Saintly Pennsylvania Update.

Have no fear, kiddies! There are saints among us and the Gates of Hell shall not prevail!

The Morning Call: Schuylkill priest step closer to sainthood; Allentown diocese ships supporting evidence to Rome.


A priest from Schuylkill County who spent 15 years in gulags for trying to spread the word of God in the atheist Soviet Union has cleared the first step toward recognized sainthood.

The Allentown Catholic Diocese recently shipped three wooden crates to the Vatican in Rome full of what they believe is substantive evidence detailing the Rev. Walter J. Ciszek's life of ''heroic virtue.''
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Inside the crates are six cardboard boxes of documents, including sworn testimony from 45 witnesses, and thousands of typed pages of Ciszek's meditations and writings. As ancient traditions dictate, the boxes were carefully sealed with cord and red wax, and stamped with Bishop Edward P. Cullen's signet ring.

A review of the documents, which have taken more than 16 years to compile and organize, begins Tuesday.

Monsignor Anthony Muntone, pastor of St. Elizabeth of Hungary Church in Whitehall Township, will go to Rome next week to open the boxes and present the evidence and plead on Ciszek's behalf for beatification, which is the next step in the canonization process.

''It has been an enormously time-consuming task,'' Muntone said Friday.
''Next we will go back to closely examining the claims of miracles.''

Ciszek (pronounced Chih-zeck) is on track to become the first saint from the Allentown diocese. He is the only person from the region under review for sainthood, diocesan officials said.

Nuns at the Carmelite Monastery in Upper Saucon Township have said they want their monastery's co-founder, Mother Therese of Jesus, to be considered for sainthood.

One of the most recent American saints is Mother Katharine Drexel, who founded the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament in lower Bucks County and was canonized in 2000. John Neumann, a saint canonized in 1977, was bishop of Philadelphia in the 1850s, when the Lehigh Valley was part of that diocese.

Muntone has supervised the preliminary phase of Ciszek's canonization for a decade. The Allentown diocese took over the local investigation in 1996 from the Byzantine Catholic Diocese of Passaic, N.J.

Before Ciszek can be beatified, the Vatican will need proof of one miracle. A second miracle is needed for canonization in the case of those who have died naturally, as did Ciszek.

He died in New York in 1984. The drive to have him declared a saint began five years after his death.

Ciszek was born in Shenandoah in 1904. As a youth, he 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.

Bless and protect all your priests, Lord.

Ciszek was ordained in 1937 in Rome and sent to a parish in eastern Poland, only to flee with his flock to the Soviet Union as the Nazi blitzkrieg advanced in 1939-40. There, he was charged as a Nazi spy and a Vatican agent. He spent so much time in prison, where he was beaten, drugged and starved, that his family and the Jesuits believed him dead.

Five of those years were in solitary confinement at Moscow's infamous Lubyanka prison. His spirit and faith unshaken, he continued to celebrate Mass in the labor camps of Siberia, where he was sent until being released in 1955.

Ciszek was allowed to return to the United States in 1963 in exchange for two Soviet spies. He continued counseling, and gave retreats and talks while in residence at Fordham University in New York.

''They thought he would be a ghost of a man, but he was very robust and psychologically and spiritually whole,'' said Muntone, who was born three decades after Ciszek in the same town but never met him. ''There wasn't the slightest bit of rancor or resentment about the people who caused his suffering.''

While in residence at Fordham, Ciszek made himself available to anyone who needed his spiritual guidance or a compassionate listener. As more people began to seek him out for advice and comfort, word of his fascinating life spread. He never turned away a visitor, even in the middle of the night, even when he was in his 80s and suffering from arthritis and heart disease.

''He believed if someone came to him, God sent that person,'' Muntone said. ''His spirituality was extremely simple.''

Much of Ciszek's life is documented in his two books, He Leadeth Me and With God in Russia. Altogether, there are 200 pounds of evidence the Congregation for the Causes of Saints will review, including thousands of pages of Ciszek's other writings.