Pope Benedict XVI Blog

Review of Father Walter Ciszek's life for possible sainthood to start Tuesday

Father Ciszek's writings, especially "He Leadeth Me" and "With God in Russia" are testaments of his patience during suffering. His life is a true witness to God's love and mercy.

Standard~Speaker
Monday, 13 March 2006

Vatican to begin review of Ciszek for sainthood

Sunday, 12 March 2006
By L.A. TARONE
tarone@standardspeaker.com

The Diocese of Allentown is asking the Vatican to canonize a Shenandoah priest who survived more than two decades of imprisonment in the Soviet Union.

The diocese sent three crates of materials concerning the Rev. Walter Ciszek’s life to Rome two weeks ago. The crates included six cardboard boxes that contained things such as sworn testimony from 45 witnesses and thousands of typed pages of his writings and meditations.

The documents reportedly took 16 years to compile. The Vatican is slated to review them beginning Tuesday.

“They arrived last week,” Sister Albertine of the Father Walter Ciszek Prayer League in Shenandoah said Saturday night. “We got official word they are there.”

“That is good because it means the church has recognized that Father Walter is a person worth looking more deeply into to determine whether he should be canonized as a saint,” Sister Albertine added.

The sister further said the diocese’s Monsignor Anthony Muntone is on his way to Rome to open the boxes for examination this week. She added this was the first step in the process.

“The packages have to be opened in his presence,” Sister Albertine said.
She added that the crates and other packages had to be sealed and had to arrive untampered.

“We had to send copies of his documents – both published and unpublished – that will prove in his writings he led a heroically virtuous life,” Sister Albertine said. “The documents that were sent in contain that proof.”

“We had a great deal of his unpublished writings – from things such as retreats and mailings – that people were gracious enough to give to the cause,” Elaine Cusat of Hazleton, who is involved in the drive, said.

Born in Shenandoah in 1904, Ciszek was ordained in Rome in 1937 and sent to Poland that year. But when Nazi Germany overran the country, he and his parish fled to the Soviet Union.

There, he was arrested by the Soviet secret police, at the time called the NKVD (later renamed the KGB), and charged first with being a Nazi spy – a common charge regarding anyone who’d been in territory once controlled by the Nazis under Stalin’s USSR – then with being a spy for the Vatican.
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posted by Dr. Denice Hanley, DPM, M.Div. @ 12:00 PM