The story of Father Walter Ciszek, like the story of St. Elizabeth Ann Seton, challenges the old maxim that \u201cGod never gives you more than you can handle.\u201d He does, in fact, give you more than you can take\u2014 so that you can learn to let him handle it.<\/p>\n
Father Walter Ciszek spent years in hidden suffering \u2014 a hard life of pain and exile in Soviet captivity, in conditions that eventually killed him decades after he regained his freedom.<\/p>\n
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\u2019t come from his own strength, but only from surrendering\u00a0his strength to God.<\/p>\n
Walter Ciszek was a born brawler.<\/strong><\/p>\n 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\u2019s way of correcting his temperament.<\/p>\n He entered the Jesuits in 1928 and soon heard that Pope Pius XI wanted candidates for a new Russian center in Rome \u2014 and he experienced the news as a \u201cdirect call from God.\u201d<\/p>\n 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 \u2014 two years before Germany invaded his parents\u2019 homeland, Poland, from the West while the Soviet Union invaded Poland from the East.<\/p>\n Father Ciszek entered Russia with false identification papers and was working there when he was arrested and charged with being a \u201cVatican spy\u201d in 1941. So, as a new priest, he found himself spending five years of solitary confinement at Moscow\u2019s Lubyanka Prison.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n But then, the experience broke him.<\/strong><\/p>\n At first in his solitary confinement, he said \u201cI had asked for God\u2019s help but had really believed in my ability to avoid evil and to meet every challenge \u2026 I had been thanking God all the while that I was not like the rest of men.\u201d<\/p>\n Eventually, though, he realized \u201cI had relied almost completely on myself in this most critical test \u2014 and I had failed.\u201d<\/p>\n Near despair at the overwhelming circumstances, he surrendered. \u201cI 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,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Nonetheless, he found joy in the labor camp, he said, because \u201cI 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.\u201d<\/p>\n He learned that his job wasn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n Ciszek wrote two books about his experiences. With God in Russia <\/em>is the recounting of his experiences that his superiors requested, and He Leadeth Me <\/em>was a book of spiritual insights that he pursued on his own. They are powerful testimonies.<\/p>\n \u201cWe 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,\u201d he said. \u201cWe said Mass in drafty storage shacks, or huddled in mud and slush in the corner of a building site \u2026 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.\u201d<\/p>\n Those Masses, he said, made \u201cthe sufferings I endured seem totally worthwhile and necessary.\u201d<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u201cI should have died 20 different times in the Soviet Union, but God had something for me to do,\u201d he told a friend later.<\/p>\n St. Elizabeth Ann Seton had the same missionary spirit.<\/strong><\/p>\n She once wrote, \u201cIf I was a man, all the world should not stop me. I would go straight in [St. Francis] Xavier\u2019s footsteps. The waters of the abyss and the expanded sky would be well-explored.\u201d<\/p>\n But she also learned that it is not her strength, but God\u2019s, that prevails. To one of her sisters on mission who had shared the hardships she was facing, Mother Seton wrote, \u201cNever mind, God is God in it all. If you are to do his work, the strength will be given you.\u201d<\/p>\n Then, importantly, she added: \u201cIf not, my precious child, some one else will do it, and you may come back to your corner.\u201d<\/p>\n 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\u2019s return home.<\/p>\n 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 \u2014 and had a hard time accepting the waste of food he saw all around him in America, and the extravagance of some Jesuits.<\/p>\n He had strong opinions and felt things deeply, but \u201cWhen he had to deal with something he didn\u2019t like, he didn\u2019t expect someone else to change \u2014 he changed himself,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n God took one thing after another away from Mother Seton \u2014 husband, two children, plans, her health, and finally, her life. Father Ciszek experienced something similar.<\/p>\n 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 \u201cI have given all for you, my Lord.\u201d<\/p>\n TOM HOOPES<\/strong>,\u00a0author most recently of The Rosary of Saint John Paul II, is writer in residence at Benedictine College in Kansas, where he teaches. He hosts The Extraordinary Stor<\/a>y podcast about the life of Christ. His book What Pope Francis Really Said<\/a> is now available on Audible<\/a>. A former reporter in the Washington, D.C., area, he served as press secretary for the U.S. House Ways & Means Committee Chairman and spent 10 years as editor of the National Catholic Register newspaper and Faith & Family magazine. His work frequently appears in the Register, Aleteia, and Catholic Digest. He lives in Atchison, Kansas, with his wife, April, and has nine children.<\/em><\/p>\n