Wherever he goes, Eucharist is home for Delaware Guard Chaplain

Posted in: January 2005
By Jane Harriman, Staff reporter
Jan 11, 2005 - 7:11:28 AM

MILFORD -- Father George Brubaker is a man of many ministries, ones that lead beyond the rectory and into worlds and experiences unknown by the average priest.

His work has taken him to Catholic Relief Services projects in Africa and Central America, from refugee camps in Rwanda to combat areas of Kuwait, and from a military hospital in Germany to the U.S. air base in Kyrgyzstan.

But no matter how foreign the location, Father Brubaker brings with him the home of all Catholics, the Eucharist.

No doubts about faith

Like many priests, George Brubaker began to test his vocation as a small boy playing at a make believe altar on the front porch of his parents' house. He was born in 1947 in Ventnor, N.J., an oceanfront town near Atlantic City, where his parents worked for the Du Pont Co. exhibit on the boardwalk.

His mother, a Catholic, made sure he and his two sisters were raised in the church; their father, Amos Brubaker, a Mennonite originally from Lancaster, Pa. helped. "He didn't talk about his Mennonite background very often," says Father Brubaker. "He would test us on our catechism questions, though. I'm sure my mother put him up to that, but he did it. I think he enjoyed what we were learning and was very strict about it."

In 1955, Du Pont closed its boardwalk exhibit and transferred the Brubakers to Wilmington; George entered Christ Our King School.

"I think I had some sense of wanting to be a priest when I was at Christ Our King," he says. He went to meetings with Msgr. Paul Taggart, then vocation director for the diocese. "The meetings were fun and did help my resolve, mostly because there were other boys from my neighborhood who were going to the meetings and were thinking about the seminary."

With many of those same boys, he attended St. Charles High School seminary in Catonsville, Md., and then entered St. Mary's Seminary in Baltimore. He left the college seminary after three years and transferred to Duquesne University in Pittsburgh for his senior year.

His doubts, he says today, were not about the faith.

"I did stop going to church for a while, but when things were not going well for me, I realized that I needed to pay attention to my faith-life and not take it for granted. Any doubts I had were about me, not about God. I didn't want to continue on and become a priest [only] because I couldn't do anything else."

During his seven years away from the seminary one of his jobs was for Delaware's Division of Adult Corrections as a probation/parole officer. As he met with each of the 1,000 or so convicts in his caseload, he began to see that many who have been in jail "have no sense of [their own] value. What they really need is a priest."

The renewed realization that an individual's dignity and sense of self-value comes in relationship to God was, he says, one of the experiences that kept him thinking about the priesthood. He returned to St. Mary's, completed graduate studies in theology and was ordained in Wilmington in 1980.

'Absorbs everything'

Today, Father Brubaker, 57, has been pastor of St. John the Apostle in Milford and St. Bernadette in Harrington since 1997.

"He really does care about the person -- it is so apparent one-on-one," says Dr. Andrew Riddle, a chiropractor who is executive officer of the parish council. "Father George is a true academic -- he is brilliant. He has a wealth of historical, theological, canonical and cultural information and he absorbs everything." Meeting Father Brubaker, Riddle says, convinced him and his wife to stay in Sussex County when they were contemplating a move to Texas a few years ago. "He's a wonderful comforter of souls. My soul has been refreshed. He's one of the biggest reasons we decided to stay here."

When Father Brubaker was a deacon, a priest asked if he'd be interested in studying canon law. Three years after his ordination, while he was associate pastor at St. John/Holy Angels in Newark, he was appointed to the diocesan tribunal (church court), where he served until 1989. After earning a degree in canon law from Catholic University of America in Washington, he returned to become a full-time judge in the tribunal.

Today he is Judicial Vicar, the chief judge. While the tribunal is associated with marriage annulments, it can adjudicate any case under canon law. It might, for example, prepare documents for the Holy See in a case of clergy laicization, mediate disputes about diocesan employment if the employee sought resolution under church law, or settle disputes about property within the diocese.

Lt. Col. Brubaker

While at St. John's/Holy Angels, parishioners who were members of the Delaware Air National Guard asked him to consider becoming a chaplain. Today, in his 20th year as a guard chaplain, he is a lieutenant colonel who does not have to retire until age 67.

Chaplains have no weapons training and carry no weapons. If a chaplain comes under fire, his survival depends on his armed assistant, Father Brubaker says. But chaplains see their share of wounds and devastation, which Father Brubaker witnessed as recently as last summer, during his service in support of the war in Iraq.

"The first patient I saw at Landstuhl Army Hospital [in Germany] was a Catholic priest who had a very bad head wound and was in a coma," he recalled. "I took his hand and prayed with him, and he did react a little to my touch."

Father Brubaker reflected on the impact such experiences have on him. "I think I process death and the wounded through prayer; at least that's what I do when I encounter them. I try to bring them with me to the Lord in my mind and heart. That's all I can do, but I do think it helps me process the emotions."

His first overseas deployment was 10 years ago, to Rwanda, where the genocidal civil war was taking more than a million lives. After that he was called for what he describes as "my Bob Hope Christmas tour," when he traveled by train and stayed in hotels across France and Italy while visiting air bases from which U.S. planes departed for missions over Bosnia.

The chaplain is free to mingle among the servicemen and women, "a visible reminder of the holy," the priest says. "He is a kind of moral barometer for the commander; if there are problems, you're a quick way for the commander to know." Chaplains deal with personal problems, including those of service people who cannot handle the combat experience and who are being considered for discharge.

In 1996 in Kuwait for three months, Father Brubaker says, he was the only Catholic chaplain in the country. "After all the Air Force Masses, the Army would come to take me to say Masses for them."

Speaking to the Lord

Father Brubaker does not find it difficult to stay focused on the Mass, no matter how many he needs to celebrate in a day.

"I think I could say Masses all day long because I enjoy it very much," he says. "When I say Mass I am speaking directly to the Lord on behalf of the assembly. I am speaking for them and I know they are relying on my intercession. That's enough to keep me centered."

He takes care not to speak the words carelessly or too fast to understand, he says. "I always thought I could at least say the words with a little meaning and that people deserved that. The words are really wonderful when they're spoken carefully. That's what I try to do."

Reprinted with permission of The Dialog, newspaper of the Catholic Diocese of Wilmington.