The Rev. Paul Seil, chaplain for the Buffalo Fire Department, always carries a radio linked to a dispatcher. He was at the rectory Wednesday at Our Lady of Perpetual Help, the parish he serves as pastor in the Old First Ward, when the radio erupted around the single word that “changes everything.”
The urgency, Seil said, is gut-level, almost primal: “It is usually called by the person in difficulty.”
Seil hurried to the fire, at 745 Main St. The structure was still burning, smoke rolling in a great cloud. A fire department officer offered a swift explanation for an unspoken tension not quite like anything Seil had experienced since he officially became chaplain, five years ago.
The helmet that the Rev. Paul Seil wears while serving as Buffalo Fire Department chaplain.
“You could see it on everyone’s faces,” Seil said. “He told me they had one unaccounted for.”
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At such a time, Seil said, when men and women whose duties are built around protecting lives come together in a fierce attempt to save one of their own, a chaplain knows enough to step back, until needed.
“There was still a glimmer of hope,” Seil said. Not long afterward, the worst possibility was confirmed, and division Chief Paul Graham asked Seil to go to the Engine 2 firehouse, where the lost firefighter had been stationed.
Buffalo Firefighter Jason Arno of Engine Company 2.
Seil, 67, traveled there to do what he could. At the firehouse, he learned the identity of Jason Arno, a 37-year-old husband and father who died while on duty. Seil watched as those who served with Arno, wrestling with grief, turned their energy toward searching the building for their newest American flag, which could serve as a shroud when they carried their companion from the ruins.
“It was basically hugs and tears,” said Seil, who accompanied them in returning to the scene. On Main Street, he was asked to join some fire department officers, a firefighting union leader and one of Arno’s closest friends in the aching task of notifying the family.
Bunting is draped Thursday at the firehouse where firefighter Jason Arno worked out of Engine 2.
Seil had an intimate sense of what that would involve. He has spent much of his life on what he calls the other side of such a knock on the door. His dad, Jerry Seil, was a firefighter. In May 1964, when Seil was a third grader in South Buffalo, his father and a friend were critically injured after an aerial platform, 60 feet in the air, collapsed during an arson fire.
Seil’s mother, Rita Roach Seil, was pregnant with Seil’s youngest sister, Laura, when a fire department chaplain – the Rev. Robert Mack – arrived in the middle of the night. Seil’s mom was so startled that she called the police.
Rita finally heard Mack out, then made a decision. She allowed Seil and his two sisters to sleep until morning, when she did her best to explain: Their dad survived, but with severe and disabling injuries.
“He suffered a shattered arm, broken legs, and he was in a half-body cast,” said Seil, who recalls there is no question his father’s early death, 12 years later, was tied directly to the accident.
As a little boy, he absorbed knowledge about the “other side” of a chaplain’s visit that he never forgets, now that he does the job:
There is a road back. There can be healing and even a place, someday, for comfort in memory. But wherever it takes you, Seil said, “your life will never be the same again.”
On his way to the Arno home, he sifted through all those lessons. He remembered dozens of women and men lost to Covid-19 for whom he provided quiet anointings as part of a specially trained Catholic ministry that tends to people left critically ill by the pandemic.
A pin is displayed on the Rev. Paul Seil’s jacket, with the Buffalo Fire Department motto: “Ut Vivant Alii,” or ‘so others may live.’
Seil contemplated a Saturday last May, in the Old First Ward, when he heard a dispatcher relay accounts of a mass shooting at the Jefferson Avenue Tops supermarket. The chaplain went straight to the store, where 10 women and men were murdered simply because they were Black.
He was with retired fire commissioner Garnell Whitfield when he was told he lost his mother, and Seil moved quietly that evening among firefighters who had seen things he knew could never leave their minds.
In the following weeks, he often returned to Jefferson Avenue to speak with mourning neighbors, because such evil seemed to cry out for whatever solace he could bring.
Two days after Jason Arno died in a four-alarm inferno at a downtown building, his body was released from the Erie County Medical Examiner’s Office and the somber rituals of his funeral began.
Seven months after Tops, during the Christmas weekend blizzard, Seil was in his rectory when pipes began to burst and the heat went out. He walked into a storm whose intensity was suffocating, attempting to meet a firefighter who could provide a ride at the corner of O’Connell Avenue. Seil made it there only because a volunteer snowmobiler offered him a lift.
For a night, he slept on the Edward M. Cotter, the legendary fireboat, though returning home hardly provided respite: Less than a week later, Seil was consoling firefighters who responded to a burning home on Dartmouth Avenue, a fire in which five children died.
His mission as a chaplain, he said, is to gently “break down the shell” that people who respond to crisis and suffering each day can sometimes place around anguish of their own.
Since last spring, what many firefighters have witnessed in such a short time is unimaginable. Seil’s only strategy, again and again, is being there.
“I’m just another guy,” he said, hoping those roots serve as a bond, if and when they want to talk.
On Wednesday, Seil reached back for lessons from that South Buffalo child, almost 60 years ago, who heard devastating news. All he could offer Arno’s widow, Sarah-Liz Tierney, was the same thing that Mack – a chaplain who became a lifetime family friend – promised Seil’s mother on behalf of the firefighting community:
“We’ll help you through this.”
The Rev. Paul Seil holds a photograph showing his father, Gerard Seil, with his fire company.
At such a moment, “notification” is an inadequate description of the sacred. In the Arno living room, Seil led everyone in the Lord’s prayer and a “Hail Mary,” then spontaneously said a short prayer requesting the only healing grace he could envision, amid such grief.
Arno, he said, lived out the Buffalo fire motto of “Ut Vivant Alii,” meaning: So Others May Live. For all those who loved him, the priest asked for consolation.
The Rev. Paul Seil, chaplain of the Buffalo Fire Department: The only way forward is to “accompany one another.”
He was still at the Arno home when he learned the firefighters were ready to carry their brother from the building. He needed to be there, and he said the family, too, wanted to bear witness.
On Main Street, Seil stood waiting as “a sea of firefighters” parted to allow their friends to move past with their flag-draped bier, while Seil sprinkled holy water and offered words at the foundation of everything he does:
Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord.
Seil has had a few days now to reflect on such a loss. He is a Buffalo guy, and he knows some people say all these months of cascading pain in the city feel like blows of almost biblical dimension.
All he knows is that human suffering rises and falls in waves, and in childhood he learned just one response that makes any sense.
“I’ve seen this ever since I was a kid,” he said, “and it really is true that this is when people can put aside their differences, put aside their spears and arrows about things that really don’t matter and pick up the mantle of helping as we can.”
“He had his whole future in front of him, an exemplary firefighter and employee, just a great all-around person. No one ever had anything negative to say about firefighter Arno,” Fire Commissioner William Renaldo said.
The undeniable beacon, Seil said, is the example of Arno’s life. There are still people willing to die for their community, to offer up their own lives for a complete stranger, which is at the heart of all that Seil believes.
From living practice, he was taught a route toward peace when his own family was staggered. In Buffalo, a community that has been through too much, it is what he requests of us for Arno’s wife and child, and their city.
“We need to accompany one another,” Seil said, “not just right now, but for everything on the other side.”
Sean Kirst is a columnist with The Buffalo News. Email him at skirst@buffnews.com.