In a gesture of ecumenical sharing offered on the eve of Veterans Day, Br. Sixtus Roslevich delivered the 2022 Roswell S. Bosworth Jr. Lecture at St. Michael’s Episcopal Church in nearby Bristol, Rhode Island. Given on November 10, the talk was entitled, “Do the ‘Warrior Saints’ Violate the Commandment Not to Kill?” The talk was prompted by the four stained-glass windows in the Servicemen’s Chapel at the historic 1861 church edifice on the corner Hope and Church Streets in downtown Bristol.
 

Sts. Richard and Godfrey

Abbot Michael received the initial invitation to the Bristol parish from W. DeWolf Fulton, who was hoping to locate a monk who might be able to “trace the history behind the Abbey designers” of those four windows, “a magnificent and colorful collection, including the St. Michael Tiffany over the altar.” Br. Sixtus took up the challenge, engaging in several months of research to discover any possible connection between the four windows and the monks at Portsmouth. During his labors, he had the opportunity to visit St. Michael’s to see the historic church and its windows, and also was invited to tour the1810 Federal-style Linden Place, now a historic house museum designed by architect Russell Warren and built by the DeWolf Family. The visit elicited further, more theological, questions from Fulton: “How do we reconcile the veneration with which we sanctify our warrior saints who made it their profession to violate our commandment? What are the redeeming elements these saints embraced to elevate their status to sainthood?”

Br. Sixtus opened the gathering by expressing his love for the historic town of Bristol and its impressive honor of being the site of the oldest Independence Day parade in the United States, He then offered a bit of unrelated research. While it had little to do with windows, it elicited an intriguing Bristol-Portsmouth connection. In a copy of the 1957 Portsmouth Priory School yearbook, he had discovered a fictitious Class Calendar, created by a Sixth Former who was later to become a monk (Dom Luke Childs). For January 14, 1957, Childs wrote, “Newport and Providence put off bounds, leaving only exotic Bristol to Priory devastation.” “What had those Portsmouth boys been doing,” Br. Sixtus asked, “to get banned from both Newport and Providence, mid-winter 65 years ago?”

Moving from the ridiculous to the sublime, Sixtus discussed several case studies of military men who were later in life, either officially or unofficially, deemed worthy of sainthood, despite formative years in the military as soldiers or crusaders. One prime example was St. Martin of Tours, venerated by the Catholic Church, the Church of England and the Episcopal Church. His feast day coincides with Veterans Day. The 80 years of his lifetime spanned the 4th century (317-397) and included early service as a soldier in the Roman army. His name, ironically, derives from Mars, the Roman god of war. Announcing his military resignation to Caesar, he is said to have proclaimed, “Hitherto I have served you as a soldier. Allow me now to become a soldier to God.” A powerful legend involves Martin cutting in half his military cloak, offering it to a beggar. He later realizes it was Christ Himself, who appears to him in a dream, wearing Martin’s half-cloak and speaking the words of Matthew 25, “I was naked, and you clothed me.”

Inspired by the Mass reading of Ephesians 6 for Martin’s feast, Br. Sixtus turned to its militaristic imagery for faith: armor, belt, breastplate, shield, flaming arrows, helmet, sword and chains. The passage reminded him of a 1910 book given to him on his tenth birthday by Rev. Robert E. Burnett, the young parish priest who taught him how to pray and serve the pre-Vatican II Latin Mass when he was seven years old. Br. Sixtus held up the classic, The Young Man’s Guide: Counsels, Reflections, and Prayers for Catholic Young Men, at the lectern, noting that the first part of the extensive table of contents is called “Panoply of War,” a historical and literary word which means “a suit of armor,” echoing the Ephesians’ images of battle and warfare. Quoting a recent church talk of Abbot Michael, he also added a monastic note, that the early Egyptian communities, which may have numbered well over 1,000 monks, “weren’t very solitary. But they needed to be organized… (therefore) early monasteries were modeled after military camps.”

The four personages depicted in the individual “warrior saint” windows at St. Michael’s are St. Michael the Archangel, St. George, King Richard I the Lionheart, and St. Godfrey de Bouillon. Although it is agreed that all four were indeed warriors, “whether or not they are universally known and accepted as ‘official’ saints remains open to debate,” he said, noting further, “My mother was never canonized by a pope but, in my book, she was a saint.” He interjected a side note about “another female saint, besides my mother,” offering details of the life and martyrdom of Joan of Arc, proving that the canon of ‘warrior saints’ does include women.

In addressing the provenance of the window designs in question, he informed the group that no evidence has yet been identified to connect monks of Portsmouth with the design or fabrication of the windows. “This is not to say that such records do not exist in our archives,” but that, “those records have simply not surfaced yet.” He added that the prospect seems unlikely: “My personal thoughts are that once the first dormitory at Portsmouth was completed in 1930 in a very traditional New England ivy-league brick-and-stone style of architecture, the monks at the time decided to never look back, only forward to a more modern aesthetic. It’s not that they had made a mistake in the design of St. Benet’s, but that they decided it was not the direction in which they wanted the monastery and the school to go. As much as I adore your four windows which are post-1945, I don’t see their design and style and coloration as having come from the modern-minded monks of that post-war period.”

Sts. Michael and George

Br. Sixtus brought his remarks to a conclusion by quoting Pope Paul VI, who spoke on October 4, 1965, at the United Nations in New York, “speaking of war during a war.” Pope Paul said (in French, the language of diplomacy): “These are the words you are looking for us to say and the words we cannot utter without feeling aware of their seriousness and solemnity: never again one against the other, never, never again.” That is the Vatican’s official English translation. The French phrase: Jamais plus la guerre! Jamais plus la guerre! The more popular and well-known spirit of the translation is, “No more war! War no more!” The pope went on to say, “Listen to the clear words of a great man who is no longer with us, John Kennedy, who proclaimed four years ago: ‘Mankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind.’” President Kennedy had been assassinated less than two years earlier.