Sure, 'tis like a morn in Spring...

Nick Coleman on Maj. Gen. Patrick J. Hessian:

"When anyone dies, we want our families around us," he told me a few years ago, after celebrating his 50th anniversary of his ordination in 1953.

"But when you have an 18-year-old kid, thousands of miles from home and he'd like to see his mother but there's nobody. ... I tried to be the local parish priest for those kids. Their eyes are just pleading with you: 'Help me, help me.' It was awful."

"But I had to be there."
...
Hessian rose through the ranks of Army and church, becoming a monsignor and a major general. From 1982 to 1986, when he retired, he was the Army's chief of chaplains.

"We just revered him," said one of his subordinate chaplains, Howie Krienke, a retired colonel who is associate pastor of Zion Lutheran Church in Hopkins. "Hessian was plain and ordinary in the way he acted, but he was an icon. We stood in awe of him. He didn't care if you were Lutheran or a rabbi or Muslim. He treated us all fairly, and honored and respected our traditions."

"He looked the part," said Brig. Gen. Douglas Lee, an Army chaplain of the Presbyterian persuasion who also served under Hessian and attended his funeral. "He was handsome and tall and looked distinguished. More than that, he kept the faith and kept the focus on spirituality, especially in times of chaos and war. He brought the soldiers to God, and God to the soldiers."

Hessian's authority over 3,000 chaplains of all faiths was hard to explain when he met with the top officer in his other line of command, Pope John Paul II. They had a private audience at the Vatican in 1986 and discovered they had something in common: Each had been wounded (the pope was shot in an assassination attempt). After swapping their stories, the pope asked the chaplain how a priest could be the boss of Protestants and Jews.

Hessian reminded the pope of the story of the Roman centurion in Matthew: "I, too, am a man of authority with soldiers under me."

Then, tapping the stars on his uniform, he said, "You see these two stars? That means I'm in charge."Here I am, a guy from Minnesota, quoting scripture to the pope," he told me once. "I really enjoyed that."

Yesterday, as they carried Monsignor and Maj. Gen. Patrick J. Hessian out of Our Lady of the Prairie, they stopped to cover his plain pine coffin in an American flag in front of a statue of St. Patrick.

The statue came from Belle Plaine's old Irish Church, Sacred Heart, which was razed when the Irish and German congregations combined. Hessian grew up in Sacred Heart parish, and remained close to Belle Plaine. Thursday, it was noted that his funeral was scheduled at his regular Thursday tee time at Belle Plaine's Valley View Golf Club: 11 a.m.

This "Hessian," by the way, was as Irish as a Murphy or O'Halloran. As they carried him out of the church, the organist struck up a familiar tune: "When Irish Eyes Are Smiling."

I think the toughest kid on West Seventh would've really enjoyed that.