Episcopal Bishop Charles Henry Brent featured among chaplains in First World War ‘Sacred Service’ exhibit – Episcopal News Service

A photograph of an unidentified chaplain administering Communion to soldiers on a World War I battlefield in Austria-Hungary is part of the Sacred Service exhibit at the National World War I Museum and Memorial in Kansas City, Missouri. Photo: Melodie Woerman/Episcopal News Service

(Episcopal News Service – Kansas City, Missouri) The work of Episcopalians and other chaplains during World War I is highlighted in a new exhibit at the National World War I Museum and Memorial in Kansas City, Missouri.

The sacred service, which opened in time for Memorial Day on May 23 and runs through September 7, 2025, explores the ministry of chaplains through panels highlighting 19 men from the Christian, Jewish and Muslim faiths. The panels are surrounded by photographs, letters, diaries, vestments, Communion kits and other artefacts that help tell the story of the clergy who served those who fought across Europe between 1914 and 1918.

“The sacred service is a window into an experience of war that hasn’t really been looked at in the last 100 years,” Patricia Cecil, the museum’s specialist curator of faith, religion and World War I, told Episcopal News Service during a guided tour from May 22. Chaplains played a unique role during the war, she said, not only because they were there to bring faith, but also because they were noncombatants. “I’m just there to help people,” she said. “What can this teach us about the First World War?”

Episcopal Bishop Charles Henry Brent served as a chaplain during World War I while also serving as missionary bishop of the Philippines. He later became bishop of Western New York.

Among the chaplains featured is the Rt. rev. Charles Henry Brent, the first missionary bishop of the Episcopal Church in the Philippines, who is commemorated in the church calendar on March 27. He is also the author of a prayer for mission that is part of the Morning Prayer service in the Common Book of 1979. Prayer. He later served as bishop of the Diocese of Western New York.

Brent was asked by Major General John J. Pershing, who was in charge of the American Expeditionary Forces, to become the AEF’s senior chaplain and charged him with creating a systematic approach to military chaplaincy. Brent knew Pershing from the Philippines, where he baptized and confirmed the future general.

Among those featured are three Church of England clergy: the Reverend Edward Montgomery Guilford, who served the troops during the First Battle of the Somme, one of the largest and bloodiest battles of the war; rev. Neville Talbot, Senior Chaplain of the 6th Division of the British Expeditionary Force who founded Talbot House in Belgium as a place of Christian respite and hospitality; and the Rev. GA Studdert Kennedy, who helped wounded soldiers during an attack on the German front and later became an author and poet.

Cecil said it’s important to not only feature chaplains from a variety of faiths, but also those who have been affected by war in different ways. “There were chaplains who felt the war strengthened their faith, chaplains who felt they lost their faith because of the war, and chaplains who somehow didn’t know what they were doing,” she said.

The three Anglican chaplains embodied this. Talbot went on to have a historic ministry as Bishop of Pretoria in the Anglican Church of South Africa and later as Assistant Bishop of Southwell in England. Kennedy became a fierce advocate for poor and working people through his work with the pro-labor Industrial Christian Fellowship. Guilford had a different experience.

A field Communion set used by an Anglican chaplain during the First World War is on display in the Sacred Service exhibition. Photo: Melodie Woerman/Episcopal News Service

He saw the troops in his unit suffer heavy losses and lost faith in the church and questioned his faith in God. Despite saying that he was waging an inner war that he had to try and win, he remained a chaplain out of duty and for the sake of his friends.

Many chaplains came out of the war with a new understanding that faith should be accessible to more people, Cecil said. “They wondered what the practice of faith should look like in the world they now live in. How do we help people? How do we recognize that life is hard?”

Some were encouraged to embrace modern, progressive ideas and causes. It also led some to see the need for people of different faiths to work together.

This was the case with Brent. He became an advocate of ecumenical cooperation and helped implement the Faith and Order Movement. He presided over a world conference on Faith and Order in the summer of 1927 in Lausanne, Switzerland, which landed him on the cover of TIME magazine and helped make his name recognized by many Americans outside the Episcopal Church.

For others, it changed the way they saw how the church should respond to the world and especially to people in need. Cecil said the chaplains began to see that the purpose of faith was to help other people. “They asked questions like: What does it mean to be human and how do I live my faith?”

The reverberations of those questions would last for decades.

A priest stole from the archives of the Anglican Diocese of Toronto was found on the ground by a soldier during the Battle of the Somme in France. The chaplain who carried it was probably killed in action. Photo: Melodie Woerman/Episcopal News Service

Father Angelo Roncalli, who served in an Italian medical corps as a stretcher bearer as well as a chaplain, came to see that his calling was to uphold peace and human rights. He worked to save thousands of people during the Holocaust, and in 1958 he became Pope John XXIII. He oversaw major changes in the life of the Roman Catholic church in the Second Vatican Council.

Theologian Paul Tillich served as a Lutheran chaplain in the German army. His testimony of death and suffering caused him to leave behind the notion of a God who makes “all things work out.” He was forced out of Germany by the rise of Nazism and moved to the United States, where his teachings and writings as a systematic theologian sought to bring faith and culture together.

Tillich’s work had a profound influence on the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., particularly his description of sin as separation. King went on to expand this concept to describe the inherently evil nature of the racial segregation that underpinned the Civil Rights movement.

“It’s a direct thread,” Cecil said, not only between Tillich and King, but also between the wartime experience of many of those chaplains and “how they went on to build the world we live in now.”

More than a century after what was known as the Great War, the ministry of chaplains remains a critical part of military life, Rt. Rev. Ann Ritonia, the Episcopal Church’s suffragan bishop for the armed forces and federal ministries, told ENS. “They help ensure that soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines are spiritually prepared to perform their duties and also help them through the trauma of war,” providing both spiritual care and emotional support.

Service members often seek out chaplains for their mental health needs, she said, because they know what they say will be held in confidence. Chaplains also help those they serve build resilience, which can help reduce suicide. Many service members feel isolated, she said, especially those between the ages of 18 and 26.

A field of “Flags of the Forgotten Soldiers” on the front lawn of the National World War I Museum and Memorial for Memorial Day weekend recognizes veterans who die each day by suicide. Photo: National First World War Museum and Memorial

Every Memorial Weekend, the front lawn of the World War I Museum and Memorial is filled with a field of American flags, known as Forgotten Soldiers’ Flags, each representing the approximate number of veterans who kill themselves each week. This year there are 140 flags. Additional information is available in the Veterans Suicide Prevention Annual Report.

Ritonia said he needs more Episcopal chaplains, who serve not only in the U.S. Armed Forces, but also in Veterans Administration medical centers and federal correctional facilities. Episcopalians are especially needed, she said, to provide ministry in an accepting and non-judgmental way to all, and especially to those in the LGBTQ+ community.

Acts of Congress in 2006 and 2014 designated the Kansas City Museum and Memorial as the National World War I Museum and Memorial. Next to it is the Liberty Memorial, a monument to Americans killed during the war, dedicated by President Calvin Coolidge in 1926.

A World War I memorial also stands on the National Mall in Washington, DC, honoring the 4.7 million Americans who served and the more than 116,000 who were killed. It was dedicated in 2021, and later this year a sculpture wall depicting the soldiers’ experiences will be installed.

—Melodie Woerman is a freelance reporter based in Kansas.