Fr. Kapaun, native of Abp.-designate McKnight’s home diocese, declared Venerable

He had a gift for relating to people. There was a real ‘humanness’ in his sense of humor and practicality.”

Archbishop-designate W. Shawn McKnight

The crucifix in Kapaun Mt. Carmel School in Wichita, Kansas, was carved in honor of a chaplain who helped shepherd many prisoners of war through their own Way of the Cross.

That chaplain was Venerable Father Emil J. Kapaun (1916-51), a candidate for being declared a saint, who hailed from Archbishop-designate W. Shawn McKnight’s home diocese.

“Fr. Kapaun was an example of holiness for all of us,” said Archbishop-designate Mc­Knight, while discussing the recent announcement that Fr. Kapaun’s sainthood cause had reached an important milestone.

Archbishop-designate McKnight will be installed as archbishop of Kansas City in Kansas on May 27.

Pope Francis on Feb. 24 authorized the Vatican’s Dicastery for the Causes of Saints to promulgate a decree naming Fr. Kapaun as “Venerable.”

In its decree — which also addressed the canonization causes of six other individuals — the Vatican said it recognized Fr. Kapaun’s “offering of life,” a criterion for sainthood established by Pope Francis in a 2017 document on sainthood causes.

Archbishop-designate McKnight noted that “holiness looks different according to who you are. And holiness isn’t gonna’ look the same on everybody.”

In the case of Fr. Kapaun, it looked like a country priest who ministered to soldiers in battle during World War II (1939-45), went home to his diocese, and volunteered to return to the front when the call went out for more chaplains during the Korean War (1951-53).

“He was willing to go back!” said Archbishop-designate McKnight. “He had served in World War II, and he volunteered to go back, because they were still in need.”

Fr. Kapaun knew what he was getting himself into, and chose to get into it anyway.

By that, he set a prime example of Catholic masculinity.

“He was very brave,” said Archbishop-designate Mc­Knight. “He was manly in a way that was not, as we unfortunately understand it a lot of the time, as being filled with might. Rather, it was his ability to make self-sacrifice.”

“It’s not the ability to inflict one’s will on others,” the archbishop-designate stated. “It’s the ability to give oneself completely and make the ultimate sacrifice. The kind of self-surrender that our Lord, who was the greatest example of manliness, showed us on the cross.”

Fr. Kapaun was taken into custody by Korean and communist Chinese forces and sent to a military prison camp in Pyoktong, North Korea.

He was known for never leaving anyone behind while they were on death marches in the Korean camps.

And while their captors were trying to indoctrinate the prisoners with communist propaganda, Fr. Kapaun would stand up after they’d finish speaking and tell the prisoners, “Don’t believe any of that.”

“That was his character,” said Archbishop-designate McKnight. “And it got him in trouble.”

Prioritizing the needs of others over his own health, Fr. Kapaun developed pneumonia and a blood clot while imprisoned. He was denied medication and died in the prison camp May 23, 1951, at age 35.

He blessed his captors before dying.

For decades after the war, his earthly remains were kept with those of other unidentified servicemen and women at a military repository in Hawaii, awaiting identification.

Hidden valor

Fr. Kapaun graduated from Kenrick-Glennon Seminary in St. Louis in 1940 as part of the largest ordination class to-date in that seminary’s history.

Among his classmates at Kenrick were the late Father Joseph B. Boland, who served for many years as a priest of this diocese, and the late Monsignor Jerome Sommer PA, a fellow military chaplain and priest of this diocese who until his death in 2012 was Fr. Kapaun’s last living classmate.

The late Bishop Christian Winkelmann of Wichita, who ordained Fr. Kapaun to the Holy Priesthood in 1940, had previously served as pastor of Sacred Heart Parish in Rich Fountain in what is now part of the Jefferson City diocese.

In a 2008 interview, Msgr. Sommer recalled liking and admiring Fr. Kapaun as a fellow seminarian but not foreseeing his heroic accomplishments and possible recognition by the Church as a saint.

“I remember that he was always attentive to his duties in school, in chapel, in class,” Msgr. Sommer stated.

But behind the veil of the ordinary during Fr. Kapaun’s seminary years, God was setting into place a foundation of faith that would support an edifice of courageous, life-giving Christian witness made complete by death in Christ.

Msgr. Sommer, who also became an Army chaplain about a year after Fr. Kapaun entered the service, did not find out about Fr. Kapaun’s death until shortly after the fighting ceased in 1953.

“Some of his fellow prisoners wrote about him and how heroic he was over there,” said Msgr. Sommer in a 2008 interview. “They attributed their very lives to his influence, that he kept up the morale of them. A higher percentage of the POWs in that particular camp survived than in other places where our American soldiers were held captive. And those survivors attribute their survival in great part to him.”

Sometime around 1954, Msgr. Sommer read an article about Fr. Kapaun in the Saturday Evening Post. It included testimony by men who credited him with helping to keep them alive.

“I thought, ‘This is my classmate! He’s a hero!’” said Msgr. Sommer, who appears briefly with two other classmates in a documentary about Fr. Kapaun produced by FOCUS Worldwide TV Network. It is called “A Catholic Chaplain in Combat Boots.”

