Chaplains

Vincent Timphony was born right outside the gates of the Fair Grounds in New Orleans. Monday, 76 years later, he died within a stone's throw of Santa Anita. Timphony was a horse trainer and horse-race character. Ranking the order is impossible. In racing, he had his 15 minutes of fame. In life, he was a Fourth of July rocket who kept on going right through the fizzles. He had little when he was born and less when he died. Eddie Donnally rode thoroughbreds for 20 years, more than 10,000 races over 54 tracks.

When Christy Goetz's husband, Dale, told her at the outset of the war in Iraq that he wanted to join the Army to become a chaplain, she rebelled. "I told him: 'You're not going over there and getting killed,' " Christy Goetz recalled. "I mean, he's my honey. I love him. I don't want anything to happen to him. " Dale Goetz, a Baptist minister, signed up anyway in January 2004. Before long he was Chaplain Goetz, ministering to troops in Iraq later that year and the next. He volunteered for a second combat tour last summer, in Afghanistan.

As his fellow prisoners of war returned home from the Korean War, they shared stories of sacrifice by the Rev. Emil Kapaun, a humble Roman Catholic priest from Kansas. The prisoners of the 8th Cavalry Regiment spoke of how Kapaun, an Army chaplain, continued to look after his men even when he was wounded and sick. Risking his life, Kapaun would sneak out after dark to scrounge food, fashion makeshift containers to collect water and wash their soiled clothes. Kapaun died at the camp hospital seven months after the Chinese captured him in 1950.

In a small room above the crowds of Terminal 2, the Rev. Michael G. Zaniolo prepared to deliver his airport version of Mass. In other churches it can take an hour or more. But as an American Airlines pilot strode into the chapel with his luggage, Zaniolo was ready to deliver it a bit quicker -- 30 minutes or less. His homily, a thoughtful sermon with messages of hope, was whittled to 1 minute, 46 seconds. "People have to rock and roll," said Zaniolo, a 50-year-old Catholic priest.

American Muslims have never been much of a presence in the Los Angeles Police Department, accounting for less than 1% of its nearly 10,000 officers. But now, with department leaders eager to improve relationships with local Muslims, top brass have named the force's first Islamic chaplain: a Pakistani-born spiritual leader who has spent much of the last decade trying to build bridges between law enforcement and Los Angeles County's diverse Muslim communities.

It was 8 a.m., and the subject was death. A 55-year-old man was wasting away from lung cancer and cirrhosis. His weight was plummeting and his brain was swelling. But he was in denial, refusing to discuss hospice care or consider a "do not resuscitate" order. A bright pink vase filled with yellow mums sat near the window, belying the grim task facing the healthcare workers at Beth Israel Medical Center who had clustered around a conference table. "This has been really sad," said the Rev.

A U.N. tribunal convicted a former Rwandan military chaplain of attempted rape and genocide for crimes that included killing people who had sought refuge in a seminary and sentenced him to 25 years in prison. Emmanuel Rukundo, 50, was found to have played an integral role on at least four occasions in the abduction and killing of Tutsi refugees from the St. Leon Minor Seminary in Gitarama, the judges said.

The basic rule for Marine boot camp is simple: Keep your mouth shut and mind your own business. But it's different when the subject is suicide. Drill instructors encourage recruits to share their feelings in "guided discussions" and tell them to watch out for, and promptly report, warning signs in their buddies. The suicide rate in the active-duty Marine Corps was 16.5 per 100,000 in 2007 -- below both the active-duty Army and a similar demographic in the civilian population.

Rabbi Levi Meier, 62, chaplain at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center for 29 years, died Sunday at his Los Angeles home after a long illness, the hospital announced. Meier arrived at Cedars-Sinai in 1978 and as the hospital's spiritual leader ministered to patients, their families and the staff. He led ceremonies on the High Holy Days -- Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashana -- as well as weekly Sabbath services that were broadcast over the hospital's closed-circuit TV system. He also commissioned a small "traveling Torah" scroll to be taken to bedridden patients' rooms.