Walter Ciszek

Walter Joseph Ciszek, S.J. (November 4, 1904 – December 8, 1984) was a Polish-American Jesuit priest of the Russian Greek Catholic Church who conducted clandestine missionary work in the Soviet Union between 1939 and 1963.

Fifteen of these years were spent in confinement and hard labor in the Gulag, plus five preceding them in Moscow's infamous Lubyanka prison.

Ciszek was born on November 4, 1904, in the mining town of Shenandoah, Pennsylvania, to Polish immigrants Mary (Mika) and Martin Ciszek, who had emigrated to the United States in the 1890s from Galicia in Austria-Hungary.

A former street gang member, he shocked his family by deciding to become a priest.

Ciszek entered the Jesuit novitiate in Poughkeepsie, New York in 1928.

The following year, he volunteered to serve as a missionary to Russia, where the Bolshevik Revolution had taken place 12 years before.

Christians were being openly persecuted there, and few believers had access to a priest.

Pope Pius XI made an appeal to priests from around the world to go to Russia as missionaries.

In 1934, Ciszek was sent to Rome to study theology and Russian, the history of Russia and liturgy at the Pontifical Russian College (or 'Russicum'), a Jesuit-run seminary established to train priests of the Russian Greek Catholic Church for missionary work in the Soviet Union and the Russian diaspora.

His fellow Russicum seminarians included Alexander Kurtna, a convert from Estonian Orthodoxy whom Ciszek referred to in his memoirs only by the codename "Misha".

In 1937, Ciszek was ordained a priest in the Byzantine Rite in Rome taking the name of Vladimir.

In 1938, Ciszek was sent to the Jesuit mission in Albertyn in eastern Poland.

With the outbreak of World War II in 1939, the Soviet Union occupied eastern Poland and forced Ciszek to close his mission.

Arriving in Lviv, he realized that it would be easy for a priest to enter the Soviet Union amid the streams of exiles going East.

Following his expulsion by the Russicum's Rector in 1940, Kurtna worked, with only one interruption, between 1940 and 1944 as a translator for the Vatican's Congregation for the Eastern Churches.

During those same years, Kurtna covertly spied for the Soviet NKVD, with devastating results for Walter Ciszek and many other underground priests and faithful.

After securing the permission of Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky, he crossed the border in 1940 under the assumed identity of Władymyr Łypynski.

With two of his fellow Jesuits, he traveled 2400 km by train to the logging town of Chusovoy, in the Ural Mountains.

For one year, he worked as an unskilled logger while discreetly performing religious ministry at the same time.

Ciszek was arrested in 1941 under false accusations of espionage for Nazi Germany and the Vatican.

To Ciszek's shock, the NKVD already knew his real name and that he was an American citizen and a Catholic priest.

He was then sent to the Lubyanka prison in Moscow, the national headquarters of the NKVD (secret police agency).

He spent five years there, most of them in solitary confinement.

In 1942, he signed a confession under severe torture to espionage and was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor in the GULAG.

Ciszek was to remain in Lubyanka for four more years.

Kurtna, who was always loyal to the USSR, only started spying for Nazi Germany in 1943 because his handler, SS Obersturmbannführer Herbert Kappler, threatened otherwise to send Kurtna and his wife to a concentration camp.

Kurtna, however, turned the tables on Kappler by stealing the codebooks from his office and passing them to the Soviets.

In 1946, he was sent by train to Krasnoyarsk then 20 days by boat north on the Yenisei River until reaching 300km above the Arctic Circle to the city of Norilsk, the center of the labor camp complex known as Norillag.

There, Fr. Ciszek was forced to load coal onto freighter vessels and later transferred to working in coal mines located in the Permafrost.

A year later, he was sent to work on the construction of a nickel, copper, cobalt, platinum, and palladium ore refinery.

Ironically, Kurtna and Ciszek met one another again in 1948 as fellow political prisoners in Norillag.

From 1953 to 1955, he worked in mines.

His memoirs provide a vivid description of the Norilsk uprising, which started at Gorlag spread through Norillag in the aftermath of Joseph Stalin's death.

Throughout his lengthy imprisonment, Ciszek continued to pray, to offer both the Tridentine Mass and the Byzantine Rite Divine Liturgy, to hear confessions, conduct retreats and perform secret and illegal parish ministry.

Until he was allowed to write to America in 1955, he was presumed dead by both his family and the Society of Jesus.

By April 22, 1955, Ciszek's hard labor sentence was complete, and he was released with the restriction to live only in the city of Norilsk.

At this time, he was finally able to write to his sisters in the United States.

He was released and returned to the United States in 1963, after which he wrote two books, He Leadeth Me and the memoir With God in Russia, and served as a spiritual director.

Since 1990, Ciszek's life has been under consideration by the Catholic Church for beatification.

His current title is Servant of God.