Army Capt. Jeffrey Paveglio hadn’t taken a shower in a month, and his sweatstained uniform was stiff with dirt. Practicing battle scenarios with his men in the heat of the Mojave Desert outside Fort Irwin, California, he was tired, he was uncomfortable and thoroughly sick of eating MREs. He was, in other words, living his childhood dream.

Growing up in New Hampshire, Paveglio had wanted to serve in the military from a young age. He achieved that goal, joining the National Guard at 17 and entering ROTC at the University of New Hampshire the next year. He would go on to be commissioned as an Army officer, take part in combat training and be deployed around the world.

But there is one aspect of his military service that young Jeffrey did not foresee.

“He would be like, ‘Wait, you’re what? You’re a priest?’” laughs Army chaplain Father Paveglio, imagining his teenaged bafflement if he had somehow been shown his future career.

At 17 years old, the future Father Paveglio barely knew what a priest was. His family did not go to church, and though baptized, he had never been catechized. It wasn’t until college that he found faith and received his first Communion and confirmation. And then, even as he trained and drilled and prepared for his commission as an Army officer, he began to suspect that God was preparing him for something different — or rather, not different, but more.

Paveglio felt called to the priesthood, but at the same time, he sensed that his affinity for the military was part of his vocation, not separate from it.

“It’s a call within a call. Within the call to priesthood, there are many ways of living the priesthood and using the gifts that God has given to the individual priests,” he explained. “Military chaplaincy is one call like that.”

Commissioned as an officer after graduation, Paveglio was designated a “chaplain candidate” throughout his seminary studies for the Diocese of Manchester. Once ordained, he served as a chaplain in the National Guard for six years before his bishop gave him permission to transition to active duty in 2020. Now his job, as the Army’s Catholic chaplain recruiter, is to find more men who feel that call and help them answer it.

A Willingness to Get Your Hands Dirty

Nowhere is it easy to be a priest. But many of the challenges facing parishes apply as much, if not more, to military chaplains, particularly the shortage of priests. There are only 80 active-duty Catholic Army chaplains to serve approximately 300,000 Catholic soldiers and family members around the world.

“We’re stretched thin,” Father Paveglio said. “There are a lot of Catholics that go without the sacraments pretty regularly because they don’t have a priest to minister to them.”

On top of that challenge are others specific to military service. For example, a chaplain is always balancing his responsibilities to the Catholic community of a military installation — which includes spouses, children and more — and his responsibilities to his commander and the members of his unit, both Catholic and non-Catholic.

“I can’t drop the ball with my unit to take care of the Catholics (on base) and vice versa. So that means I’m going to have to work harder,” Father Paveglio explained.

And there are the physical challenges. Father Paveglio has found that keeping up with fellow soldiers is essential to serving and leading them.

“We’re out in the field. If they’re getting rained on, we get wet as well,” Father Paveglio said. “You have to be willing to get your hands dirty. … When they see the chaplain out there, and he’s just as dirty as them, but he’s still joyful — that inspires.” A Missionary Spirit In some ways, being that joyful witness to Catholics and non-Catholics alike is the core of military chaplaincy. A chaplain is working in a mission field, Father Paveglio emphasized, and “having a missionary heart, a missionary spirit, is huge.”

Not only is a military chaplain interacting constantly with non-Catholics, but he is also working with many men and women grappling with big-picture questions about their lives.

“When you’re faced with hardship, with real challenges, with the possibility of death, soldiers will either turn to God, or they may turn to other things that are not so helpful. But often they turn to God. So as a chaplain, I help them to navigate that,” Father Paveglio said.

He recalled his first duty assignment as an active-duty chaplain, with 1st Battalion, 66th Armor Regiment, at Fort Carson, Colorado. Within weeks of his arrival, one soldier in the battalion was killed in a car crash and another took his life. Three more soldiers committed suicide over the following months. Amid these tragedies, a company commander called Father Paveglio, asking him to come to his home. Two of the soldiers who’d committed suicide belonged to his unit; now his six-monthold son had just died of sudden infant death syndrome.

“There’s not much you can say in a circumstance like that, but I just cried with them, and we prayed a little bit,” Father Paveglio said. “And then in the days and weeks after that, I accompanied them.”

His presence helped the officer, a fallen-away Catholic, turn back to God, and helped his wife, raised Lutheran, convert. Just over a year later, Father Paveglio was baptizing their children, including a new baby son. In a dark time, it was his privilege to share the light of grace, one soldier to another: “A lot of grief came out of that horrible tragedy, but what that battalion needed was a Catholic priest in the midst of that tragedy.”

Experiences like this motivate Father Paveglio in his efforts to find the holy priests needed to serve the U.S. Army — priests with a missionary heart who are willing to share the manifold sacrifices of their flock and bring others to Christ through their example of faith and courage. 

To learn more about becoming an Army chaplain, visit GOARMY.COM/CHAPLAIN2025.