With recovery of Father Kapaun’s remains, ’sainthood is more of a possibility’

The call came first thing Thursday morning. Ray Kapaun didn’t recognize the phone number, so he didn’t answer it.

“I figured it was a telemarketer,” he explained from his home on Whidbey Island near Seattle.

But his wife later noticed a message and checked it.

“You may want to call this guy,” she told him. “He said he was from Fort Knox. He wants to talk to you about your uncle.”

Ray’s uncle is Father Emil Kapaun, who died in a prisoner of war camp in 1951 and is a candidate for canonization by the Catholic Church. Ray returned the call and was told something he never expected to hear: His uncle’s remains had been identified in Hawaii.

Chaplain Kapaun was among 848 unidentified soldiers returned to the U.S. as part of Operation Glory, an exchange of war dead, in 1954 — a year after the truce ending the Korean War was signed.

Kapaun’s bravery on the battlefield retrieving injured soldiers and providing encouragement earned him a posthumous Congressional Medal of Honor in 2013. He was taken prisoner in November 1950 and endured brutal conditions while tending to and inspiring prisoners of all — or no — faith before his death on May 23, 1951 at the age of 35.

Inspired in part by the stories of Kapaun’s selfless acts of caring for prisoners regardless of rank or background, the Catholic Church declared Kapaun a Servant of God in 1993, launching the cause for his possible canonization.

The Diocese of Wichita undertook a thorough investigation of Kapaun’s life and presented the details to the Congregation for Saints in Rome, where his cause awaits review.

“It was a joyful and exciting surprise for the Diocese of Wichita that Fr. Kapaun’s mortal remains were recovered after so many years and we continue to look forward to his process of canonization in the future,” Bishop Carl Kemme said in a statement.

When the cause for canonization begins, that person’s remains exhumed and placed in a secure location, said the Rev. John Hotze, episcopal delegate for the office of Kapaun’s cause.

But diocesan officials couldn’t do that with Kapaun because they had no idea where his remains were. For years, the belief was that Kapaun was interred in a mass grave along the Yalu River near the border between North Korea and China.

“We had very little hope that we would ever have his remains,” Hotze said.

Operation Glory

Research into Kapaun’s time in the POW camp uncovered a witness who said he helped bury the chaplain in an individual grave near the building the Koreans labeled a “hospital” but in truth was little more than a place for the gravely ill to die.

That gave family members and diocesan officials faint hope that Kapaun’s remains may have been returned to the U.S. as part of Operation Glory — hope that became a reality last week.

“It’s still hard to believe,” Ray Kapaun said. “It’s still way beyond anything I can comprehend.”

He wept at the news and slept little the following night, stunned by the unlikeliness of what had happened and trying to wrap his mind around what it means. He would have expected to learn his uncle had been declared a saint before hearing that his body had been identified.

“I think a lot of people are going to look at this and say, ‘Well, okay, now sainthood is more of a possibility just because this happened’ because nobody, nobody thought this would really ever happen.”

Hotze didn’t recognize Kapaun’s phone number when he called on Thursday and almost didn’t answer, thinking it was a telemarketer. Something nudged him to answer anyway.

“I could have made a list of a hundred things I would be getting a call about, and that wouldn’t have made it,” Hotze said. “I mean, it was just totally out of the blue.”

Hotze called the development “very inspiring.”

“When you think about the awesomeness of it, even if it were not him being in the process of being named a saint, to think that here was a man who died seventy years ago and now he’s coming home,” Hotze said. “Any person, you would be elated that that was able to happen.”

A life saved

There’s a statue outside of Kapaun’s native St. John Nepomucene Catholic Church in Pilsen of the chaplain lending a hand to a wounded soldier as they made the long trek to captivity after being captured by the Chinese.

