We invite readers to send short stories about the ways in which their lives have been personally blessed by the life and work of priests and religious in our diocese.

By Karina Fabian

Father Patrick Patton’s vocation has not only taken him around the world and in and out of military service, but also spanned two faiths.

Father Patton did not start out as a Catholic priest. After graduating from college (beginning at the University of Maryland campus in Germany and finishing at the University of Alabama) he went into the Air Force and served as an intelligence officer for four years.

After that, however, he pursued his calling and went into seminary, but since he was raised in a faithful Episcopal family, he naturally became an Episcopal priest. (Even in seminary, he moved around, attending the Episcopal Theological Seminary in Virginia, but interning for a summer in Montreal and another in Jerusalem, and serving as a deacon in England.) He was ordained into the Episcopal Diocese of Atlanta in 1974, but moved to Montana in 1975 to serve as associate pastor of St. Peter’s Episcopal Cathedral in Helena.

Nonetheless, he had always had a love for the Catholic Church. “I was a High Church Episcopalian, sometimes called Anglo-Catholic. Before I went to seminary, I attended Catholic Mass because where I was stationed, there was only a Catholic chaplain and a Baptist chaplain. I was pretty Catholic, but I remained in the church I was baptized in,” he said.

In 1976, however, the Episcopal Church made some decisions he felt moved the denomination too far in a Protestant direction. “To remain a Catholic, which I believed I was, I felt I needed to leave the Episcopal Church and come into full communion with the Roman Catholic Church,” he said. He was received into the Catholic Church on Easter 1977, was ordained a deacon, spent a year at seminary in Oregon and was ordained a priest in Hamilton in 1978, 10 days after Pope John Paul II was installed.

The diocese would not get to enjoy its new priest for long, however; although Bishop Elden F. Curtiss offered him a parish, Father Patton was feeling a call toward a military ministry. His father had served in the Air Force and as a “military brat,” he had lived in several states, as well as France and Germany.

He became an Air Force chaplain in 1980 and served at Lowry AFB, Colo.; Okinawa, Japan; Edwards AFB, Calif., and Shemya AFB, Ala. Then his father had a heart attack, so he left the Air Force and received permission from the diocese to serve in the Diocese of Venice in Florida to be close to his family.

Father Patton returned to the Helena diocese in 1988 as associate pastor at St. Mary’s Parish for two years. In 1990, he became pastor at Our Lady of the Valley in Helena, where he remained for four years.

However, he was also serving as chaplain with the Montana National Guard, and when the military needed chaplains, he naturally returned to active duty, this time as an Army chaplain. He served in Fort Polk, La., where he also served the refugees in Guantanamo, Cuba, for four months.

He then went to Haiti with a United Nations Canadian-American engineering team; Korea to Camp Page; and the Sinai in Egypt with an 11-nation group that monitored peace between Israel and Egypt. While there, he led monthly pilgrimages into the Holy Land. He spent four years in Germany, then his last year in Colorado before retiring in 2004.

In August 2004, he returned to Montana, where he is pastor of St. Charles Borromeo in Whitefish and Our Lady of Mercy in Eureka. While his adventures have been very fulfilling – and make good material for homilies – he is very content with his assignment in Whitefish. “It’s a wonderful, welcoming community and a beautiful part of Montana,” he said.


Published in The Montana Catholic, Vol. 22, No. 11, November 15, 2006.