Naval Academy

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You’ve gotten some really good advice here. Sports, extra-curricular leadership activities, high grades, good teacher recommendations, high SAT scores, the Summer Session (VERY helpful!!) are all things he wants on his resume. All honors and honor societies he can list also help.

Some of the best priests I have met have been Navy Chaplains. One of them became the Cardinal Archbishop of New York a few decades back.

Your son might want to read the biography of Fr. Vincent Capodanno, a Navy Chaplain who received the Medal of Honor. Interestingly, among the few MOH recipients in the last few years are two Navy SEALs who were also devout Catholics.

The virtues of self control, honor, hard work and sacrifice are not incompatible with Catholicism. Life at the USNA is a call to exercise those virtues and then take them out into the fleet. Someone I am very close to was among those who at a pre-graduation Mass at the USNA Chapel (where he later married his sweetheart, another lovely perk!) pledged his Naval Service to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. There is a plaque there at the chapel with the names of the students who did that.

It’s an important undertaking, not to be taken lightly. I think of the words to the song “Who more than self their country loved, and mercy more than life.”

As St. Martin exemplifies, military service is a path to sanctity as well. Good luck!
 
Thank you again everyone for your comments. I will share this thread with my son. Your thoughts and prayers will be greatly appreciated!

Kathy
 
Mark77,

If you are truly former military, then you should know that sometimes, the only way to stop people DEDICATED to killing every American they possibly can, is to kill them. Not to kill them would be immoral, because you would be sacrificing innocent lives by refusing to end a guilty one.

I mean, let’s do the math here… Soldier A kills Proven Terrorist B, and thereby saves hundreds of innocent children in the Federal Building daycare center, which PTB would have blown up 2 months later. Or, the United States decides to have a delicate conscience, stop killing terrorists, and allow hundreds of innocent children to die in said daycare center’s fiery end. Do we pat ourselves on the back for refusing to take life? Self-defense and defense of others are allowable reasons for taking life, according to the Church and secular society.

Pacifism is the philosophy of shifting the responsibility for protecting the innocent onto other people.
 
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