That soldier is Herbert Miller, who had parachuted into Normandy on D-Day in World War II but expected to die at any moment as he lay in a bloody ditch in North Korea. A hand grenade had broken his ankle and a Chinese soldier was about to execute him when Kapaun swatted the gun away and lifted Miller to his feet.

Miller survived captivity and made it home to upstate New York, where he will turn 95 next month.

News that the chaplain’s remains had been identified “brought tears to my eyes,” Miller said. “It brings back a lot of memories.”

What turned out to be Kapaun’s body was exhumed from the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in 2019, said Michael Mee, Chief of Identifications for the Past Conflict Repatriation Branch of the U.S. Army Human Resources Command at Fort Knox in Kentucky.

The exhumation was part of a seven-phase plan begun in 2018 to exhume and identify all remaining unknown Korean War veterans resting in the national cemetery in Hawaii.

The painstaking process in a laboratory at Hickam Air Force Base included using X-rays, dental records and DNA records, Mee said. There’s no question that the remains tested are Kapaun’s.

“This is huge news,” Mee said.

Kapaun’s skeleton is about 95 percent intact, his nephew said.

“They’ve got a complete set of remains for Father Kapaun,” Mee said.

Kapaun’s body will remain in Hawaii until his surviving next-of-kin — six nieces and nephews — decide where they would like him laid to rest, Mee said.

“Miracles still happen”

William Funchess was stunned to learn that Kapaun’s body had been recovered.

“It was terrible to realize that he had died up in that abandoned Buddhist monastery on top of that mountain ridge,” said Funchess, who is 93 and lives in South Carolina. “I knew when they took him up there what would happen. Nobody who went up there ever came back alive to tell the story.”

Funchess said he’s also surprised that Kapaun’s skeleton is virtually intact.

“I just visualized the Chinese and North Koreans doing all kinds of things to his body because they hated him,” Funchess said. “They hated Christianity and they especially hated Father Kapaun and they hated me because I took care of him.”

For the last month of his life, a desperately weak Kapaun lay next to Funchess on the mud floor of their shack, a blood clot in his leg leaving him unable to move. Funchess was still recovering from being shot in the foot.

“I was sleeping on the floor next to the wall,” Funchess said. “When he came in, I gave Father Kapaun my place” next to the wall “so nobody would step on his leg during the night. We had no light. It was total darkness. We had to get up at night, fumble around and try to get out and go to the bathroom every two or three or four hours.”

It was so crowded, Kapaun and Funchess slept side by side, their backs touching. Temperatures routinely fell to minus 10, minus 20, minus 30 at night, Funchess said. There was no heat provided in the shack and prisoners had no blankets. If Kapaun felt Funchess shiver, he would turn around and wrap an arm around Funchess to help keep him warm. When Funchess felt Kapaun shivering, he would return the favor.

“We were just fighting to catch our next breath and to survive,” Funchess said.

The other POWs knew Kapaun was ill and would check on him. Kapaun would hear confessions while flat on his back, a door to an adjoining room cracked open a little so he could hear what was being said.

Funchess still has the pocket Bible he kept with him in the POW camp, the Bible Kapaun would sometimes borrow, the Bible the Chinese confiscated several times in punishment, the Bible Funchess risked his life each time to retrieve, the Bible he gripped tightly in his left hand as he made the arduous walk alone across the DMZ on a path perhaps 10 inches wide with mines on both sides on the September day in 1953 when he was released.

Some of the pages are damp now and his handwritten notes in the margins have faded, but Funchess’ memories have not dimmed with time. Neither has Kapaun’s place in his heart.

“Father Kapaun was the holiest man, the greatest man I have ever had the honor of associating with and knowing on a first-name basis,” Funchess said.

Nearly seventy years have passed since he last saw the chaplain, Funchess said, and those words are still true.

“It’s just great news,” Funchess said of Kapaun’s remains being found and identified. “Miracles still happen, thank goodness.”

