The story of Father Walter Ciszek, like the story of St. Elizabeth Ann Seton, challenges the old maxim that “God never gives you more than you can handle.” He does, in fact, give you more than you can take— so that you can learn to let him handle it.
Father Walter Ciszek spent years in hidden suffering — a hard life of pain and exile in Soviet captivity, in conditions that eventually killed him decades after he regained his freedom.
His uncompromising dedication to his missionary work has inspired leaders such as Bishop Robert Barron and Father Mike Schmitz. But in an era where young men are devotees of life coaches such as David Goggins and Wim Hof, who teach personal resolve, Father Walter learned that his resources don’t come from his own strength, but only from surrendering his strength to God.
Walter Ciszek was a born brawler.
Born in 1904 as the seventh of 13 children in his Polish immigrant family in Shenandoah, Pa., Walter made his presence felt. He learned how to defend himself with his fists and his friends, leading a gang of street toughs. He later regretted his antagonistic spirit and saw the long painful experiences he went through as God’s way of correcting his temperament.
He entered the Jesuits in 1928 and soon heard that Pope Pius XI wanted candidates for a new Russian center in Rome — and he experienced the news as a “direct call from God.”
He enrolled in the center where, along with Western theology, he learned about the Byzantine Rite and, along with Church Latin, he learned Russian. When he was ordained in 1937 he was sent into the Soviet Union — two years before Germany invaded his parents’ homeland, Poland, from the West while the Soviet Union invaded Poland from the East.
Father Ciszek entered Russia with false identification papers and was working there when he was arrested and charged with being a “Vatican spy” in 1941. So, as a new priest, he found himself spending five years of solitary confinement at Moscow’s Lubyanka Prison.
His brawling temperament helped him survive the mentally and spiritually dangerous ordeal of solitary confinement where boredom is only broken by beatings and interrogations. He held on to his sanity by willpower, keeping a strict order to his days of praying, working at tasks, such as polishing his cell floor, and reciting poetry.
But then, the experience broke him.
At first in his solitary confinement, he said “I had asked for God’s help but had really believed in my ability to avoid evil and to meet every challenge … I had been thanking God all the while that I was not like the rest of men.”
Eventually, though, he realized “I had relied almost completely on myself in this most critical test — and I had failed.”
Near despair at the overwhelming circumstances, he surrendered. “I knew that I must abandon myself completely to the will of the Father and live from now on in this spirit of self-abandonment to God,” he said.
He needed it: He was sentenced in Moscow to 15 years in Siberia. At a labor camp he was sent to, Ciszek went from little exercise to physically demanding work in a Gulag coal mine. He did it all with little food and inadequate protection from the cold.
Nonetheless, he found joy in the labor camp, he said, because “I was able to function as a priest again. I was able to say Mass, although in secret, to hear confessions, to baptize, to comfort the sick and to minister to the dying.”
He learned that his job wasn’t just to serve but to witness, showing by his way of life who Jesus Christ is. The Mass became a center of his life and identity.
Ciszek wrote two books about his experiences. With God in Russia is the recounting of his experiences that his superiors requested, and He Leadeth Me was a book of spiritual insights that he pursued on his own. They are powerful testimonies.
“We said our daily Mass somewhere at the work site during the noon break. Despite this added hardship, everyone observed a strict Eucharistic fast from the night before, passing up a chance for breakfast and working all morning on an empty stomach,” he said. “We said Mass in drafty storage shacks, or huddled in mud and slush in the corner of a building site … there were no altars, candles, bells, flowers, music, snow-white linens, stained glass or the warmth that even the simplest parish church could offer. Yet in these primitive conditions, the Mass brought you closer to God than anyone might conceivably imagine.”
Those Masses, he said, made “the sufferings I endured seem totally worthwhile and necessary.”
He successfully went from no activity in Moscow to surpassing his work quotas in the mines, and was transferred to a chemical factory in the Gulag city Norilsk. There, he had the freedom to write to his family members in the United States. However, since he spent his time ministering as a priest, the KGB cracked down on him, transferring him to one city after another.
“I should have died 20 different times in the Soviet Union, but God had something for me to do,” he told a friend later.
St. Elizabeth Ann Seton had the same missionary spirit.
She once wrote, “If I was a man, all the world should not stop me. I would go straight in [St. Francis] Xavier’s footsteps. The waters of the abyss and the expanded sky would be well-explored.”
But she also learned that it is not her strength, but God’s, that prevails. To one of her sisters on mission who had shared the hardships she was facing, Mother Seton wrote, “Never mind, God is God in it all. If you are to do his work, the strength will be given you.”
Then, importantly, she added: “If not, my precious child, some one else will do it, and you may come back to your corner.”
Father Ciszek learned the same lesson. For a man as driven as he was, retreating from the missions was difficult in its own way. In 1963, after more than a quarter century in Russia, President John F. Kennedy negotiated Father Ciszek’s return home.
He worked at Fordham University for the next 20 years. Photographs from this time show his easy smile, and he was known as upbeat and kind. Nonetheless, his old temperament remained, according to a Carmelite num he knew late in his life. Having experienced hunger, he expressed thanks in a special way at each meal — and had a hard time accepting the waste of food he saw all around him in America, and the extravagance of some Jesuits.
He had strong opinions and felt things deeply, but “When he had to deal with something he didn’t like, he didn’t expect someone else to change — he changed himself,” she said.
God took one thing after another away from Mother Seton — husband, two children, plans, her health, and finally, her life. Father Ciszek experienced something similar.
Lifelong breathing problems from conditions in the Siberian mine forced him to sleep sitting up, and eventually killed him. He died at age 80 on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. He was found in his pajamas in his sleeping chair, rosary in hand. His last written words were “I have given all for you, my Lord.”
TOM HOOPES, autor más reciente de El Rosario de San Juan Pablo II, es escritor residente en el Benedictine College de Kansas, donde imparte clases. Es anfitrión de La extraordinaria Story podcast sobre la vida de Cristo. Su libro Lo que dijo realmente el Papa Francisco ya está disponible en Audible. Antiguo reportero en la zona de Washington, D.C., fue secretario de prensa del Presidente del Comité de Medios y Arbitrios de la Cámara de Representantes de los Estados Unidos y pasó 10 años como editor del periódico National Catholic Register y de la revista Faith & Family. Su trabajo aparece con frecuencia en el Register, Aleteia y Catholic Digest. Vive en Atchison, Kansas, con su esposa, April, y tiene nueve hijos.
Imagen: Dominio públicoImage: The Father Walter Ciszek Prayer League Inc.
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