KAPAUN’S CHOICE
NEWS: VIDEO REPORTS
A cross to bear
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TRANSCRIPT
The recently identified remains of Servant of God Fr. Emil Kapaun are finally home in his native Kansas.
He died in a Korean POW camp in 1950.
Church Militant's Martina Moyski explains how his life and death are inspiring others.
Fr. Emil Kapaun: "There will come a time when we must make a choice between being loyal to the true Faith or giving allegiance to something else ... O God, we ask of thee to give us the courage to be ever faithful to Thee."
Servant of God Fr. Emil Kapaun's life reads like a ladder to Heaven while first going through Hell.
Born on a farm in 1916 to Czech immigrants, he learned early in his youth to be helpful, fighting the effects of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl.
A priest at 25 and a chaplain shortly after, he moved from Kansas to the Burma Theater, then to the 38th parallel, around which the fame of his service to others grew.
Travis Heying: "By far, the greatest man I ever knew was Fr. Kapaun."
Fr. John Hotze: "He was a man who instilled hope, and it was through his instilling hope that they were able to survive."
He dragged the wounded from the battlefield, comforted the dying and celebrated Mass on an improvised altar on the front end of a Jeep.
Fr. John Hotze: "Basically, Fr. Kapaun was giving his life for others."
Instead of retreating to safety, he stayed with the wounded, carrying an injured soldier 30 miles during a march to a POW camp during Korea's coldest winter.
He picked lice from soldiers' bodies when they lost the will to live.
Fr. John Hotze: "All the men said if it hadn't been for Fr. Kapaun, they probably wouldn't have made it out of the prisoner of war camp alive."
He defied the communists, rebutted their indoctrination with Bible verses, made clandestine raids on the storerooms to bring food to starving soldiers and prayed with the men.
The communists punished him by making him stand in the subzero temperatures without clothes.
Within months his health broke.
Racked with pneumonia and a blood clot in his leg, he was led away to die. But he blessed the communists, saying: "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do."
Hotze: "It's a great time for us here in Kansas. We learn more and more how this farm boy from Kansas lived the life of Christ."
Seventy years after his death, Fr. Kapaun's funeral Mass was offered near where he was born.
And as the news travels out of the flat plains of Kansas to the larger world, so does the story of the soldier-priest whose loyalty to the true faith saved the lives of untold numbers of fellow soldiers.
After Fr. Kapaun's death, the POWs kept his memory alive. One, a Jewish artist who heard the stories of Fr. Kapaun, honored him by using scraps of wood to carve a Crucifix.
When the prisoners were finally released, they carried it triumphantly out of the camp. It is now on display at Kapaun Mt. Carmel Catholic High School in Wichita.
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