Schuylkill County Priest On The Road To Sainthood

From PhillyBurbs.com

Local clergy are asking the Vatican to consider for sainthood a priest from Schuylkill County who spent 15 years in gulags for trying to spread Christianity in the atheist Soviet Union.

The Diocese of Allentown recently shipped to Rome three wooden crates of what they believe is substantive evidence detailing the Rev. Walter J. Ciszek's life of "heroic virtue."

The crates contain six cardboard boxes of documents, including sworn testimony from 45 witnesses, and thousands of typed pages of Ciszek's meditations and writings. As ancient traditions dictate, the boxes were sealed with cord and red wax, and stamped with Bishop Edward P. Cullen's signet ring.

A review of the documents, which took more than 16 years to compile and organize, begins Tuesday.

Monsignor Anthony Muntone, pastor of St. Elizabeth of Hungary Church in Whitehall Township, will go to Rome next week to open the boxes and present the evidence and plead on Ciszek's behalf for beatification, which is the next step in the canonization process.

"It has been an enormously time-consuming task," Muntone said Friday. "Next we will go back to closely examining the claims of miracles."

Ciszek (pronounced Chih-zeck) is on track to become the first saint from the Allentown diocese. He is the only person from the region under review for sainthood, diocesan officials said.

Before Ciszek can be beatified, the Vatican will need proof of one miracle. A second miracle is needed for canonization in the case of those who have died naturally, as did Ciszek.

The drive to have him declared a saint began five years after his death in New York in 1984.

Born in Shenandoah in 1904, Ciszek was ordained in 1937 in Rome and sent to a parish in eastern Poland, only to flee with his flock to the Soviet Union as the Nazi blitzkrieg advanced in 1939-40. There, he was charged as a Nazi spy and a Vatican agent. He spent so much time in prison, where he was beaten, drugged and starved, that his family and the Jesuits believed him dead.

Five of those years were in solitary confinement at Moscow's infamous Lubyanka prison. His spirit and faith unshaken, he continued to celebrate Mass in the labor camps of Siberia, where he was sent until being released in 1955.

Ciszek was allowed to return to the United States in 1963 in exchange for two Soviet spies. He continued counseling, and gave retreats and talks while in residence at Fordham University in New York.

One of the most recent American saints is Mother Katharine Drexel, who founded the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament in lower Bucks County and was canonized in 2000. John Neumann, a saint canonized in 1977, was bishop of Philadelphia in the 1850s, when the Lehigh Valley was part of that diocese.