CHAPLAINS UPDATE

WINTER 2022

Photo: Cardinal Dolan with chaplains Fr. Damian Eketi, Fr. Stephen Okele, and Fr. Akram Javid at the 2021 ArchCare fund-raising gala.

FAITH RESPONDERS

IN TIMES OF CRISIS, we rely on first responders for our safety and health, and sometimes for our survival. In the face of natural disasters, acts of violence, and raging illness, men and women who devote their careers to service put their welfare on the line for us. We honor them.

Standing among them, less visible and less recognized, are the faith responders: the chaplains and ordained religious who work to meet the spiritual needs of firefighters, police officers, EMTs, and hospital workers and patients. Catholic chaplains bring the presence of Jesus to the hospital or nursing home, to the precinct or station house, to the sickbed, the crime scene, the funeral Mass. They, too, frequently put themselves at risk in service to others.
 

IN ORDINARY TIMES, there are joyful occasions on a chaplain’s calendar – graduations, promotions, births, christenings – to offset moments of grief and loss. But the onset of Covid-19 in early 2020 brought an abrupt change to the nature of chaplaincy in New York. Most in-person events were canceled; not just the graduations, but even funerals. Access to hospitals was denied to police and fire department chaplains.

“We were under order,” recalls NYPD chaplain Msgr. Robert Romano. “Not only was it ordered by the police department for fear that we would get sick – the hospitals and the nursing homes were not open to us. We had a chief who died of Covid – he was in the hospital for weeks – and I couldn’t go.”

NYPD chaplain Msgr. Robert Romano in department uniform.

At the FDNY, the chaplains’ experience was similar. “Our EMTs were entering the apartments of highly contagious patients multiple times every day and taking them to the hospitals,” says Msgr. Marc Filacchione, a chaplain for the FDNY as well as director of Propagation of the Faith for the Archdiocese of New York. “But if those same EMTs ended up in the hospital, we couldn’t visit them. And the same went for the firefighters.”

Particularly heartbreaking, for both the FDNY and the NYPD, was the predicament of those suffering from 9/11-related illnesses. “Everybody with 9/11 disease was automatically on the vulnerable list for Covid,” Msgr. Romano says. In many of these cases, “The virus coming into their system was the death knell. We lost a lot of people.”
 

THE CHALLENGES WERE DIFFERENT for the hospital and nursing home chaplains of ArchCare. Unlike their uniformed counterparts, they did have access to hospitals and nursing homes – but with significant restrictions. Many worked in quarantine for weeks.

Fr. Jonah Pollock belongs to a community of Dominican chaplains who serve in a number of Manhattan hospitals. “Our ministry changed dramatically,” he recalls. One priest moved in to the Mary Manning Walsh Home, remaining within the grounds for months in order to care safely for residents. Three others, including Fr. Pollock, lived in isolation at their East Side priory, distanced from each other, taking meals separately, and making daily trips to the hospitals. “For several months,” Fr. Pollock says, “we routinely donned personal protective equipment that covered almost all of our bodies in order to enter hospital rooms. . . . We administered the sacrament of the anointing of the sick using plastic gloves and cotton balls.”

Sr. Jo-Ann Faillace, OP, a chaplain with ArchCare at Home, a certified home health service.

In-person visits were eliminated altogether for Sr. Jo-Anne Faillace, OP, a Dominican Sister of Blauvelt who serves as a chaplain with ArchCare at Home, which provides health care to seniors at home. When in-person visits became unsafe, she switched to providing pastoral care by phone. “It worked better than I expected,” she says. “Being with patients and families is more deeply healing, but I understand the importance of safety.”
 

AS PANDEMIC-RELATED RESTRICTIONS have lifted, chaplaincy programs are evolving toward a new set of routines. First, there were the memorial services. “When things opened up and we got our shots, we started encountering a big flow of memorials for people who didn’t have funerals. Every day we were going to memorial services,” Msgr. Romano recalls. “It was kind of tough.”

NYPD and FDNY chaplains are once again participating at graduations and other events, but there is a heightened need for caution. “At most of the things that we attend, we have to wear masks,” says Msgr. Romano. “And you have to have a shot to go into a building.”

In the hospitals, pandemic restrictions linger: mandatory mask-wearing, the absence of volunteers (including extraordinary ministers of Holy Communion), restrictions on visitors. Attendance remains sparse at Masses in hospital chapels. With new variants on the horizon, these effects are unlikely to disappear anytime soon.

On the bright side, some technological innovations necessitated by the health crisis are being adopted permanently as tools to enhance the impact of chaplaincy. Just as the widespread use of telehealth seems poised to transform the health-care industry, the use of teleconferencing and Zoom calls to bring prayer and spiritual counsel to patients, connect them with family, and create networks of support among caregivers and even chaplains has proven to have benefits beyond the prevention of viral spread.
 

MANY CHAPLAINS ALSO FEEL the pandemic has led to deepened relationships with the people they serve. “I think the chaplains have become more of a user-friendly organization,” Msgr. Romano says. “It happened during and after 9/11, and more so with Covid. People became more aware of us. In the past, people were afraid of the chaplains. Now they want to come and talk to us.”

Fr. John Anderson, vice president of mission integration for ArchCare – and a chaplain himself – has noticed a similar breakthrough in the dialogue between chaplains and health-care workers. “Since Covid-19, chaplains have joined meaningful conversations with their health-care colleagues,” he says. “That is good news and a reason for hope, because all of us have discovered things about ourselves – strengths, new or dormant skills, fresh capacities for patience and trust – that we will take forward into our post-Covid lives. Recognizing and giving God thanks for these discoveries is at the heart of our Catholic tradition of finding new life through our suffering.”