Fr. Bill Dorwart, at 59, enlists in the Navy for the third time.
University of Portland photo
He’s 59 and this fall, he enlisted in the U.S. Navy for a third time. He was 17 the first time around and needed a signed note from his parents.
Holy Cross Father Bill Dorwart, gentle and soft-spoken director of campus ministry at the University of Portland, is returning to the military because he believes that is where he is most needed.
“I can’t think of a more important place to be, especially at wartime,” Father Dorwart says. “That’s what draws me back now. If we weren’t at war in Iraq and Afghanistan, I’d be happy to stay at the University of Portland.”
He first joined the Navy as a high school graduate who grew up in Sidney, Neb., population 6,000 — about the same as that of the aircraft carrier where he would eventually be stationed.
The year was 1967, and the United States was mired in combat in Vietnam. Young Bill needed signed approval from his parents then because he was under 18.
He joined the Navy, in part, as an alternative to being drafted by the Army. He had been exposed as a young man to Air Force bases near Sidney, and he was intrigued by the adventure of it.
“I’d never seen the ocean before,” he says.
His first stint in the Navy was as an aviation electronics technician on an aircraft carrier. His first assignment was in the Mediterranean and he served in the Navy for four years before getting an honorable discharge.
It was during that first military assignment that the young sailor learned to appreciate the work of chaplains. That led him to the University of Notre Dame, where he enrolled in the seminary program and graduated in 1976.
Father Dorwart then spent a year in Bangladesh, returned to Notre Dame for graduate school and was ordained a priest in 1980. Next came several years as a parish priest.
In 1985, he re-entered the Navy and served as a chaplain with the Marines in Okinawa because, “I wanted to be where the need was.”
Later, he served on the USS Midway, with a home port in Japan, and from there sailed to the Persian Gulf as part of Desert Shield and Desert Storm. It was the first aircraft carrier to travel into the Gulf waters and the only one not to lose a plane.
Dorwart left the Navy in April 1991 after six years and with a second honorable discharge. He would become provincial superior of the Indiana Province of the Congregation of Holy Cross for a term, with offices near Notre Dame. He made his way to the University of Portland in August 2004. He was appointed director of campus ministry in 2006.
Father Dorwart is passionate about serving young people and the importance of faith. He once wrote about tending to the spiritual needs of young men and women after a horrific fire aboard a ship that lasted 18 hours and claimed the lives of six sailors — including two young Catholic men, whose charred bodies were found locked together.
“They were clinging to life with each other during their last breath,” he said.
It’s these types of experiences — and that nearly 30 percent of the Navy and Marine Corps are currently Catholic with only about seven percent of military chaplains being Catholic —that draws Father Dorwart back.
“I love working with young people at the University of Portland,” he says, “and it will be hard to leave.”
His first assignment will be for 12 months on the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. The British and US military base on a 13-square-mile island supports military activities in that part of the world. The only residents of the island, for the most part, are Navy and Air Force personnel who are assisting those in the Indian Ocean, the Arabian Sea and the Persian Gulf.
After that, Father Dorwart will be assigned to the USS Ronald Reagan, an aircraft carrier based in San Diego.
As he reflects, he says that the work in the Navy is similar to his college ministry in that he is working with the same age group.
Dorwart presided at a Mass on campus earlier this month. The next day, he left to go across the ocean.
