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Father Walter Ciszek, who died on the Feast
of the Immaculate Conception, December 8, 1984, grew up in Pennsylvania in an ethnic Polish community. As a Jesuit seminarian
in the 1930’s, he answer Pope Pius XI’s call for volunteers to train for what was called the “Russian Missions”
for the Holy Father had hopes of returning Russian to its historical religious roots from the official atheism of its Communist
government under Stalin
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Father Walter Ciszek, who died on the
Feast of the Immaculate Conception, December 8, 1984, grew up in Pennsylvania in an ethnic Polish community. As a Jesuit seminarian
in the 1930’s, he answer Pope Pius XI’s call for volunteers to train for what was called the “Russian Missions”
for the Holy Father had hopes of returning Russian to its historical religious roots from the official atheism of its Communist
government under Stalin.
Unable to enter into Russia following his ordination in the late 1930’s, Father Ciszek
was assigned to a parish in Eastern Poland which was overrun by the Red Army at the outbreak of World War II. Few people remember
that when Hitler attacked Poland from the West, by a secret treaty with Stalin, the Communists attacked from the East.
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Father Ciszek and another priest saw this as an opportunity
to enter Russia disguised as laborers but soon found that everyone there was afraid even to discuss religion. When Hitler
attacked Russia in May, 1941, he was arrested as a “Vatican Spy”, a charge so ludicrous that Father Ciszek didn’t
take it seriously for a long time. Eventually, he spent five years in solitary confinement in Moscow and another 15 years
in a gulag, a slave labor camp in Siberia. Somehow he survived. His family as well as his Jesuit superiors had long given
him up for dead, and they learned that he was alive when, as a recently released ex-convict, he mailed a post card home from
a small Siberian village.
After he was released, as a former ‘spy’, he wasn’t allowed to leave and
had to earn his living in manual labor in various villages. He had many adventures and run ins with the Secret Police as people
flocked to him for the Mass and Sacraments, and in November, 1963, Attorney General Robert Kennedy engineered a swap for Father
Ciszek in exchange for a couple of real Russian KGB agents captured in the U.S. He lived out his remaining years at the Jesuit
Community at Fordham in New York City.
Any Miracles attributed to Father Ciszek please send to:
The Father Walter Ciszek Prayer League, Inc.
231 North Jardin Street
Shenandoah, PA 17976 | |
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