Born to Polish
emigrants, Walter Ciszek hardly looked the part of a future hero. He spent much of his early youth fighting
anyone who would oblige him; his parents, other youths, the law. It got so bad that his father actually dragged
him down to the local police station and begged them to place Walter in reform
school. His future looked as bleak as
the coal mining region of Pennsylvania he was growing up in.
So when this
juvenile delinquent decided in the eighth grade that he wanted to be a Catholic
priest, not many people believed him.
But God apparently did. And in
June of 1928 Walter Ciszek entered the Jesuit novitiate, with the intent of
being a missionary to Russia.
This coincided
with Pope Pius XI’s appeal for the Jesuits to go into what had become the
Soviet Union. There, government persecution of religion was threatening the
very existence of the Russian Orthodox Church, where the number of priests had
plummeted from 157,000 to just 4,000.
Since he
couldn’t enter the Soviet Union directly, Ciszek set up shop in Poland, where
he taught at the Jesuit seminary and served as a parish priest. However, when the Nazis invaded in September
of 1939, the seminarians were sent home.
And as the Soviet army invaded Poland from the east, the young priest
seized the opportunity to enter Russia with a flood of refugees. With false identity papers, Ciszek stepped
into a train bound for Chusovy in the
Ural Mountains. There, as “Vladimir
Lypinski”, he worked by day as a laborer hauling and stacking logs for a lumber
factory, and after hours, snuck into the woods to say Mass and memorize the
prayer book in case his Mass kit was discovered.
And sure enough
a year later he was arrested and accused of being a spy for the Vatican. He was sent to Lubyanka prison in Moscow,
where he sent the next five years mostly in solitary confinement. Under torture he confessed his true identity
and story, and was sentenced to 15 years hard labor in a Gulag in Siberia. There, he worked in coal mines, shoveled coal
onto freighters, and eventually as a construction worker at an ore mine. Throughout his imprisonment, Ciszek prayed
with other prisoners, celebrated Mass, heard confessions, gave retreats, and
offered spiritual direction.
In 1955 he
completed his sentence and was released with restrictions in Norilsk, a town 10
degrees north of the Arctic Circle. He
wrote home to his shocked sisters and his Jesuit community, who had sent out a
notice of his death in 1947. For the
next three years, Father Ciszek worked in a chemical factory as a front, but
carried on his duties as a priest in secret, even establishing mission
parishes. However, in 1958 the KGB
arrested him again for his religious work, canceled his passport, and gave him
48 hours to leave the region. He was
sent to the southern part of the country where he was put to work as an auto
mechanic.
Finally in
1963, President John F. Kennedy secured Ciszek’s release in exchange for two
Soviet spies. He returned to
Pennsylvania where he wrote his memoir, With
God in Russia, and joyfully served as a priest until his death in
1984. In 1990, his cause for
canonization was opened in Rome.
A beacon of
light, placed in the darkest part of the Soviet Union for 23 years, this
Servant of God reminds us that no place is God forsaken.
Walter Ciszek is a hero you should
know. And I'm Dr. Ross Porter.
No comments:
Post a Comment