Bishop Adna Wright Leonard, Father of Methodist Chaplaincy

Bishop Adna Wright Leonard was the father of chaplaincy as an organized ministry of the Methodist denomination. He was killed on May 3, 1943 while visiting chaplains and service members overseas during World War II.

The United Methodist General Commission on Archives and History provides this brief biography.

Bishop Adna Wright Leonard was born November 2, 1874, in Cincinnati. He was the only son of Reverend and Mrs. A.B. Leonard. His father was the mission secretary of the Methodist Episcopal Church. Leonard married Mary Luella Day on October 9, 1901. Two children were born of their marriage. Leonard was educated at New York University, Drew Theological Seminary, and The American School of Archeology in Rome. After the completion of his education Leonard was ordained in the Cincinnati Annual Conference in 1899. He served churches in New Jersey, Puerto Rico, Rome, Ohio, and Washington State. In 1916 he was elected a bishop and served in San Francisco (1916-1924), Buffalo, (1924-1932), Pittsburgh (1932-1940), and Washington, D.C., (1940-1943).

In an era in which Methodist institutions were becoming increasingly liberal, Leonard was a staunch political and religious conservative. He was an anti-modernist, or in his preferred term, an “essentialist” (to distinguish Methodist conservatives from “fundamentalists” outside of Methodism). During his tenure in San Francisco, he served as a trustee of the University of Southern California, which surprisingly was a Methodist-related school until 1952. In Buffalo, he headed the Anti-Saloon League of New York.

On December 31, 1940, Leonard became the first chairman of the newly created Methodist Commission on Chaplains. The Council of Bishops created the Commission to respond the rapidly growing demand for chaplains in the armed forces. The Commission would be responsible for recruiting, assessing, endorsing, equipping, guiding, and supporting chaplains on a denominational level. No similar office existed in any of the denominations that merged in 1939 to become the Methodist Church. For most of Methodist history, service as a chaplain was solely a matter of individual clergy initiative and episcopal acquiescence. 

Leonard's appointment as chairman was due in part to the location of his office in Washington, DC where he could coordinate with the Army and the Navy. Bishop Leonard already served as the chair of the General Commission on Chaplains for the Army and the Navy, the Protestant endorsing body created by the Federal Council of Churches (FCC) during World War I. By 1941, the General Commission had ceased to be a committee of the FCC and had become a separate organization. With his location near the War Department and his experience in the General Commission, Leonard was the natural choice to lead the Methodist chaplaincy program. He was a forceful leader, unashamedly patriotic, and believed deeply in the ministry of chaplains. He also served on the Committee on Camp Activities that supported Methodist churches located near military installations.

Bishop Leonard quickly organized the Commission for its work and began recruiting chaplains for military service. Even though the United States was not a party to the war when the Commission came into being, the government was already expanding the Army and needed chaplains. The peacetime Army was growing to include 400,000 men. New camps were being constructed across the United States. One chaplain would be authorized for every 1200 soldiers. At that time, the Methodist Church was the largest Protestant body in the United States, and the War Department initially assigned the denomination a quota of 399 chaplains, about 11% of the total required. Within a year, the authorized size of the Army would nearly double again. To support the work of the Commission, the work of churches near military camps, and the need for overseas war relief, the Methodist Church raised nearly $1,000,000 in a special offering in March 1941.

The Commission’s work consumed most of the bishop’s time, keeping him at his desk until midnight or later on many evenings. He focused the Commission’s appeal on seminaries and annual conference sessions, but he received a cool reception throughout most of year. The Methodist Church had become strongly pacifist during the 1920’s and 1930’s, and the national outlook was largely isolationist. The very idea of a Methodist military chaplaincy was strongly resisted in some quarters. Additionally, bishops and superintendents were reluctant to give up their congregational pastors for military service. There was no such thing as an organized “extension ministry” during that era of Methodist history. Service as a missionary provided the closest analog, but there were significant differences between chaplaincy and missionary work.

Unsurprisingly, the effort initially produced fewer applications than required. When the Council of Bishops met at Sea Island, Georgia, December 1-5, 1941, the Methodists were still 238 chaplains short of the quota. When some bishops complained that the government should not set quotas for the church, Leonard explained that the quotas were proportional to the population. More than one million Methodists would serve in uniform, and it was appropriate that the church should provide a commensurate share of the chaplains. He told the bishops that most other denominations had met or exceeded their quotas. If the Methodist Church did not fill its allocated slots, those authorizations would be given to other denominations. Leonard passionately appealed to his fellow bishops,

"From the statistics it will be seen that The Methodist Church is failing to supply spiritual advisors and moral guardians for men from Methodist homes. Camp after camp can be cited in which the number of Methodist chaplains on duty is far disproportionate to the number of young men who have come from our congregations. Methodist ministers, and those charged with the appointment, can scarcely escape the accusation that they are responsible for the failure to provide adequately for the young men who have been nourished in The Methodist Church and who are now the nation's defenders."

The United States entered the war two days after the Council of Bishops adjourned. With American entry into the war, the Commission began to receive a warmer reception at the church’s seminaries and annual conferences. Nevertheless, the Methodist Church remained below its quotas until near the war’s end and recruiting continued to be a primary focus of the Commission.

