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.
