Far in the bitter Russian north, word of the death
of Joseph Stalin spread—even among the political prisoners and criminals
who toiled ceaselessly, doomed and forgotten, in the mines and forests
of Siberia. The news was a spark of hope that lit the fuse of rebellion.
The camps erupted in violence as prisoners’ pent up frustrations with
hard labor, hunger, and indignity were loosed. They never had a chance.
By the butt of the rifle and the muzzle of the machine gun, Soviet
soldiers put the uprising down. Among the prisoners of Camp 5, sprawled
in the dirt and desperately trying to avoid the gunfire, was a Catholic
priest from Pennsylvania. How he came there—and how he came back—is a
study in, as the priest himself put it later, “the strange and
mysterious ways of divine providence.”
Walter Ciszek’s seemed an unlikely vocation. By his own account, he
was a “bully, the leader of a gang, a street fighter … I had no use for
school, except insofar as it had a playground where I could fight or
wrestle or play sports.” Walter’s Polish immigrant parents—his father
was a mine worker and then a barkeeper in eastern Pennsylvania—were so
exasperated by their difficult son that they once asked the police to
take him off their hands. It was not the typical childhood of a follower
of Ignatius of Loyola, who was required, among other things, to observe
strict obedience to superiors and to achieve intellectual prowess
through a long and rigorous regimen of academic study. But Walter Ciszek
did not lead a typical life.
Born November 14, 1904 in Shenandoah, Pennsylvania, Walter was the
seventh of Martin and Mary Ciszek’s thirteen children. His mother’s
devotion eventually inspired Walter to form aspirations to consecrated
life, though his father remained skeptical that such an obstreperous
youth could ever embody the piety and kindness that Martin thought
proper to the Catholic priesthood. In the “strange and mysterious ways
of divine providence,” however, the path of Walter Ciszek was already
laid out: God would use the young man’s very contrariness as a lever to
nudge him toward his vocation. His father’s opposition to the idea
confirmed Walter’s determination to enter the seminary, and Walter’s own
inclination away from the communal religious life and extensive
training of the Jesuits convinced him to accept both: “since it was so
hard,” he declared, “I would do it.”
In 1929, Pope Pius XI founded a Roman university for the purpose of
training Western priests to work among the eastern-rite Catholics of
Russia. Early in his religious life Walter learned of “the Russicum” and
by the time he took vows in 1930, the dream of ministering to Russian
Catholics was planted ineradicably in the young Jesuit’s mind. Father
Ciszek was ordained in Rome, June 24, 1937.
By
the 1930s, however, Soviet Communism’s implacable opposition to all
independent religious activity made it impossible for a Catholic priest
to enter the country. Fr. Ciszek was therefore assigned to a small town
in eastern Poland, to work among the eastern-rite Catholics of the area
and bide his time until a route into the USSR might somehow be
discerned.
That day came quickly. Shortly after war broke out in September 1939,
the Soviet army overran eastern Poland. Its envelopment by Nazi Germany
and Soviet Russia was a disaster for Poland, but it was a godsend for
Ciszek. He now found himself within the boundaries of the Soviet empire.
The American embassy recommended that he leave the country, but he
declined. Instead, with the approval of his Jesuit superiors and the
local archbishop, he conspired with two fellow Jesuits to enter the
Russian heartland and realize his missionary dream.
Aided by his local friends, Ciszek forged papers to show that he was a
widowed Polish peasant and volunteered to work in the Soviet war
industry, which was hiring recruits throughout Soviet-occupied
territory. Thus he found passage on an eastbound train and crossed into
Russia proper. Notwithstanding his careful efforts to hide his
identity, he was arrested after only a year spent as a logger in the
Ural Mountains. The Communist state had spies everywhere, and they
quickly discovered the true identity of the American priest.
So began a brutal, years-long series of interrogations,
incarcerations, and forced-labor assignments. The Soviet imagination
could not comprehend the religious and charitable motives that impelled a
young American man to sacrifice all for the sake of a ministry amidst
the embattled and impoverished Catholics of Russia; therefore, they
determined that he must be a spy. At first, they insisted that he was in
the service of Hitler, then that he was involved in some kind of plot
masterminded by the pope. In any case, they would not accept his
explanations. He was found guilty of espionage and sentenced to fifteen
years of labor in the Gulag.
