Free Republic

Walter Ciszek (1904-1984) Before there was an Armistice Day, Walter Ciszek was born on November 11, 1904, and lived through a crucified century. Death came gracefully in 1984 on the feast of the Immaculate Conception. In boyhood he was a bully in a gang on the gritty streets of Shenandoah, Pennsylvania, and Ciszek’s Polish immigrant father dragged him to the police station, hoping to put him into a reform school. Everyone thought he was joking when the eighth grader announced that he would enter the Polish minor seminary. The seminarian swam in an icy lake and rose before dawn...

The Diocese of Allentown is asking the Vatican to canonize a Shenandoah priest who survived more than two decades of imprisonment in the Soviet Union. The diocese sent three crates of materials concerning the Rev. Walter Ciszek’s life to Rome two weeks ago. The crates included six cardboard boxes that contained things such as sworn testimony from 45 witnesses and thousands of typed pages of his writings and meditations. The documents reportedly took 16 years to compile. The Vatican is slated to review them beginning Tuesday. “They arrived last week,” Sister Albertine of the Father Walter Ciszek Prayer League in...