Father John Beyenka was one of about 100 priests from the Archdiocese of Chicago who served as military chaplains during World War II. He enlisted in 1943 and was appointed a first lieutenant and a chaplain. He went to basic training in Louisiana and Texas, and then was assigned to the newly formed 351st Infantry Regiment, 88th Infantry Division of the Fifth Army.

He was with the regiment’s roughly 2,500 men through training and on the three-week sea voyage to North Africa and across the Mediterranean into Italy.

Along the way, he offered spiritual counseling and the sacraments, celebrated Mass, organized sports and entertainment for the men, censored mail and helped carry the wounded and the dead from the battlefield.

His story is told in an online exhibit created by the Archdiocese of Chicago’s Joseph Cardinal Bernardin Archives and Records Center.

Beyenka wrote letters to the families of the fallen, and to the families who simply wanted reassurance as to the well-being of their sons and husbands, according to processing archivist Charles Heinrich, who created the exhibit.

“Sometimes they are just letters to say so-and-so is OK,” Heinrich said. “Or, ‘Your son got demoted, but it’ll be OK. He said something he shouldn’t to his superior.’”

If he was writing about a soldier’s death, Beyenka might tell his family that their loved one received last rites, or, if he could, something about the manner of the soldier’s death, that it was quick and he didn’t suffer.

“These were all typed, but I was surprised that how many of them seem to be almost copy and pasted,” Heinrich said.

One that was not was to the wife of his commanding officer, Lt. Col. Raymond Kendall, who “basically sat on a grenade” to save his men. Kendall was posthumously awarded the Distinguished Service Cross.

Kendall was killed during the three-day battle for Santa Maria Infante in May 1944, part of the Fifth Army’s drive toward Rome. It was the first real action the 351st Regiment saw. In information shared with a Chicago newspaper, Beyenka told of comforting a wounded French North African soldier, only to learn that he was Muslim. Each man said their own prayers, he said, next to each other.

In early June, Beyenka wrote to his family: “I could tell you so much about what I’ve been through. I prefer to forget.”

The campaign that eventually saw the German army in Italy surrender did not end until April 1945; at that time, Beyenka made a personal note:

Killed in Action: 854

Missing or Captured: 613

Wounded in Action: 3159

One of Beyenka’s claims to fame is that he is possibly the first Catholic priest to enter Rome with the Allied forces, according to a Chicago newspaper clipping, and he was able to meet the pope and celebrate Mass at the Vatican.

His story is laid out in a photo exhibit posted online by the Archdiocese of Chicago Archives and Records Center, which received Beyenka’s papers and other artifacts from his nephew, Father Michael Meany, in 2000, two years after Beyenka’s death.

Meany, who held his uncle’s power of attorney before he died, didn’t know how much Beyenka had kept.

“It was all in the tub at St. Monica,” the last parish Beyenka pastored, Meany said. When Beyenka moved into a nursing home in 1993, Meany brought the boxes to St. Clotilde Parish, where he was assigned, and then in 1999 to St. Damian in Oak Forest, when he became pastor there.

“You can see at that point I was concerned about something getting lost after storing it in so many locations,” Meany said.

After making the donation, Meany didn’t hear anything about it for some time.

Heinrich began working on the Beyenka collection in earnest in 2020, during the COVID-19 shutdown, he said. In the boxes of documents, he found leather-bound scrapbooks filled with snapshots Beyenka took, showing everything from his tent chapel to a view of St. Peter’s to boxing matches that he organized.

Artifacts include his decorations, including a Bronze Star, army insignia, as well as a military-issued chalice, missal stand and holy water vial.

There were also hundreds of letters to the families of service members and, neatly typed and collected in leather binders, the letters he wrote to his own family every day that he could.

“He kept very neat and organized records,” Heinrich said. “And he kept a lot of things from his time as a chaplain in World War II. The core of his archive is the World War II material.”

Beyenka remained on active duty in Italy past the end of the war, until he finally was discharged in 1946. He wrote often of being lonely during the closing months of his service; hardly any of the men he had trained and shipped over with remained.

When he returned to the Archdiocese of Chicago, he was given “easy duty” for a time, serving at St. Edmund Parish in Oak Park. Meany said family members remember that his uncle was at times moody and withdrawn, likely suffering from what is now known as post-traumatic stress disorder.

With the passage of time, however, he became “a man of unique understanding, compassion, and dedication,” according to the online exhibit. “Father Beyenka’s wartime experiences molded his priesthood deeply. He would drop what he was doing to visit parishioners sick in the hospital, and personally reached out to those in grief or sorrow. He further organized archdiocesan remembrance masses for firefighters killed in the line of duty.”

“I think it made him a great priest,” Meany said. “When he came back, he was much more open.”

Heinrich said the Archives and Records Center welcomes donations of the papers of any archdiocesan priest, including their writings, homilies and personal correspondence.

“We put them to good use,” Heinrich said. “We make exhibits out of them, like this one about Father Beyenka, or we can write articles about them.”

To learn more, he suggested that priests or their survivors contact the director of the center, Meg Hall, by email at [email protected].

Visit the online exhibit at archives.archchicago.org/photo-exhibit/fr-john-beyenka.