![[Ciszek Picture]](Ciszek_1.JPG)
Rev. Walter Ciszek, S.J.
November 4, 1904 - December 8, 1984
Jesuit priest, suffered in the service of Christ in Russia
Born November 4, 1904 in Shenandoah, Pennsylvania; died December 8, 1984, in New York; Jesuit priest. Born into a family of Polish emigrants, he attended school and college at the Sts. Cyril and Methodius Seminary in Orchard Lake, Michigan. He entered the Jesuit monastery in 1928 in Poughkeepsie, New York. In 1929 he volunteered for a mission in the USSR, after an appeal by Pope Pius XI. Before he departed he studied Philosophy at Woodstock College in Maryland (1929-34). In the summer of 1934 he went to Rome where he studied theology at the Gregorian University and Russian Studies at the Collegium Russicum. He received Holy Orders on April 24, 1937. Because he could not enter the Soviet Union he was sent to work among the Russian Catholics in Albertyn, Poland. He arrived in November 1938. When Russia took over Albertyn on September 18, 1939 he moved to Lwow and then consented to travel secretly to Kusowoj, a locality in the Urals to work in a sawmill and spread the gospel.
After Germany attacked the USSR (June 22, 1941) he was arrested as a spy and imprisoned in Perm. The Russians informed him that they knew of his religious status and sent him to the Lubianka [prison in Moscow]. On July 26, 1942 he was sentenced as a "Vatican spy" to 15 years of heavy labor, but spent the remainder of the war at the Lubianka. He was sent to Siberia in June 1946 to serve his sentence. First he was in Krasnojarsk, then (to 1953) in the Norilsk region. Moved from camp to camp he worked in the mines and as a construction laborer. In October 1953 he was sent to the vicinity of Kayerkhan from where he was released in April of 1955. He returned to Norilsk, found work and preached the gospel. For this he was exiled to Abakan where he worked (to 1963) as an automobile mechanic. That year he was permitted to leave the Soviet Union and on October 12 he reached New York.
He then worked at Fordham University, Pope John XXIII Center for Eastern Christian Studies. He wrote: L'espion du Vatican: vingt-trois ans d'activite d'un jesuite americain en Russie Sovietique (1967) and the memoir With God in Russia (1964, Polish edition Z Bogiem w Rosji, 1990, 2000) and He Leadeth Me (1973. Polish edition On mnie prowadzi, 1999, 2001). His beatification is in progress.
Sources: The Encyclopedia of American Catholic History, edited by M. Glazier, T. J. Shelley, Collegeville, Minnesota 1996.
Author: Kazimierz Dopierala
Translated by Peter J. Obst (2006) from: "Encyklopedia Polskiej Emigracji i Polonii," Edited by: Kazimierz Dopierala, Vol. I, Oficyna Wydawnicza Kucharski, Torun, Poland, 2003.