The early years of his sentence were served in Moscow, within the
confines of the notorious Lubyanka prison. Ciszek could not know at the
time that the cell at Lubyanka would appear to be luxurious
accommodations compared to later hardships. In 1946 he was transferred
to Norilsk, Siberia, where his toils over the next decade included
construction and coal mining. Daily life was a constant struggle for
survival, but Ciszek made the most of his spiritual opportunities,
saying Mass when possible, offering solace and sacraments to the
religious, and sharing the rudiments of faith with those who had none.
Ciszek’s sentence ended in 1955. He was released into Siberia, but he
was not free. As a treasonous ex-convict, not only would he never be
permitted to leave the country; he must also seek permission for every
transition of employment or residence. This period of relative freedom,
however, was Ciszek’s most fruitful as a minister. Priests were in short
supply in Russia and Ciszek found grateful parishioners wherever he
went. The KGB discouraged Ciszek’s religious activity by harassment and
threat, but by this time the hard-bitten priest was not easily cowed,
even by the Soviet secret police.
Meanwhile, in the United States, Ciszek was presumed dead. The last
contact with his relatives and Jesuit brothers was a postcard sent from
Poland in 1940. In 1947, the Jesuits said a memorial Mass for him and
his name was added to the official list of the Society’s deceased. Then,
suddenly, came a letter, postmarked Siberia. Fr. Ciszek was alive! He
remained in sporadic contact with his native country while his family
sought to secure his liberty.
On October 11, 1963, the U.S. State Department announced to the world
that a deal had been struck with the USSR. Two American prisoners were
to be released in exchange for two Soviet spies captured in the United
States. One of the Americans was a Jesuit priest. On the morning of
October 12, Fr. Ciszek stepped onto the tarmac at Idlewild Airport (now
JFK) in New York.
Friends and colleagues implored the repatriated priest to record his experiences, and he did so in two books: With God in Russia (1964) and He Leadeth Me
(1973). It is no wonder that his accounts of life “behind enemy lines”
were a sensation in Cold War America, but for Catholics they hold a
meaning that goes beyond the historical contingencies of a particular
period. In the details of this particular life we see written again the
themes that play across Christian history: proclamation, witness,
sacrifice, death, and resurrection. Fr. Ciszek’s labors evoke the
heroism of the great Jesuit missionaries who preceded him: Francis
Xavier, Paul Miki, Matteo Ricci, Isaac Jogues, Eusebio Kino. Not to
mention the bearers of the gospel who formed the Church for fifteen
hundred years before the Society of Jesus existed: Paul of Tarsus,
Patrick, Boniface, Cyril and Methodius.
During his time in Russia, Ciszek narrowly escaped death by drowning,
freezing, starvation, illness, electrocution, firing squad, explosion,
and beating. Millions of victims of the Gulag died in these ways and
others. Why did Fr. Ciszek survive? The answer is once again the
“strange and mysterious ways of divine providence,” but one might
speculate. Fr. Ciszek did: “I felt that one reason that God in his
providence had brought me safely home was so that I might help others
understand these truths a little better.” Which truths? “That God has a
special purpose, a special love, a special providence to all those he
has created,” and that, therefore, “every moment of our life has a
purpose, that every action of ours, no matter how dull or routine or
trivial it may seem in itself, has a dignity and a worth beyond human
understanding.”
In the midst of the Cold War, this was a message the West needed to
hear. Fr. Ciszek was uniquely qualified to announce it. He possessed a
combination of street-smart intelligence and genuine humility; an
astonishing memory; an indomitable faith; and a native appreciation of
American culture that was untainted by jingoism or xenophobia. His story
helped to shape among American Catholics an anti-Communist ethos that
was tethered to faith and fueled not by hatred of the Russian people but
by a desire to free them from oppression—to restore to them the
transcendent truth about man’s relationship with God that materialist
ideology tried to stamp out.
Ciszek remained for the rest of his life in the United States,
residing and teaching at Fordham University. He died on the Feast of the
Immaculate Conception in 1984, and his cause for canonization was
formally introduced in 1990 at the behest of the Byzantine Catholic
Eparchy of Passaic, New Jersey. By that time, the Berlin Wall had
fallen, the Catholic Church was enjoying its freedom in Poland, and the
Gulag where Ciszek had spent ten physically miserable years was largely
dismantled. Yet changing circumstances do not diminish the timeless
witness of the saints. The good news of God’s “special purpose, special
love, and special providence” is a message the world still needs to
hear.
This article is reprinted from Crisis Magazine.
By Crisis Magazine
Crisis Magazine gives faithful Catholics the confidence to defend the
common good, a just society, the teachings the Church, the family, and
the sanctity of life.
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