Different kind of holy

All of the men in the prison camp found in Fr. Kapaun a familiar soul.

“He had a gift for relating to people,” said Archbishop-designate McKnight. “There was a real ‘humanness’ in his sense of humor and practicality.”

He ministered to everyone, regardless of their religious affiliation.

“Protestant, Jewish, as well as Catholic fellow soldiers in the camp all respected him and spoke highly of him,” Archbishop-designate McKnight stated.

The priest’s holiness was thoroughly expressed in his humanity, not above or despite it.

“I think that’s part of the adjustment a lot of people need in their conception of what holiness looks like,” said Archbishop-designate McKnight.

The crucifix now prominently displayed in Kapaun Mt. Carmel High School in Wichita was carved by a Jewish former prisoner of war who had spent time in the same prison camp where Fr. Kapaun died.

“He never knew Fr. Kapaun, but he was so taken by the stories he was hearing about him from his fellow soldiers, he was inspired to carve that crucifix,” said Archbishop-designate McKnight.

The chaplain’s ministry was one of radical presence: “To have a sense that someone cared for them that much in their hellhole, who was there with them,” the archbishop-designate said.

Lord of the dance

Archbishop-designate McKnight was working at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ headquarters in Washington, D.C., in 2013 when President Barack Obama posthumously presented Fr. Kapaun the Congressional Medal of Honor.

“I was very fortunate to be at the ceremonies at the White House and the Pentagon and to see some incredible things from the inside,” said Archbishop-designate Mc­Knight.

One of these involved a young man waltzing in the White House entryway.

“This young man from a country parish was in a pole-vaulting accident in his senior year in high school, leaving him paralyzed,” said Archbishop-designate McKnight. “He wasn’t expected to survive, let alone ever walk again.”

The young man’s inexplicable recovery took place in the months after his injury, following fervent appeals to God through Fr. Kapaun’s intercession.

“So, there at the White House, the Marine Band was playing music for the reception, and this young man had his eye on this cute young woman, and he just went up and asked her to dance, and she said, ‘okay,’ and they started dancing,” the archbishop-designate recounted.

Almost everyone there knew his story. They all stood aside and basked in what was likely the aftermath of a miracle.

“You see? That happened in our White House!” Archbishop-designate McKnight noted. “The seat of the presidency of the United States.”

Homecoming

DNA testing in 2021 yielded a match between Fr. Kapaun’s earthly remains in the Hawaii repository and several of his living relatives.

Once there was a positive identification, his body could be returned to Wichita for a Mass of Christian Burial, some 50 years after his death.

It had all the trappings of a state funeral.

“They had generals there, they had a caisson and the horses in Missing-Man Formation and all kinds of military personnel involved,” the archbishop-designate recalled.

Archbishop-designate Mc­Knight was able to return to Wichita as a visiting prelate to concelebrate the Funeral Mass at a local convention center, the only venue large enough to accommodate a crowd that size.

Afterward came a military procession from the convention center to the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Wichita, where a crypt had been built for Fr. Kapaun.

Archbishop-designate Mc­Knight then participated in the burial service for Fr. Kapaun in the same cathedral where the archbishop-designate was ordained to the Priesthood in 1994.

“Fr. Kapaun is a role model for all of us who profess the Christian faith, not just priests,” he stated at the time of the funeral and burial. “I am honored to participate in this historic funeral and pray that his example will inspire all priests throughout the world.”

Also attending the Mass was Father Derek Hooper, a Kansas native and current parochial administrator of St. Joseph Parish in Martinsburg, Sacred Heart Parish in Vandalia and the Mission of St. John in Laddonia.

Fr. Hooper has held a strong devotion to Fr. Kapaun since his own time of serving in the Army.

“The life of Fr. Emil Kapaun is one that we can all look to for comfort and encouragement,” Fr. Hooper stated in 2021.

To each his own

Archbishop-designate McKnight will soon serve as metropolitan archbishop of Kansas City in Kansas, his home state.

He anticipates with great hope the day when God will send more miracles to reveal that the archbishop-designate’s fellow Kansan, Venerable Fr. Kapaun, is truly a saint in heaven.

Archbishop-designate McKnight said there’s no way in this life to know whether Fr. Kapaun possessed such intense holiness and the capacity for martyrdom throughout his life, or whether the prison camp served as a crucible for purifying that holiness.

“Either way, he took steps all along to get himself there, relying always on God’s help,” the archbishop-designate stated.

He reemphasized that holiness looks different on everybody.

“That’s an important thing for us to remember,” he said. “Because if we start comparing ourselves to other people, we’re going to feel as though we’re never gonna’ measure up.

“What we have to discover are the ways in which God IS calling all of us to holiness,” he said. “Fr. Kapaun found his.”

More information about Fr. Kapaun’s life, ministry and sainthood cause can be found at frkapaun.org.

Contributing to this report were Gina Christian of OSV News; Christopher Riggs, editor of Catholic Advance in Wichita; and Jean M. Schildz, formerly a reporter for the St. Louis Review in St. Louis.