Bishop Leonard continued to serve as chairman of both the General Commission on Chaplains and the Methodist Commission on Chaplains until his death. As chairman of the General Commission, Leonard also fathered the Service Men's Christian League, a broadly Christian organization created to support chaplains, to provide Christian fellowship and devotional opportunities for service members, to educate, reform morals, and evangelize. He also supported an organization called Home Front which included religious, fraternal, labor, business, and professional leaders. Home Front's purpose was to prepare communities for the return of soldiers from war. Leonard said that he hoped the organization would help service men not experience the bitterness and disillusionment that afflicted many soldiers after the last war.

In 1943, President Roosevelt asked Leonard to visit chaplains and troops overseas. He was the first Protestant church leader to make such a visit, although Catholic Archbishop Spellman had begun a similar tour at Christmas of the previous year. The trip was intended to include stops in England, North Africa, India, China, and a "side trip" to Iceland. The bishop said that the tour had the dual purpose of "letting the Protestant chaplains and service men overseas know that the churches at home are not forgetting them and obtaining a first-hand picture of religious life among men under fire, in order that the churches may better serve these men."

 

Bishop Leonard arrived in England just before Easter in April 1943 and took part in a sunrise service in London's Hyde Park. For the next several days, he was constantly on the move, visiting camps and hospitals, conferring with military leaders, and meeting with officials of the British government. He conducted retreats for chaplains and religious services for the troops. The wounded he visited were primarily veterans of the Tunisian campaign, and at a press conference he announced that President Roosevelt was "quite concerned" about the shortage of chaplains in North Africa. The bishop's travels took him throughout Britain - to the areas around Bristol, Winchester, Salisbury, and Oxford, among others - and to Ireland. Several photos from that trip are posted at the end of this article.

On May 3, 1943, Bishop Leonard boarded a B-24 named Hot Stuff in England bound for Iceland. Hot Stuff was the first heavy bomber in the 8th Air Force to complete twenty-five combat missions in Europe. It reached its 25th mission milestone three-and-a-half months before the widely celebrated B-17 Memphis Belle. The bomber and its crew were the first selected to tour the United States to support morale on the home front and to help sell war bonds. Bishop Leonard and two other chaplains were on board as passengers. Hot Stuff’s first refueling point on the way back to the United States was Iceland, one of the planned stops on Bishop Leonard's itinerary.

Co-piloting the B-24 was Lieutenant General Frank Andrews, then commander of the European Theater of Operations. He is also widely known as the father of the Air Force. Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland is named for him. Depending on the source you read, Andrews was either going to Iceland to conduct an inspection tour or on his way back to the United States to receive a fourth star and possibly to be named as Supreme Allied Commander in Europe - the job that ultimately went to Dwight Eisenhower. In either case, Andrews and his entourage bumped many of Hot Stuff’s regular crew off the flight.

When the plane arrived in Iceland, it found the island shrouded in fog. Flying blind and unable to land, the aircraft crashed into a mountain. Bishop Leonard, Lieutenant General Andrews, and twelve others died in the crash. Only the tail gunner survived. Andrews was the highest-ranking Allied officer to die in the line of duty at that point in the war. He is buried in Arlington. Bishop Leonard is buried in Ferncliff Cemetery in Springfield, Ohio.

Also among the dead were the two chaplains accompanying Bishop Leonard: Presbyterian chaplain Colonel Frank L. Miller from Washington, D.C. and Major Robert H. Humphrey, a Methodist from Lynchburg, Virginia. Piloting the plane was Captain Robert Shannon, a Methodist layman from Washington, Iowa. Bishop Leonard, Chaplain Humphrey, and Captain Shannon were all memorialized at the 1944 General Conference of the Methodist Church in the afternoon session on May 3, the one-year anniversary of the crash.

Sources

One source for this article is an unpublished and incomplete paper with related notes by John McLaughlin, the first General Secretary of the Methodist Commission on Chaplains, elected in 1956, and Fred Heather, Associate General Secretary in the 1950s and 1960s. The current version of the manuscript dates to 1999. According to a letter from McLaughlin, Heather was the primary author of the material covered in this essay. All these source documents are now housed with the United Methodist General Commission on Archives and History at Drew University in Madison, NJ.

Additional sources include:

Chaplains of the Methodist Church in World War II [Methodist Commission on Chaplains, Washington DC, 1948]

Volume 3 of the official history of the Army Chaplaincy, Up from Handymen, The United States Army Chaplaincy 1865-1920, by Earl F. Stover [Office of the Chief of Chaplains, Washington, DC, 1977]

Chaplains of the United States Army by Roy Honeywell [Office of the Chief of Chaplains, Washington, DC, 1958]

The Service of Chaplains to Army Air Units, 1917-1946, by Daniel B. Jorgensen [Office, Chief of Air Force Chaplains, 1961]

GCAH - Guide to the Adna Wright Leonard Collection (retrieved 3/21/2023)

Adna W Leonard | American Air Museum (retrieved 3/21/2023)

Bishop Sees Rise in Army Chaplains, New York Times, April 21, 1943 (retrieved 3/21/2023)

Bishop Adna Leonard, New York Times, May 5, 1943 (retrieved 3/21/2023)

Monument dedication honors JB Andrews namesake (retrieved 3/21/2023)

Harold Sloan and Methodist Essentialism (asburyseminary.edu) (retrieved 3/21/2023)