Our Hearts Were In Our Mouths

As we know, the Soviet system was not kind to religious people despite it’s founding laws. There were various periods in Soviet history when religion was actively suppressed and then loosened. As can be seen from a more detailed view from the Library of Congress here and from an interesting anti-religious point of view that defends Marxism here.  As you can see, what a constitution says and what a state does can be dramatically different. Father Ciszek, an American Jesuit, had always wanted to serve as a priest in Russia. He was ordained in 1937 and in 1938  managed to be sent to Poland. During Hitler’s aggressive World War II years the Russians and Nazis carved up Poland. Father Ciszek had reached his goal, but unfortunately the Soviets sentenced to 15 years in prison for being a “Vatican Spy.” After years in the famed Lubianka prison in Moscow, he was sent to Norilsk in Siberia where he spent his remaining prison time in various Gulags. There were several Gulag uprisings that took place in 1953. He describes a final assault at his prison by solders:

Troops mounted on trucks roared through the gate, firing as they came…..Our hearts were in our mouths….We watched some prisoners, as they were herded into groups, kill themselves by ripping their bodies open with knives.

He was released in 1953 a free man, but not free enough to chose even where he was to live. He was not allowed to leave the country, and lived for years as a Soviet citizen with limited rights. He managed to administer to Russian citizens in various cities of Siberia after his release, Norilsk being the first. Wherever he was told to live, he began his priestly duties however he could; a friendly family giving their home and risking social devaluation. He took over for another priest in a temporary hovel. He was always being watched by the MVD (Ministerstvo Vnutrennikh Del) the Interior Ministry, and regularly ordered to report for interrogations.

Link (here) to The Catholic Stand

“Turned To God In Prayer.”

.....in his memoir, “He Leadeth Me,” Fr. Walter Ciszek, S.J. experienced the “sinking feeling of helplessness and powerlessness” after his arrest in Russia in 1941. He felt completely cut off from everything and everyone who might conceivably help him. Considered a Vatican spy, he was transferred to Lubianka prison where men were reportedly broken “in body and spirit.” As he had done in every crisis in the past when there was no one to turn to, Walter “turned to God in prayer.” While an interior voice helped him focus his faith, it was faith in prayer that sustained Walter, the same faith that made him conscious of his readiness and natural competency to handle whatever came along. Naturally stubborn and strong-willed, Walter spent a great part of his life “developing willpower and training the will.” Because he realized early that self-control was not enough in struggling against depression, fear, and insecurity, spiritual growth was contingent on the depth of his personal relationship with God.

Link (here) to Jesuit News the was written by Fr. John Levko, S.J.

Lumberjack, Coal Miner, Prisoner, Seaman, Construction Worker, Auto Mechanic, Priest And Jesuit

Photo of Fr. Walter Ciszek, S.J. in a  Russian Communist prisoner mugshot

They sent Fr. Walter Ciszek, S.J. to study in Rome at the “Russicum,” the Jesuits’ Russian center, and finally in 1937 he celebrated his first Mass in the Byzantine rite. Aiming to infiltrate Russia through Poland, he taught ethics in a seminary in Albertyn. But in 1939 Hitler invaded from the west and then the Russians came from the east, despoiling the seminary, and so the young alter Christus was on the cross between two thieves. In 1940 the Ukrainian Archbishop of Lvov permitted him to enter Russia, and he headed for the Ural Mountains, a two-week trip in a box car with 25 men. While hauling logs in a lumber camp, he said Mass furtively in the forest. Secret police arrested him as a Vatican spy when they found his Mass wine, which they called nitroglycerine, and kept him in a cell 900 feet square for two weeks with 100 other men. After six more months, beaten with rubber truncheons, starved, and drugged, he signed a confession, and this he called one of the darkest moments of his life. On July 26, 1942, he was sentenced to 15 years’ hard labor, starting with five years of solitary confinement in Moscow’s hideous Lubyanka prison, and then off to Siberia. After a slow 2,500-mile trip to Krasnoyarsk in a sweltering boxcar, he was sent on a barge to Norilsk, 200 miles north of the Arctic Circle, and worked 12-hour days shoveling coal into freighters, with rags for shoes. In hushed tones he said Mass for Polish prisoners using a vodka glass for a chalice and wine made from stolen raisins. Having been transferred to work in the coal mines for a year, he became a construction worker in 1947, returning to the mines in 1953. Release came in 1955 and he got news to his sisters for the first time since 1939 that he was alive. In Krasnoyarsk he quickly established several parishes. Then came four years just south in Abakan, working as an auto mechanic. In 1963 the KGB hauled him back to Moscow and handed him over to the American consulate in exchange for two Soviet agents. As the plane flew past the Kremlin, he related, “Slowly, carefully, I made the sign of the cross over the land that I was leaving.”   In New York, undeterred by arthritis and cardiac ailments, he gave spiritual direction at Fordham University in a residence now named for him, writing his monumental books With God in Russia and He Leadeth Me.

Link (here) to read the full story at  Free Republic