Without hope, we can’t go on. With hope, we can do things we thought were impossible.
That may be the message of every saint’s life — but it is the overriding message of the heroic acts of the Venerable Father Emil Kapaun, and a constant theme of the life of Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton.
Father Emil Kapaun was a Kansan who died in a North Korean prison camp.
He was born in 1916 to German-Bohemian immigrants in Pilsen, Kansas, where he grew up on a farm outside of town. He was remembered as a hard worker on the farm — quiet, with a dry wit.
He entered a Catholic seminary from high school and was ordained when he was 24 years old. Early in his priesthood, in 1945, he volunteered for service in the chaplaincy in World War II, where he found his life’s calling. He became a chaplain on Army bases at home and overseas, and in 1949 spent what would be his last Christmas at home. Soon, he was headed to Japan with the Army. From there he was deployed to the Korean War.
From that point on, he began to be known for incredible heroism. In July of 1950, Father Kapaun and his assistant rescued a wounded soldier stranded by enemy fire, for which he was awarded the Bronze Star Medal with Valor.
He stayed with his men through six weeks of sleepless nights during the Battle of the Pusan Perimeter. Father Kapaun would go from camp to camp despite enemy fire, baptizing, hearing confessions, and celebrating Mass on the hood of his Jeep.
Mike Dowe served with the priest. “Father would go to the sound of the guns. He would go jump to the foxholes where the shooting was. And he would usually have had some fruit picked out of an orchard or something,” he said. “He’d leave something with the guys or give them a smoke on his pipe or something, say a prayer and go on to the next foxhole.”
He described how delighted Father Kapaun was when his pipe was shot in half by a sniper while he was smoking it. “He had a reputation as being a soldier’s soldier — a guy that could talk to the GIs in GI language. He wasn’t at all sort of overly religious about anything. He just made them feel like he was one of the guys. And then he would give them hope and courage, even under fire.”
It was after their victory in that battle that Father Kapaun’s men faced their biggest blow to hope.
After they fulfilled their mission that autumn, soldiers expected to be sent home and began to look forward to Thanksgiving or Christmas with their families. But then, on Nov. 2, 1950, 20,000 Chinese soldiers descended on the 3,000 U.S. troops.
In the fighting that followed, Father Kapaun refused offers to escape and rescued three dozen men in acts of astonishing bravery, for which he was awarded the Medal of Honor. In the end, though, he was taken prisoner along with his men. Instead of going home for the holidays, they were marched 87 miles to a prison camp near the Chinese border.
The conditions that winter were so extreme that men were dying daily from malnutrition and cold.
Father Kapaun made it his personal mission to raise morale in any way he could. He dug latrines and snuck into men’s tents to pray, chat, or just tell jokes. He stole small items from their captors that he could give as “gifts” to men to brighten their lives in small ways. He also often skipped eating so he could give his food away.
“He would give them a real hope,” said Dowe. “And it turns out that is what a prisoner needs, or anyone under those kinds of dark conditions. If he maintains faith in his God and his country, his conscience enables him to have an incentive to continue under very difficult circumstances. That’s necessary to stay alive. And that’s what Father gave all of us.”
Father Kapaun noticed something: Soon after men stopped caring about the lice in their hair, they would die. It was a sign that they had given up. So he began removing lice from men who were no longer bothering to do it themselves. When men were angry with each other, he would broker peace. When no one would talk to someone, he would.
That kind of hope is necessary for any vocation.
As Pope Benedict XVI put it in his encyclical on hope, Spe Salvi, “We need the greater and lesser hopes that keep us going day by day. But these are not enough without the great hope, which must surpass everything else. This great hope can only be God, who encompasses the whole of reality and who can bestow upon us what we, by ourselves, cannot attain.”
That is ultimately the hope Father Kapaun pointed to — and what St. Elizabeth Ann Seton aimed toward from her earliest days.
As a 19-year-old wife, she wrote to her husband, William, when he was away from their New York home on a business trip. She missed him dearly, she said, but, “I must look forward to tomorrow and tomorrow. Hope travels on nor quits us till we die.”
The married life that followed tested Elizabeth’s hope greatly. She would eventually lose her husband and two daughters to tuberculosis. Her husband died in Italy, where she had brought him to seek a cure. It was there that she embraced the Catholic faith of their hosts, the Filicchi family. After returning home, she brought her entire family into the Church and soon entered religious life.
Late in life, hope was the theme of one of her last letters to Antonio Filicchi before she herself died of tuberculosis.
“Eternity, eternity, my brother! Will I pass it with you? So much has been given,” she said. “I even dare hope for that, which I forever ask as the dearest, most desired favor. If I never write you again from this world, pray for me continually. If I am heard in the next, oh, Antonio, what would I not obtain for you, your [brother] Filippo, and all yours!”
That ultimate hope is what Father Kapaun left with his men.
Father Kapaun told the soldiers in the prison camp that if he ever died, he would look out for them.
He did contract pneumonia and die on May 23, 1951, after telling his men, “I’m going to where I’ve always wanted to go.”
That is the ultimate hope.
TOM HOOPES, author 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 Story podcast about the life of Christ. His book What Pope Francis Really Said is now available on Audible. 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.
Image: Public Domain, Wikicommons
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