The Saint Makers by Joe Drape

Author:Joe Drape [Drape, Joe]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-12-02T00:00:00+00:00

In Pilsen, Kansas, however, closure for Enos and Bessie Kapaun was slow in coming.

On Thanksgiving Day, 1950, Father Joseph Goracy, the pastor of St. John Nepomucene, asked the couple to meet him in the rectory after noon Mass. Earlier that morning, the postman had dropped off a US Army telegram at the church. The telegram was sealed, but the postman knew the Kapauns, and he knew not only where they would be but how they might want to hear potentially devastating news. Enos, now seventy and stooped from a lifetime of farmwork, was nervous. Bessie’s ever-present smile disappeared when Father Goracy told them about the telegram. She asked Father Goracy to read them the letter.

“The secretary of the Army has asked me to express his deep regret that your son, Captain Emil J. Kapaun, has been missing in action since Nov. 2nd ’50,” wrote Edward F. Withell, adjutant general of the US Army. “Upon receipt of further information in this office you will be advised immediately.”

The couple’s tears were silent and restrained. When Father Goracy offered them his prayers and all the words of hope that he could muster, Bessie accepted them eagerly. Enos did not.

“I will not see my son again on this earth,” he said. “I have to wait until I get to heaven.”

Eleven months later, however, an ember of hope flared for Enos and Bessie when they received a letter from Sergeant Samuel Cleckner. He had been captured with Father Kapaun and shared quarters with the priest in the valley as well as Camp No. 5. Cleckner was among the handful of prisoners released in an exchange shortly after the Battle of Unsan. He had promised to write the priest’s parents and was among the first to tell newspaper reporters about their son’s heroism on the battlefield and in the prison camps.

“May I say that your son is one of the bravest men I have ever met. He showed great courage and devotion to his country and faith under the most hazardous of conditions,” he wrote in a letter dated October 6, 1951. “I have seen him stand unflinchingly in the face of fire in order to bring comfort and aid to some soldiers that had been wounded or to deliver the last rites in some instances. He kept up the morale of those that had been taken prisoner by his kindness and words of hope and faith.

“I sincerely wish that the Chinese would have released your son at the same time I was, and hope that you receive even more glad and important news than I can give you.”

Every day thereafter, Enos and Bessie walked to the mailbox on the dirt road at their farm in the hope of getting a letter from their son or a letter from another prisoner or, God forbid, a word of their son’s fate from the army. On October 18, 1952, still uncertain whether the chaplain was dead or alive in a prison camp, the army decided to hold an

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