offered sacrifices to the Roman gods and the emperor himself, Martin, even as a child, was drawn to Christianity, specifically to its followers who had so recently been killed by Constantine’s slaughterous predecessor Diocletian, and the ascetics—hermits who adopted a form of martyrdom by living a life of prayer, alone in the woods or the desert.
    When Martin was fifteen years old, a decree was sent down from the emperor that required all sons of veterans to join the army, changing Martin’s plans of a solitary life for Christ. Instead, Martin found himself a member of the extravagantly uniformed imperial guard, one of five hundred cavalrymen protecting the emperor himself during military