The American Jesuits: A History

14 The Arrupe Era

14 The Arrupe Era Another Resurrection On October 11, 1963, word reached America magazine that a Jesuit had risen from the dead. The editor, Thurston N. Davis, a Harvard PhD in classics who had been dean of Fordham College in the 1950s but had left that post to replace Robert Hartnett as editor, was, above all, a man of moderation. But here was a scoop, relayed from a provincial to a former provincial who relayed it to him. And although America was only a weekly magazine, Davis responded like a deadline reporter. He called in Robert Graham, a California Jesuit historian whose specialty was the Vatican, and Eugene Culhane, his former Fordham assistant dean and now America managing editor, who had covered the Castro revolution with some sympathy. Together they hustled out to Idlewild International Airport (now John F. Kennedy) to meet BOAC Flight 501 from London at 6:55 a.m., which would deliver two Americans from Soviet prisons who had been exchanged for two Russians in our jails. Thurston Davis had known Walter Ciszek since they were novices together at Wernersville, Pennsylvania. He remembered him as a trim young athlete, a linguist, hard worker, quiet but outgoing. But he had not seen him in 30 years. A lot had happened since then. Ciszek had been inspired by a letter from the pope read to his novitiate class asking for volunteers to work in Russia, and he had built his vocation around responding to that invitation. This determination had led him to Poland when World War II broke out, and into Russia disguised as a workman in order to minister to Polish workmen, and, eventually, to Russian prisoners who had no priest. Arrested as a spy, he was jailed for five years at the notorious Lubianka interrogation center near Moscow, and then sentenced to 15 years of hard labor at Norilsk in Siberia. He had been presumed dead, and Jesuits had inserted his name into the list of the departed for whom they prayed. Later, cryptic 217 letters signed with his name reached his family asking for a suit, a coat, some books. And as the two freed men, the other a student, surrounded by State Department officials, whisked by them, the Jesuits barely recognized their old comrade. But, Davis wrote later: “He has come back to us from the mines and prison camps of Siberia—his hair nearly white, his hands gnarled from labor as a miner and mechanic, but unbroken, not brainwashed, and with a heart filled with compassion for the people to whom his whole adult life as a priest has been consecrated.” Ciszek’s story is important not only because it is in the tradition of Isaac Jogues and other missionaries who suffered and often died to spread the gospel, but because it exemplifies a lesser-known theme in the Jesuits’ history: their willingness to go to prison according to the pastoral needs of their time. Ignatius was twice jailed by the Inquisition . The English Jesuit martyrs were imprisoned and then disemboweled and hanged in public executions. Jesuits died in Dachau. Jesuits in the Philippines were imprisoned all during the World War II. Now, in the 1960s and ’70s, Jesuits would go to jail deliberately in acts of civil disobedience to protest the Vietnam War. A prison term would become a badge of honor. Ciszek told his story twice—in With God in Russia (1964) and again in a reflective meditation on the same events in He Leadeth Me (1973)—and in talks to fellow Jesuits. It is a tale remarkable for its simple directness, Christian charity, and lack of any Cold War rhetoric . For a while, as one of the more “famous” American Jesuits, who had probably suffered as much for the faith as any Jesuit alive, he remained outstanding by the manner in which he was ordinary. As a novice he almost didn’t make it. Born in 1904, the seventh of 13 children, son of a saloon-keeper father and a prayerful mother, he had grown up “a bully, the leader of a gang, a street fighter” in Shenandoah , Pennsylvania. He entered Sts. Cyril and Methodius Seminary, Orchard Lake, Michigan, where he continued to toughen up with 4:30 a.m. five-mile runs around the lake and cold swims in November. During one Lent he ate nothing but bread and water and ate no meat for a year. One summer he stayed at school and worked in the...