A homecoming

The Wichita diocese will have a lot to say about where Kapaun’s body will be laid to rest, Ray Kapaun said. One possible temporary resting place is Arlington National Cemetery outside of Washington, D.C.

“There’s no hurry to do this,” Mee said.

For one thing, there are still COVID-related travel restrictions and the desire for vaccinations to become widespread so people can feel safe about travel to Washington for the service.

“At some point, they’ll have to plan a funeral — a funeral that is probably going to be more complex than most because of the great notoriety of Chaplain Kapaun and his path of sainthood and the extra dimensions in this case,” Mee said.

Eventually, Hotze said, Kapaun’s body will come home to Wichita, though where his final resting place will be is a mystery.

“As the process goes on, if and when he’s beatified and canonized, there will probably be talk about a shrine,” Hotze said. “And the shrine would probably be a suitable place for his burial.”

Path to sainthood

Kapaun is two steps short of being canonized a saint. The Congregation for Saints must approve a miracle attributed to Kapaun’s intercession before he can be beatified, and then another miracle that has no medical explanation must occur and be approved by the congregation before he is eligible to be declared a saint by the pope.

Two cases — the unexpected and unexplainable recoveries of Chase Kear and Avery Gerleman — are in the evidence presented to the Congregation by the Diocese of Wichita. The Congregation was poised to take up Kapaun’s case last March before COVID-driven shutdowns occurred.

“I’m overjoyed for the family and everyone this great man’s life has touched,” Kear said after learning of the confirmation of Kapaun’s remains. “I’m happy he’ll get a long-overdue return home.”

No new date for the Congregation’s deliberations on Kapaun has been set.

“I am convinced that once his remains come back here to the diocese, even in a temporary place, that there will be people flocking to it,” Hotze said. “Look at the number of people that are already visiting Pilsen — maybe not so much this past year, because of COVID. But the number of people that already had been going up to Pilsen because it was the home of Father Kapaun.

“We have to anticipate and we have to plan that that will be even more so now that we have his remains.”

Even a temporary resting place for Kapaun will need to allow the public to come in pray and ask for his intercession, pray for his cause for sainthood, and to come and seek God’s help — “just as Father Kapaun obviously did throughout his life,” Hotze said.

Should believers flock to pray in the presence of Kapaun’s remains, Hotze said, “it will give us the opportunity to show the Congregation of Saints the devotion that both we and thousands of other people have to Father Kapaun and the devotion that we have in honoring him and his life that he was a saintly man, recognizing that he was Christ’s light in his word and his deeds, and recognize that that is a benefit to the universal Church, to have somebody and have this example here before us — the example of Father Kapaun’s life.”

In that sense, he said, Kapaun’s remains drawing crowds “does go to benefit the cause.”

“One of the reasons why the church names saints is because of the devotion and the holiness and the example of holiness that all of us are able to follow,” Hotze said.

Officials have told Ray Kapaun the funeral and tributes welcoming his uncle home will be even bigger than the Medal of Honor ceremony, which he finds both humbling and ironic.

His uncle, like his father, hated the limelight, Kapaun said.

“They almost go out of their way not to bring attention to themselves,” Kapaun said. “It was all about just doing his job and getting things done.”

His uncle would do whatever needed to be done to tend to his flock — whether it was helping dig up a broken water line with fellow parishioners in the tiny town of Timken or picking the lice off the bodies of frail prisoners, stealing and scavenging food, cleaning soiled clothing, or hacking shallow graves out of frozen ground.

“Notoriety was so far from his mind thought that I don’t think it even existed,” Ray Kapaun said. “And he would be more embarrassed with all of this than anything else.”

Kapaun said officials are right when they say his uncle’s homecoming will be even more significant than receiving the Medal of Honor. That, he said, was the culmination of receiving a well-deserved honor.

“This,” Kapaun said of his uncle’s return, “is just the beginning of the next chapter of his life and his legacy.”

This story was originally published March 7, 2021 at 5:01 AM.