Father Walter Ciszek, S.J.

A Priest in the Gulag

Walter Joseph Ciszek was born on November 4, 1904, in the coal-mining town of Shenandoah, Pennsylvania, the son of Polish immigrants. A tough, scrappy boy, he entered the Society of Jesus in 1928, drawn by its rigorous discipline. When Pope Pius XI called for priests willing to serve in Russia, young Ciszek volunteered immediately. He was sent to Rome’s Pontifical Russian College, the Russicum, where he studied Russian language, culture, and the Byzantine Rite liturgy. He was ordained in 1937.

In 1939, as war engulfed Europe, Father Ciszek slipped into the Soviet Union under a false identity. In June 1941, the NKVD arrested him, already knowing his true name and that he was an American Jesuit priest. What followed were five harrowing years in Moscow’s infamous Lubyanka Prison: interrogations, isolation, and relentless psychological pressure to confess to espionage. He was then sentenced to fifteen years of hard labor in the Siberian gulags, working in coal mines and lumber camps under brutal conditions.

Even in the camps, Father Ciszek secretly celebrated Mass with scraps of bread and drops of wine, heard confessions, and ministered to fellow prisoners. After his sentence ended in 1955, he continued underground priestly work in the Siberian cities of Norilsk, Krasnoyarsk, and Abakan, risking re-arrest to serve the faithful.

In 1963, in a prisoner exchange negotiated by President John F. Kennedy, Father Ciszek was returned to the United States after twenty-three years in Russia. His family, who had received a letter from the Soviet government declaring him dead, welcomed him home in stunned joy. He spent his remaining years at Fordham University as a spiritual director, sharing the profound lessons of total abandonment to God’s will that the gulags had taught him. He died on December 8, 1984, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception.

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