The Flying Priest

How a priest took to the skies to bring food, medicine and the Gospel to the most remote places on Earth

Father Paul Schulte, the “Flying Priest,” with an airplane in the late 1930s, early 1940s (Harris & Ewing, photographer — Library of Congress)

Father Paul Schulte gazed in wonder at the landscape that stretched out before him: endless packs of ice, blue silhouettes of distant mountains and glaciers, and, hiding behind thin clouds, the midnight sun. 

The missionary priest had a full view of — to what he later referred as— the “arctic Eden” in his small amphibious Stinson Reliant plane nicknamed “The Flying Cross.” It was so beautiful in fact it distracted him, albeit for a moment, from the perilous position he was in, flying over unexplored land with relentless headwinds and low fuel. But the pioneering flight was not out of exploration, but necessity and there was no time to waste — a priest’s life was hanging in the balance.

At 11 a.m. on Aug. 9, 1938, an urgent message was radioed to Bishop Armand Claubet from Arctic Bay, the northernmost mission in the world at the time. It stated, “Father Julien Cochard very ill for nine days. Temperature 105 degrees. Severe pains in left side. Takes no nourishment. Please help.”

It would have taken a ship four weeks to reach the ill priest and a dogsled team even longer. The fastest way to bring Father Cochard to the nearest hospital, located at Chesterfield Inlet, was by air. Father Schulte volunteered for the daring mission when he heard the urgent message. As a former pilot in the First World War and founder of the Missionary International Vehicular Association (MIVA), he was prepared for the 2,200-mile journey from Churchill to Arctic Bay to Chesterfield Inlet. 

“These pioneer flights are both difficult and dangerous, and one would not wish to undertake one of them merely for the sake of adventure,” Father Schulte wrote in his book The Flying Priest Over the Arctic. “But when a human life is involved, it is a different matter.”

After a restless sleep, Father Schulte celebrated Mass at 2:30 a.m., readied his plane, made a sign of the cross and took flight to aid Father Cochard. It was this flight, and other risky ventures he made, after which Father Schulte was reverently dubbed “The Flying Priest.”

A New Purpose

Father Schulte was born in Germany in 1896. He had a deep fascination with the Church and an interest in the priesthood early on in life. However, with the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Schulte was conscripted to serve in the Prussian 4th Guard Grenadier Regiment and then, two years later, joined the German Air Force. It was during his time in the military he befriended Otto Fuhrmann, a fellow Catholic discerning the priesthood. The friendship would change his life.

Following the war, Schulte and Fuhrmann were ordained as priests within the order of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate on the same day — July 2, 1922. The two friends shared an interest in serving in foreign missions. Father Fuhrmann went first, settling in South Africa, while Father Schulte remained in Germany at the outset of their vocation. 

A few years later, in 1925, Father Fuhrmann fell ill of malaria and pneumonia. The nearest hospital was a four-day trek in Ovamboland, or present-day Namibia. Without any means of transportation, the journey took long enough that Father Fuhrmann failed to obtain critical medical attention and died. When Father Schulte heard the news about his friend’s death, he was distraught. But he turned his grief into purpose, resolving to devote his life to providing modern means of transportation and communications so that “the burdens of God’s brave warriors might be lightened, their working strength increased and multiplied, and speedy aid given to them in times of illness,” as he writes in his autobiography. 

Father Schulte thus founded the MIVA in 1927. By 1940, the group had donated hundreds of automobiles, a fleet of motorboats, a dozen airplanes and fifteen radio stations to missions around the world.

After Father Schulte carried out missionary work in Africa, he was granted a papal audience in 1930 with Pope Pius XI. In their discussions, the Holy Father stressed that the MIVA, and Father Schulte, assist the “poorest and most isolated of all missionaries, those in the Arctic.” Father Schulte obliged and turned his attention to the unexplored, remote great white north. 

The Flying Cross

A year prior to his rescue flight in 1938, Father Schulte sent six barrels of gasoline and one barrel of oil to Igloolik. The move was providential, as during his mission to save Father Cochard, he had to refuel at Igloolik to withstand a four-hour flight to Arctic Bay. As he writes in his book, “Without watching the force of the head wind and the rate of my gas-consumption, I should indeed have reached Arctic Bay, but I should never have returned to Igloolik.” 

