THE PADRE'S HOUR
By T. E. JESSO.P
PADRES who, like the bulk of our people civilian at heart, have joined the Army for the " duration," have often been dis- appointed in their new sphere. The eager hopes that prompted them to volunteer have very commonly been found to outrun the feasibilities of the camps. True, when 'they have crossed the seas and gone into action with their untender flocks, the sense of worthwhileness has been born and fed to the full—with many of them for a short time only, for the casualties in the Chaplains' Department have been higher, proportionally, than in any other branch of the Army. But at home a sense of frustration has been frequent. One reason is the fewness of their numbers in relation to the men they have .to serve. Partly because of the needs, or supposed needs, of the civilian churches, their increase has not kept pace with the phenomenal increase of the units. What this has meant in practice is best indicated by an illustration : to work through a single padre's arza I once had ,to give two to three addresses a day for five days, the area being more than sixty miles long. This was two years ago, and the many chaplains since sent abroad have not all been replaced.
The chief reason of the sense of frustration, however, has been the difference between the work that the chaplains had hoped to do and the work that they discovered they had to do. Apart from - the parade-services their time was largely taken up with the odds end ends of welfare work—arranging entertainments, begging books and wireless sets and sports tackle, showing men how to fill in forms, helping them with problems of pay, discharge, separation proceedings and so on. All this was necessary and excellent work, of course, and no chaplain wanted to be rid of it entirely ; it was the engrossment in it, the tyranny of it, that irked. After all, it was not the sort of thing for which they had undergone their priestly or ministerial training. They were specialists, and it was to do a specialist's job that they had jailed up. They were there to keep or make men religious, so far as the men would let them, and the platform of the weekly parade:service was not big enough for so big a task. They wanted larger mid-week opportunities for getting at the men who did not come to them spontaneously.
The Padre's Hour has met their need. It was started in a division well over a year ago, and has since spread widely. It is not universal, and is not in the strict sense imposed on the units, though it is on the men ; it is a regular hour, at best weekly, but inevitably suWect to training and operational requirements, which, at the insti- gation of the Chaplain-General, certain G.O.C.'s have strongly recommended commanding officers to allot within training hours to the padre, to be used by him as he pleases. I know some padres who are conducting twenty a week, and a few thirty, which amounts almost to heroism. Usually officers are not present, so that an informal atmosphere is possible.
But it was to meet the men's needs, not the chaplains', that the Hour was introduced. Not only the recent magni- ficent sweeps across North Africa, through Sicily, and into Italy, and the earlier conquest of all Italian East Africa, but also the testing retreats they had to make in our days of weak- ness, prove that the men are as fine a body of soldiers as the British Army ever had. But outside their military concerns there is a mental trouble ; they are not as happy as men ought to be, even in in imperfect world. Many of them are bothered, some are apathetic, and a minority are bitter. They feel themselves to be the victim of baleful forces beyond their understanding and control— except some of the bitter, who know by inspiration of Marx, without the labour of study, that every evil is due to an economic system called capitalism. That is, of course, natural, since the world is topsy-turvy ; but the world is certainly not altogether unintelligible, and in order both to bring the fun back into the lives . of the men and to fit them to help in the righting of things when they return home, a concerted effort is required to make plain to them whatever can be made plain about the causes and conditions of human stability and instability. Their education, in the wide sense of both schooling and social conditioning, has not prepared them for this historic crisis—which is one of the reasons why the crisis has come.
Their education has given them neither a knowledge of the affairs of the world nor a philosophy of life. The first of these wants has been met since 1940 by the Army Education Corps, the Army Directorate of Education, the Army Bureau of Current Affairs, and the Universities (every one of which is daily sending speakers to the camps). The cumulative result of this educational venture will be less an amassing of information, since the conditions are not favour- able for study, than an awareness that more knowledge is required for democratic citizenship than the daily newspaper provides, and higher standards of thinking in political discussion than bars and drawing-rooms have so far exemplified. The follow-up of this spade-work after demobilisation will be the duty and opportunity of the various bodies concerned with Adult Education.
The challenge to seek, and the help to find, a philosophy of life comes appropriately from the chaplains. Their preaching, however. as they are painfully aware, is not adequate, for at least two reasons: firstly, the distinctive language and ideas of religion have no meaning for the now large body of men who have grown up without contact with the churches, and, secondly, in the pulpit the preacher can neither be asked questions nor be answered back. The Padre's Hour' supplies the needed complement. Here the chaplain is facing the men on their own level, struggling with their problems, inviting their questions and criticisms, and speaking with a concreteness and bluntness which the sermon, being part of a service of worship, scarcely allows. There is the knock-about of argument, a frank exchange of rebukes, a mutuality of contribution, a straight con- frontation of men with men. If ever there was a time for plain speaking, for the destruction on all sides of the humbug with which modern propaganda has fouled public controversy, it is now, and in the Padre's Hour the destruction has begun.
The effect on the men now accustomed to the Hour has been encouraging. Their essential decency and fairness have been brought out. After initial hesitation and suspicion and the trotting out of the silliest of the objections to religion, they have dropped mere heckling and got down to the business of serious discussion. Many of them have come to see that, whatever may be the difficulties of the Christian creed and however imperfect the churches and their members may be, Christianity is a meeting of very real problems which this age has done its best to overlook, the problems of the moral and spiritual advancement that can alone prevent the collapse of the elaborate, interlocking, world-wide institutions now required to sustain our lives. Christianity is more than that, but it is a step forward to see it as at least that. As for the chaplains, they feel that the Padre's Hour has put them on their mettle, re-evoked for,gotten scholarship, and brought them into a virile fellowship which they hope to introduce eventually into their own churches
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