From Harvard to Nuremberg: Father Fabian Flynn’s Service as Catholic Chaplain to the 26th Infantry Regiment, 1942–1946

Despite daunting circumstances, including the survival of stomach cancer in 1938, the Passionist priest Fabian Flynn desired to enter the United States Army as a chaplain almost immediately after America’s entry into the Second World War in December 1941. Once he received approval to enlist from his Passionist superiors ten months later, his training began in his hometown at Boston’s Harvard University. Flynn spent six months at an Army Medical Training Center in southwest Texas before joining the First Infantry Division’s 26th Infantry Regiment in the summer of 1943. He served the next four years with them, from Tunisia to Sicily, Italy, France (during the D-Day invasion at Normandy), Belgium, Germany, and Czechoslovakia. Serving at the front lines for many of the U.S. Army’s engagements in Western and Central Europe, Flynn would then face a very different and complex challenge, as the first Catholic chaplain at the International War Crimes Tribunal at Nuremberg. Throughout his service as a U.S. Army chaplain, Flynn strove to provide moral and spiritual leadership on a continent ravaged by war. His triumphs and missteps in pursuing these goals serve as a revealing microcosm of the Catholic Church’s role during the Second World War.