Saturday, March 24, 2012

Shenandoah priest's sainthood cause advances

A priest from Schuylkill County who spent two brutal decades in Soviet prison camps is another step closer to sainthood, the Allentown Catholic Diocese said.

The Vatican Congregation for the Causes of Saints has declared "valid" the Diocese's investigation into the life and virtues of the Rev. Walter Ciszek, who was born in Shenandoah in 1904 and is buried at the Jesuit Center in Wernersville, Berks County.

That decree allows the canonization process to continue in Rome, where investigators will continue to examine the priest's history for evidence of extraordinary holiness — and for anything that might disqualify him from sainthood. Canonization is the church's formal declaration that a soul has achieved heaven.

"This breakthrough in the process is very encouraging and a testimony to the commitment and dedication of all those involved," Bishop John Barres said in a statement.
Ciszek was a Jesuit missionary to the Soviet Union. He was accused of being a spy for the Vatican and held prisoner for 23 years until he was returned to the U.S. in a spy exchange in 1963. His family and the Jesuit order had believed him to be dead.

After living for a time in Wernersville, where he wrote his memoirs, Ciszek moved to Fordham University in New York, where he died in 1984. His remains were returned to Wernersville for burial.

The drive to have him declared a saint began five years after his death in the Byzantine Catholic Diocese of Passaic, N.J. At the Vatican's request, the Allentown diocese took over the investigation in 1996.

Over the next years, the diocese completed the inquiry and shipped the pertinent documents to the Vatican in 2006: testimony from 45 witnesses, Ciszek's published and unpublished works, and transcription of hundreds of his handwritten documents.

Last year, an additional 4,000 pages of documentation were sent, including information from the Jesuit archives in the United States and Rome; the original store of documents archived at the Father Ciszek Center in Shenandoah; and other documents obtained from Russia.

According to Monsignor Anthony Muntone, the co-postulator for Ciszek's cause, the next phase of the process involves presenting a summary of the documents by the postulator in Rome, together with a biography and information proving the priest's "heroic virtue."

Nine theologians will determine if Ciszek exhibited the theological virtues of faith, hope and charity and the cardinal virtues of prudence, justice, fortitude and temperance to a heroic degree, said Muntone, a priest at St. Elizabeth of Hungary Church in Whitehall Township.

"If the theologians agree that his virtue was indeed heroic, the cause will be passed on to the bishops and cardinals who are members of the congregation for their study," Muntone said.

If their judgment is favorable, the prefect of the congregation will present the results of the process to the Pope. If he approves, he will direct the congregation to publish a decree declaring Ciszek "venerable," which is two steps short of sainthood.

For the next step — beatification — the Vatican would need proof of a miracle credited to Ciszek's intercession. And for the final step, canonization, proof of a second miracle would be needed.

As a boy in Shenandoah, Ciszek led a gang of Polish street children in the tiny coal town, but grew up to become the first American Jesuit priest to join the Eastern Rite.

He was ordained in 1937 and sent to a parish in eastern Poland, fleeing to the Soviet Union as the Nazi blitzkrieg advanced in 1939-40.

There, he was charged as a Vatican agent and imprisoned, enduring beatings, druggings and near starvation. His spent five years in solitary confinement.

If canonized, Ciszek would join the short list of American saints from this region. One of the most recent is Mother Katharine Drexel, who founded the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament in lower Bucks County and was canonized in 2000.

St. John Neumann, canonized in 1977, was bishop of Philadelphia in the 1850s, when the Lehigh Valley was part of that diocese.