Fr Paul McCourt is a priest of the Diocese of Hexham and Newcastle who has spent a quarter of a century serving as an army chaplain. In this reflection for Remembrance Sunday and Armistice Day, he talks about our remembrance observance as “an annual salute to that innate human instinct to protect peace and all who live by it, to protect life in all of its ages against threat, and to live by principles so hard won in times past.”
I’m Father Paul McCourt. I’m an army chaplain and a priest of the diocese of Hexham and Newcastle.
There’s something particularly special about the morning of the 11 November, the day we call Armistice Day. Here is the day when at the very hour of 11 o’clock, the nation pauses to do something unique and deeply poignant. We stop what we’re doing, we stand still, we fall silent, as did the guns of war when the clock struck eleven on the eleventh day of the eleventh month in 1918.
It’s impossible for us to imagine what the world had gone through in the four bitter years before then, with multiple nations at war with each other, and then the aftermath of rebuilding trust across the globe. What is of note was the immediate desire never to forget the terrible human cost of war on such scale.
The Cenotaph in Whitehall was erected in 1920 to be the main memorial for those who had given everything that we might have what we enjoy today in terms of democracy, freedom, and peace. It was replicated by many local memorials in every parish church, village, town, and city across the nation because there was barely a single corner of the country that had not lost someone from their community such was the scale and reach of loss.
With another world war only 20 years later and lasting for six years, followed by all the campaigns since in defence of world peace or national protection, the time of Remembrance has become the best way we can say a collective ‘thank you’ to so many who have protected and defended world order and our nation.
Therefore, what society does today and on Remembrance Sunday is an annual salute to that innate human instinct to protect peace and all who live by it, to protect life in all of its ages against threat, and to live by principles so hard won in times past.
For all this and more, we say thank you to them and to God.
Fr Paul McCourt is a priest of the Diocese of Hexham and Newcastle, ordained in 1990 after studies at St Cuthbert’s College, Ushaw. After 10 years of parish ministry, he was approached to take up a part-time appointment with the Army as a Chaplain to Durham Army Cadet Force, before transferring as a Reserve Chaplain to a Field Hospital Unit in 2003 where he remained until 2013, completing a tour of Afghanistan in 2012.
A year with an infantry regiment led him to being appointed to a full-time position as a regular Army Chaplain in 2014, leaving the parish priesthood and the diocese that had been home for 24 years. He moved to Colchester to the Army’s specialist Air Assault Brigade, before taking up the role of Catholic Chaplain to the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst in December 2016. By 2018 a return to the Infantry preceded his current appointment with the Cavalry Regiment, The Light Dragoons and Operation Newcombe in Mali.
Forces Chaplains serve in the Royal Navy, British Army and the Royal Air Force in military communities on land, on ships and on submarines. The life of the military chaplain is hugely varied and deeply rewarding. As in the parish, chaplains spend their days providing for the spiritual, sacramental and pastoral needs of our Catholic people – in this case Service Personnel and their families (known as ‘dependents’ in military-speak). A number of fascinating aspects of military service, however, feel very different to day-to-day life in a parish and this provides the chaplain with unique experiences.
More about chaplaincy in the Army.
More about chaplaincy in the Royal Navy
More about chaplaincy in the Royal Air Force
More about becoming a chaplain.
Sources: Diocese of Hexham and Newcastle / Bishopric of the Forces
