Fr. Walter J. Ciszek, SJ

Fr. Walter J. Ciszek, S.J. (1904–1984), was an American Jesuit priest whose witness of faith under Soviet persecution has made him one of the most compelling spiritual figures of the twentieth century. A Pennsylvania coal-miner’s son, he secretly entered the Soviet Union in 1940 to minister to believers, was arrested as a suspected “Vatican spy,” and spent twenty-three years in Soviet custody — including five years in Moscow’s notorious Lubyanka prison and fifteen years of hard labor in the Gulag camps of Siberia — all the while celebrating the sacraments in secret. Presumed dead for years, he was finally returned to the United States in a prisoner exchange in 1963. His cause for canonization is underway, and he is honored as a Servant of God.

His two classic books — With God in Russia and He Leadeth Me — recount his ordeal and the radical surrender to God’s providence that carried him through it.