- Ciszek, Walter J. with Daniel L. Flaherty.
He Leadeth Me.
San Francisco: Ignatius Press, [1973] 1995.
ISBN 978-0-89870-546-1.
-
Shortly after joining the Jesuit order in 1928, the author
volunteered for the “Russian missions” proclaimed
by Pope Pius XI. Consequently, he received most of his
training at a newly-established centre in Rome, where in
addition to the usual preparation for the Jesuit priesthood,
he mastered the Russian language and the sacraments of the
Byzantine rite in addition to those of the Latin. At the time of his
ordination in 1937, Stalin's policy prohibited the entry of priests
of all kinds to the Soviet Union, so Ciszek was assigned
to a Jesuit mission in eastern Poland (as the Polish-American
son of first-generation immigrants, he was acquainted with the
Polish language). When Germany and the Soviet Union invaded
Poland in 1939 at the outbreak of what was to become World War II,
he found himself in the Soviet-occupied region and subject to
increasingly stringent curbs on religious activities imposed
by the Soviet occupation.
The Soviets began to recruit labour brigades in Poland
to work in factories and camps in the Urals, and the author and
another priest from the mission decided to volunteer for one
of these brigades, concealing their identity as priests,
so as to continue their ministry to the Polish labourers
and the ultimate goal of embarking on their intended
mission to Russia. Upon arriving at a lumbering camp,
the incognito priests found that the incessant, backbreaking
work and intense scrutiny by the camp bosses made it impossible
to minister to the other labourers.
When Hitler double crossed Stalin and invaded the Soviet
Union in 1941, the Red Army was initially in disarray
and Stalin apparently paralysed, but the NKVD (later to become
the KGB) did what it has always done best with great efficiency:
Ciszek, along with hundreds of other innocents, was rounded
up as a “German spy” and thrown in prison. When
it was discovered that he was, in fact, a Catholic priest,
the charge was changed to “Vatican spy”, and he
was sent to the
Lubyanka,
where he was held throughout the entire war—five years—most
of it in solitary confinement, and subjected to the relentless,
incessant, and brutal interrogations for which the NKVD never seemed
to lack resources even as the Soviet Union was fighting for its
survival.
After refusing to be recruited as a spy, he was sentenced to
15 years hard labour in Siberia and shipped in a boxcar
filled with hardened criminals to the first of a series of camps
where only the strongest in body and spirit could survive. He
served the entire 15 years less only three months, and was then
released with a restricted internal passport which only permitted
him to live in specific areas and required him to register with
the police everywhere he went. In 1947, the Jesuit order listed
him as dead in a Soviet prison, but he remained on the books of the
KGB, and in 1963 was offered as an exchange to the U.S. for
two Soviet spies in U.S. custody, and arrived back in
the U.S. after twenty-three years in the Soviet Union.
In this book, as in his earlier
With God in Russia,
he recounts the events of his extraordinary life and
provides a first-hand look at the darkest parts of
a totalitarian society. Unlike the earlier book,
which is more biographical, in the present volume
the author uses the events he experienced as the
point of departure for a very Jesuit exploration of
topics including the body and soul, the priesthood, the
apostolate, the kingdom of God on Earth, humility,
and faith. He begins the chapter on the fear of death by
observing, “Facing a firing squad is a pretty good
test, I guess, of your theology of death” (p. 143).
As he notes in the Epilogue, on the innumerable occasions
he was asked, after his return to the U.S., “How
did you manage to survive?” and replied along the
lines explained herein: by consigning his destiny to the will
of God and accepting whatever came as God's will for him, many
responded that “my beliefs in this matter are too simple,
even naïve; they may find that my faith is not only
childlike but childish.” To this he replies, “I am
sorry if they feel this way, but I have written only what
I know and what I have experienced. … My answer has
always been—and can only be—that I survived
on the basis of the faith others may find too simple and
naïve” (p. 199).
Indeed, to this reader, it seemed that Ciszek's ongoing
discovery that fulfillment and internal peace lay in
complete submission to the will of God as revealed in
the events one faces from day to day sometimes verged upon
a fatalism I associate more with Islam than Catholicism.
But this is the philosophy developed by an initially proud
and ambitious man which permitted him not only to survive
the almost unimaginable, but to achieve, to some extent, his
mission to bring the word of God to those living in
the officially atheist Soviet Union.
A more
detailed biography with several photographs of
Father Ciszek is available. Since 1990, he has been
a
candidate for
beatification and sainthood.
May 2009 