Walter Ciszek

Walter Ciszek volunteered for a mission that no longer existed. Born in Shenandoah, Pennsylvania in 1904, a coal town tough who joined the Jesuits and trained in Rome for the Russian rite, he crossed into Soviet territory in 1940 with the Polish refugees and was picked up in 1941 as a suspected Vatican agent. Five years followed in Lubyanka, most of it in solitary and under interrogation, and then fifteen in the labour camps around Norilsk inside the Arctic Circle, where he worked the mines and said Mass in secret. Rome and his family had already presumed him dead. He was released to internal exile in 1955 and returned to the United States in a prisoner exchange in 1963. With God in Russia, written with Daniel L. Flaherty, appeared the following year and reads as a straight account of what happened; He Leadeth Me, from 1973, is the interior version. His cause for canonisation opened in 1990.