An Interfaith Spark Glows 50 Years Later : Heroes: The memory of four chaplains who gave their lives together in wartime still inspires a more ecumenical world.

The night was frigid. The U.S. transport ship Dorchester, carrying 902 troops, had slowed to half speed because of ice floes. At 1 a.m., a torpedo struck and exploded amidships. The ship started sinking rapidly.

Then, in the panic on the deck of that doomed World War II vessel 50 years ago, came an episode that implanted the ideal of interfaith bonds in American memory.

Four Army chaplains--two Protestants, a Jew and a Roman Catholic--after working to distribute life jackets, calm the frightened men and direct them to lifeboats and rafts, gave their own life belts to men without them.

Survivors related that as the ship went under on Feb. 3, 1943, the four chaplains clung together on the slanting deck, their arms linked, their heads bowed in prayer.

“It’s a living parable that has affected the lives of many Christians and Jews ever since,” said the Rev. David Poling of Albuquerque, N.M., a cousin of one of the four chaplains.

“Ministers of different backgrounds, drawn together in crisis, gave up their lives for others in love of God. A threatening, challenging moment brought out the essence of their relationship--that they were brothers.”

That tie was little recognized in the early 1940s and before, a time of denominational aloofness, backbiting and prejudice, before the rise of ecumenical organizations and interfaith work.

“It was the sort of thing you didn’t see back then, but which we now see all over the country,” said Fred K. Honigman, interim executive director of the Chapel of the Four Chaplains in Valley Forge, Pa.

He said the event got wide public attention, spreading a spark that had implications for the whole ecumenical movement. It has broadened understanding and produced working links among most Christian denominations and Judaism.

On the 50th anniversary, commemorative events were scheduled for this week and next in scores of communities across the country by churches and veterans organizations.

Several ecumenical services and processions were scheduled this Sunday and next week in Philadelphia.

Dedication services also were held on a 4.5-acre plot in Valley Forge for building of a new Chapel of the Four Chaplains designed to suggest the shape of the Dorchester. A $2-million fund drive is under way for the project.

Last Monday, ceremonies were held at the U.S. Naval Station on Staten Island, N.Y., and a plaque commemorating the heroism of the four chaplains was dedicated at Pier 1, from which the Dorchester departed on Jan. 22, 1943.

After taking on more troops in Boston, the ship joined a convoy in the Atlantic, but broke off alone to head for Greenland. German submarines at the time were sinking about 100 Allied ships a month.

“Torpedo Junction,” those Atlantic waters were then called.

The four chaplains on the Dorchester, working to allay anxieties of the young servicemen, were Lt. Alexander D. Goode, 31, a Brooklyn-born rabbi; Lt. Clarke V. Poling, 32, a Dutch Reformed minister from New York; Lt. John P. Washington, 34, a Roman Catholic priest from Kearny, N.J.; and Lt. George L. Fox, 42, a Methodist, from Altoona, Pa.

“They were all very sociable guys, who seemed to have initiated interfaith activities even before the war,” said Clarke Poling’s cousin, David Poling, a Presbyterian pastor who has collected material on the four and the Dorchester episode.

“They had hit it off well at chaplains school. Sharing their faiths was not just a first-time deal for them. They were really very close. They had prayed together a number of times before that final crisis,” David Poling said.

“That was the climate they had grown up in,” he said. “But it wasn’t the climate of the country back then. They lit a kind of vision for the rest of us.”

The Poling family has been prominent in Protestant affairs, particularly Clarke’s father, the late Rev. Daniel Poling, who was influential in launching commemorations of the four chaplains by President Harry S. Truman in 1951.

Daniel Poling was longtime editor of the Christian Herald and pastor of New York’s Marble Collegiate Church, preceding the Rev. Norman Vincent Peale. His son, Clarke, had lived with cousin David’s family in New Jersey while going to Rutgers University.

The Dorchester went under 20 minutes after it was hit. Only 230 of the 902 aboard survived to tell of the desperation of those last minutes and the sacrifice of the four chaplains.

David Poling said it epitomizes a maxim of the 1st-Century Jewish rabbi Jesus whom Christians regard as manifesting God in the human context. He said, “Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”