Father Joseph Verbis Lafleur

The Chaplain Who Would Not Leave His Men

Joseph Verbis Lafleur was born on January 24, 1912, in Ville Platte, Louisiana, a small Cajun town in the heart of Evangeline Parish. Raised in a deeply Catholic family, he entered the seminary and was ordained a priest for the Diocese of Lafayette in 1938. Two years later, with war looming, he volunteered as a United States Army chaplain.

Father Lafleur was stationed at Clark Field in the Philippines when the Japanese attacked on December 8, 1941. As the situation deteriorated, he was offered evacuation. He refused. “Where my men go, I go,” he said. When Corregidor fell in May 1942, Lafleur was captured along with thousands of American and Filipino soldiers. He entered the brutal Japanese prisoner of war camp system.

For two years in the camps, Father Lafleur ministered to his fellow prisoners. He celebrated Mass in secret with whatever materials he could find. He heard confessions, administered last rites, and comforted the dying. He shared his own meager rations with the sick. Survivors later testified that his presence kept men alive, that his faith was the one thing the Japanese could not take from them.

On September 7, 1944, the Japanese prison ship SS Shinyo Maru was torpedoed by an American submarine off Zamboanga in the southern Philippines. As the ship began to sink, Father Lafleur helped other prisoners climb the ladder to the deck. When urged to save himself, he refused, staying below to help more men escape. He went down with the ship. He was thirty-two years old. He was posthumously awarded the Distinguished Service Cross (twice), the Bronze Star, and the Purple Heart (twice). In 2020, the Diocese of Lafayette opened his cause for canonization, and in June 2021 the USCCB bishops voted 99% to advance it. Greater love has no man than this: to lay down his life for his friends.

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