The Official Newspaper of the Diocese of Little Rock
Each summer, the Buffalo Bills travel east down the New York interstate from Buffalo to Rochester for the team's annual training camp at St. John Fisher University. For two weeks, local media is saturated with reviews of players' performances on the field, their interactions with fans in the stands and their favorite turkey-burger meals in the dining hall at the university located in a Rochester suburb.
Not all of the team's activities attract media attention, however. Each Sunday of training camp, Basilian Father Kevin Mannara with Deacon Jonathan Schott offers an early morning Mass for Catholic players and coaches before practice.
"This is a real joy for us to be able to help players, coaches and staff practice the faith and attend holy Mass," Deacon Schott, assistant director of campus ministry, said to the Catholic Courier, the newspaper of the Diocese of Rochester.
The team also uses the university's ministry center for team Bible studies with the Bills' team chaplain, Len Vanden Bos.
"Our relationship with their chaplain is year-round," Father Mannara, director of campus ministry, said.
Now in his seventh season as the Buffalo Bills' team chaplain, Vanden Bos is a rare breed in the NFL: He is a full-time chaplain.
"There are only a couple of teams that have a full-time chaplain like myself that works for the organization. There are only two or three out of the 32 teams," Vanden Bos told the Catholic Courier.
While a Catholic priest based in Orchard Park, N.Y., frequently leads Saturday evening Masses for the Catholics with the Buffalo Bills, Vanden Bos, a nondenominational Christian, is entrusted with the task of providing pastoral care for the team on a daily basis. This is no small task, as there are 53 players on the roster, 16 more on the practice squad and more than 20 people on the coaching staff, he said.
Each of those 100 or so people is at a different place in his or her faith journey, Vanden Bos added. Some have a close relationship with God, others have no previous experience with faith but are interested, and many fall somewhere in between, he noted.
"You have to meet them where they're at," he said.
Vanden Bos said his ministry is challenging, yet, at the same time, it's his dream job. He coached college football teams for several years in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and he continued to coach part-time even after he turned his professional attention to ministry. He served as a part-time chaplain for the Chicago Bears from 2013-14 and for the Baltimore Ravens in 2016.
In 2017, Buffalo Bills head coach Sean McDermott hired him to take on the newly created position of full-time team chaplain. This role allows Vanden Bos to use skills he honed in his previous careers, he said, noting that he doesn't coach the players but can relate to them.
"I stay in my lane, but I understand the world they're in. Being able to marry those two worlds has given me an advantage to meeting them where they are," he said.
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