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Friday, May 22, 2009

Reading List: He Leadeth Me

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.

Posted at May 22, 2009 22:04