Chaplain Kapaun

Father Emil Kapaun, was born in Pilsen, Kansas in the Diocese of Wichita, Kansas on Holy Thursday, April 20, 1916.  He was ordained as a Priest for the Diocese on June 9, 1940 and entered the U.S. Army Chaplain Corps in 1944. Separated from the service in 1946, he re-entered the Army in 1948 and was ordered to Korea in 1950.

Communist forces surrounded Chaplain Kapaun’s outfit near Unsan the night of November 1, 1950. Fr. Kapaun was captured but escaped when his captors were shot by allied soldiers. He was captured a second time the next day when he went back to be with the wounded.  He and the other POWs were marched for days to the prison camp at Pyoktong. Father had difficulty walking because of his frostbitten feet. At the prison site, the officers were separated from the enlisted men and on a hill above the rest of the camp. Fr. Kapaun would sneak down the hill to tend to the sick and wounded, and he would even sneak out of the camp to scrounge for corn, salt, millet, and soy beans for the starving POWs. He prayed to St. Dismas before every one of these missions. He gathered sticks to make fires to heat water in the twenty-below-zero temperatures of February 1951. Using talents he learned on the farm in Kansas, he fashioned vessels out of old iron sheeting so he could have containers to launder the clothing of the wounded and a place to store purified water.  

He led the prisoners in prayer for their daily material and spiritual needs and for their deliverance and liberation.  He even led prayers for their captors. His favorite prayers were the rosary, prayers from the Mass and the Stations of the Cross. He also conducted services for the Protestant POWs. After prayers he made his rounds in the camp, burying the dead and tending to the sick and dying. He boiled water in his home-made vessels and laundered the soiled clothing of the weak, incontinent POWs, and he bathed those too ill to do so themselves. Then he reported to indoctrination where his Chinese captors taunted him that his God must not exist since He would not rescue him. Prisoners were buoyed by Fr. Kapaun’s retort to the communists that, “God is as real as the air they breathed but could not see, as the sounds they heard but could not see, as the thoughts and ideas they had and spoke but could not see or feel.”

Chaplain Kapaun, suffering from a clot in his leg and an infection in his eye, led Easter services for the prisoners in 1951. He employed a cane to help him walk, and his infected eye was covered with a black patch. Shortly after Easter, Fr. Kapaun was immobilized on the floor of the prison so that he could heal. The POWs who visited him knew he had to be suffering great pain, but Fr. Kapaun rarely let on that he was hurting. Over protests of the other POWs, the Chinese captors ordered Fr. Kapaun to the prison hospital. Everyone knew that hardly any prisoners came back alive from the hospital. 

Sources differ on the exact date and cause of Fr. Kapaun’s death. The U.S. Army records indicate that he died of pneumonia on May 6, 1951. His fellow prisoners insist that he died on May 23, 1951, and that the cause of his death was malnutrition and starvation.    

The Diocese of Wichita and the Vatican have begun the formal process that could lead to Father Kapaun's canonization. In 1993, it was announced that Fr. Kapaun would receive the title of "Servant of God." Earlier this year President Obama awarded him the Medal of Honor.