By Father Garrett Braun
From Fields Afar
An undercurrent and constant of everything that happens on the military base is the rank that everyone wears on their uniform. In conjunction with your occupational badge, rank is an immediate indicator of your expertise, longevity and pay grade (salary). Rank determines how you address others and where you sit at a staff meeting. There is also a sort of class divide between the enlisted and officer corps — with enlisted accomplishing the mission and officers directing or commanding that mission. Officers receive a “commission,” which reflects their supervisory authority but could also reflect a highly-specialized skillset, such as for pilots, doctors, lawyers or chaplains. Within the law few months, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth announced a directive for Chaplains to remove their rank in their utility uniforms.
Typically, “pulling rank” means that people have to do you what you say (because you outrank them). In this case, “pulling rank” meant the instruction to literally pull the rank off our uniform. But why? To be fair, it was not just a removal of rank but a refocusing on the purpose of that rank, which we do still have. We are still officers. However, the aforementioned “occupational badge,” which for a Christian Chaplain (Catholic or Protestant) is a Cross, was moved from its normal location to replace the rank altogether. Before the switch, the officer rank was in a more prominent position than the Cross. It meant that an airman would immediately notice you were an officer, but only secondarily might they also see you are a Chaplain … if they looked carefully. Now, they immediately see the cross in the prominent position, and the rank becomes an afterthought. The idea is to emphasize the Chaplain’s unique status as clergy-person and spiritual caregiver over the authority that sometimes comes with their rank as officer. Furthermore, even though everyone is aware that officers are chaplains, it “flattens” that rank — I could be a lowly Captain Chaplain (the rank I currently hold), or I could be an O-6, a full bird Colonel, and still be identified only by my Cross.
How important is status in your life? Are you white-collar or blue-collar? A person of means or of meagerness? Do you identify yourself by your successes or fall into the trap of believing your sins are the final word? Galatians 3:28 says, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free person, there is not male and female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” Rank, status, wealth, successes or failures do not define us. Or rather, they are temporary identifiers that do not endure. Rather, we are called to belong to Christ and to him crucified and raised from the dead. Since we bear the name of Christian, we are called to make this central in our lives.
Father Garrett Braun is currently on a temporary release to the Archdiocese for the Military Services to fulfill his five-year minimum commitment as an active duty chaplain in the United States Air Force. He will share monthly reflections through this column. He can be reached at gbraun@evdio.org.