Dwight D. Eisenhower photo

Remarks to Members of the Military Chaplains National Association.

May 09, 1956

IT IS a tremendous pleasure to meet again with so many old friends and to have even this brief contact with representatives of a group that has meant so much to me personally in the work I have had to do in the past, but more especially to the Armed Services of which you have been so important a part.

So it is with real sincerity that I congratulate Charlie Thomas this morning on the honor he has received. It is with real appreciation I thank you, sir [to Chaplain Maurice S. Sheehy] for the very kind, complimentary and over-generous remarks you have made about me.

My understanding, my feeling, about the importance of the Chaplains Corps is so great that it would be difficult indeed to think of the most important of all of those things for a two or three-minute chat with you this morning. I would like to bring my thoughts right down to the present.

We know that America now must remain strong, by which I mean militarily strong, to sustain in the world the concepts on which our civilization is based, the ideas of the dignity of man, of a government based on religious faith. So it seems to me, as long as we have to do that, as long as our young men must respond cheerfully to their military duty, whether it be in the Reserves or the Regulars, and must do it as a national obligation, your task is especially important. It is to bring home to them, to their fathers and mothers, and indeed to the whole world, how much this is truly a crusade, a crusade for decency, not carried out on a militant basis but on one where we stand firmly behind the great concepts found, indeed, in every great religion but more especially, I suppose, in the Sermon on the Mount, by which this Nation has lived and which underlies its founding.

You bring to the men actually in the Service a sense of doing a wonderful thing--that their sacrifices, the performance of their duty, are important. You give them that sense of feeling, because you bring to them the certainty and the constant reminder that man is a spiritual being. You comfort the United States as it realizes that it has a long period of sacrifice ahead of it and giving of its sons and of its treasure and of its might, doing something that does not of itself advance the cause of human progress and human happiness, defending what we have.

This is a very difficult task, to take all of these complex ideas, these purposes, and put them before all of us in their proper perspective. And I can't conceive of anybody better--more equipped--to do this than the Chaplains Corps, both in its Reserves and active formations, because this is indeed a time of trial, when it tries men's spirits, not merely their pocketbooks.

So I think the one thing I would like to say above all else to you this morning is just simply: Thank you, thank you very much--personally, officially and every way I can speak.

Good morning.

Note: The President spoke in the Rose Garden at 9:00 a. m., immediately after presenting to Secretary of the Navy Charles S. Thomas the Association's distinguished service award. Chaplain Maurice S. Sheehy was President of the Association.

Dwight D. Eisenhower, Remarks to Members of the Military Chaplains National Association. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/233152

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