Venerable Emil J. Kapaun

Emil Joseph Kapaun was born on Holy Thursday, April 20, 1916, in the small Czech farming community of Pilsen, Kansas — about ninety miles south of Atchison. His parents were immigrants. His childhood was hands and dirt and the slow rhythms of a parish that knew everyone by name.

He felt the call to the priesthood early. After seminary, he was ordained in June 1940 at Sacred Heart College in Wichita — the first man from Pilsen to enter the priesthood for the Diocese of Wichita. He served his hometown parish for a few years, then answered the call for chaplains during World War II and joined the Army Chaplain Corps in 1944. He served in Burma and India, came home in 1946, finished a master's degree, and re-entered the Army in 1948 — drawn back to soldiers who needed a priest in the field.

In July 1950, just weeks after Communist North Korea invaded the South, Chaplain Kapaun was among the first American troops sent in. He racked up two thousand miles a month on his jeep, saying Mass on its hood, hearing confession in foxholes, anointing the wounded under fire. In a letter home to his bishop he wrote, simply, "Tomorrow we are going into combat."

On November 2, 1950, at the Battle of Unsan, his unit was overrun by Chinese forces. Kapaun had a chance to fall back to safety. He refused. He stayed with the wounded who couldn't be evacuated, knowing it meant capture. When a Chinese soldier raised a rifle to execute a wounded American, Kapaun pushed the soldier aside and carried the man out himself.

What followed was a death march of nearly a hundred miles through the Korean mountains in winter, then seven months in the prison camp at Pyoktong. He stole food for the starving. He washed the lice-ridden clothes of men too weak to do it themselves. He led prayer in defiance of the camp's communist indoctrination. He encouraged. He forgave. He became the spiritual father of that camp.

By spring 1951 he was sick — a blood clot in his leg, then dysentery, then pneumonia. The Chinese guards, who had grown to resent his influence over the prisoners, denied him medical care. His fellow soldiers carried him on a stretcher to what the camp called the "death house," and along the way Kapaun asked them to stop so he could ask forgiveness from each of the guards he passed and bless them. He died on May 23, 1951. He was 35 years old.

His remains were unaccounted for nearly seventy years. In 2021, after decades of work by the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, his body was identified and returned to Kansas. Today he rests in the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Wichita.

Each year at the beginning of summer, hundreds of pilgrims walk sixty miles across the Kansas plains — from the Church of the Magdalen in Wichita to Father Kapaun's hometown of Pilsen. Four days. Open prairie. The pilgrimage ends with Mass at the church where he was baptized, ordained, and said his first Mass.

It's about ninety minutes south of us. The 2026 pilgrimage runs June 4–7.