Due to the dire circumstances, Father Schulte decided to leave his mechanic behind in Igloolik and take additional barrels of gasoline to be safe. Despite the conditions, the Flying Priest eventually reached Arctic Bay and found Father Cochard, thankfully, alive. The ill priest was speechless and had a high fever, but was joyful that help had finally come.  

“I had never seen this Father before, but in that moment we became friends for life,” Father Schulte writes. “I let him weep quietly and I was deeply moved myself.”

Father Cochard had enough energy to ask Father Schulte to take ten hosts the ill priest consecrated so that he could receive Communion until his death. The Flying Priest was honored to oblige. While flying home, carrying the Blessed Sacrament in a chest pocket in his jacket, Father Schulte felt “refreshed, calm, and convinced that my return flight to the hospital would succeed and that the suffering missionary would be cured of his illness.”

While initially calm due to a tailwind which cut the flight time by half, the Flying Priest experienced what “proved to be the most difficult flight so far in my career.” The fog was so dense that Father Schulte had to fly just above the ice.

“Had there been a weather report covering this territory, I should not have started,” he writes. “It was the second night flight within two days. I felt myself obliged to fly the patient as swiftly as possible to Chesterfield Inlet.” 

But Father Schulte’s initial assurance that the flight would succeed came true, as he arrived in Chesterfield Inlet and brought Father Cochard to the hospital. The doctors reported that the ill priest had been suffering from a serious kidney ailment, but he was nursed back to health. Throughout the course of those harrowing several days, Father Schulte couldn’t help but reflect on his friend, Father Fuhrmann, and the purpose of the MIVA.

For his daring mission, Father Schulte received a paternal blessing from Pope Pius XI. The Flying Priest was gracious, calling the blessing his ‘Pour le Mérite’ adding that it “encourages and nerves me for future mercy flights with The Flying Cross.”

Over his four years in the Arctic, the Flying Priest saved the life of a four-day-old Inuit child, brought food and medicine to remote missions and settlements, aided a distressed ship lost the Frozen Strait, all the while bringing the Gospel to the native peoples.  

As he writes in his book, “The only type of bread which the Eskimo of the inner Arctic ever comes to know and taste is the Lord’s Bread in the Holy Eucharist.” 

Our Lady of the Snows

Father Schulte is a man of several firsts. His rescue mission of Father Cochard is considered the first air rescue to the high Arctic. Additionally, on May 6, 1936, Father Schulte celebrated the first aerial Mass aboard the LZ 129 Hindenburg — the same zeppelin which, a year later to the day, was infamously destroyed by a fire in New Jersey.

His work took him from regions in Africa to the Arctic and then to the United States. By the early 1940s, he was renowned as the “Flying Priest,” and also known as a Knight of Columbus. The famous missionary became a Knight in a class initiated at Father DeSmet Council 2676 in Wagner, S.D. The February 1941 edition of Columbia reported that the class was named in Father Schulte’s honor.

Despite his ministry, Father Schulte’s German heritage came into question by the Canadian and U.S. governments as both countries were at war against the Axis Powers. Therefore, the Flying Priest was grounded, as he was interred by the U.S. government at Saint Henry’s Seminary in Belleville, Ill., according to a biography featured on the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate – United States Province website.

However, Father Schulte was not idle during the war. He organized the construction of a small chapel dedicated in honor of Our Lady of the Snows and commissioned artist J. Watson Davis to paint a picture of Our Lady. With the new chapel, devotion to Our Lady of the Snows flourished, so much so that construction of the National Shrine of Our Lady of the Snows commenced in 1958. Today, it is one of the largest outdoor shrines in North America. 

The latter years of Father Schulte’s life were spent promoting and supporting the MIVA. His work eventually brought him to Swakopmund, Namibia, where he died in 1975. He is buried next to his friend, Father Fuhrmann, the source of the MIVA’s inspiration. 

Today, that grief Father Schulte experienced continues to be turned into relief as the MIVA still provides tens of thousands of vehicles to missionaries in more than 60 countries.

A map of the Flying Priest’s travels from the book “The Flying Priest Over the Arctic.”