Father Emil Kapaun moves one step closer to sainthood

Emil Kapaun started life as a Kansas farm boy and ended it as a Medal of Honor war hero. Now, Pope Francis has elevated Kapaun one step closer to being declared a saint by the Catholic church.

Pope Francis on Monday elevated Kapaun to venerable. The next rung up the ladder would be for the pope to declare Kapaun “blessed.” After that there would be one more rung — canonization as a saint.

That process, however, could take years.

“They should have skipped all those steps years ago,” said Mike Dowe, who fought to save Kapaun’s life from Chinese army guards in a prison camp in 1951. “I’ve never understood why this is taking so long.”

The Kapaun family’s spokesman, nephew Ray Kapaun, got the news Tuesday while celebrating his 68th birthday. “I was worried — Pope Francis seemed near death, and I thought the whole thing would get pushed back years once again, especially if the Pope died.”

The pope, now 88, has been hospitalized with pneumonia in both lungs, but resumed some work Monday, calling a church in Gaza that he’s stayed in touch with since the war there began and moving Kapaun’s cause forward.

Kapaun’s body rests in a tomb in the Cathedral of Immaculate Conception in downtown Wichita.

Kapaun’s heroism

President Barack Obama awarded Kapaun the Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest award for valor, in 2013.

Kapaun grew up in Pilsen and took holy orders to become a priest in that town as a young man. He joined the U.S. Army as a chaplain during World War II, but saw no combat in Asia, where he was stationed.

But starting in 1950 he performed hundreds of heroic acts that ended with his death from illness and starvation but saved the lives of dozens, possibly hundreds, of fellow soldiers in the Korean War.

Kapaun was a chaplain to the 8th Cavalry, stationed in Japan, when North Korea invaded South Korea. The 8th was one of the first regiments sent to fight. They were vastly outnumbered in the first months and were attacked often by mass charges from the North Korean Army. Kapaun raced forward under fire, sometimes hundreds of yards, to drag wounded soldiers to safety. “That man was crazy,” one soldier who saw this told The Eagle in 2009.

Kapaun and dozens of survivors were captured in November 1950 when the the 8th was overrun near the Chinese border; China had entered the war just days before, though the soldiers of the 8th did not know this.

Saving “hundreds” might sound far-fetched. But starting in 2009 The Wichita Eagle interviewed 13 of Kapaun’s fellow prisoners of war and they all said he did just that. They were held with him in a filthy camp on the banks of the Yalu River, which borders North Korea from Communist China.

All 13 saw Kapaun’s heroism, both on several battlefields, and in the prison camp. Kapaun died in May 1951, five months after he was captured. Of the roughly 1,300 camp prisoners, roughly half died that winter of starvation and illnesses.

Prisoners like Dowe insisted that he saved hundreds there, not only by giving them moral courage (“he denounced Chinese Army brainwashers to their faces” Dowe said) but by picking thousands of lice off the bodies of starving soldiers. He saved many, Dowe and the others said, by teaching them how to use stones as hammers, turning twisted pieces of bomb-damaged roofing tin into bowls so that water could be boiled over small fires.

This was crucial, Dowe said, because the camp was filthy — the guards gave them no outhouses and no water. Prisoners hydrated by scraping dirty snow off the ground with their fingernails; hundreds died of dysentery and other stomach ailments.

The case for sainthood

It could be years before Kapaun could reach full sainthood, said the Rev. John Hotze, the Wichita Catholic priest who has spent years documenting Kapaun’s cause for sainthood.

Hotze has done most of the Wichita diocese’s work making a case to multiple popes. Hotze spent years gathering thousands of documents, including print, audio and video interviews of POWs who served with Kapaun, either in combat or in the camp.

The next step is up to the diocese, Hotze said, and much of that work is done.

The church, to elevate him to “blessed” status, (the next ladder rung) must accept a proven miracle of someone who’s life was preserved in the 74 years since Kapaun’s death. “We have documented at least five of what the church calls ‘alleged miracles’ that I’m confident will make that case,” Hotze said.

Those cases, he said, are mostly about multiple Kansans surviving an illness that doctors said were impossible to recover from. People in all those cases testified to Hotze and a Vatican investigator that many people prayed for weeks for the intervention of Kapaun from his perch in heaven.

After that miracle might get proven to the satisfaction of the Vatican — and the Pope declares Kapaun “blessed — things get deeply complicated, Hotze said.

“For full canonization we’ll need another proven miracle, and that proven miracle has not happened yet,” Hotze said. “The rules are that it needs to be a miracle occurring after Father Kapaun is elevated to “blessed.”

But Hotze is hoping for yet another intervention.

“I’m hoping that Pope Francis might get wind of what’s going on here,” Hotze said. “And that he’ll tell everybody ‘Just go ahead and do it.’ ”

If it happens, none of Kapaun’s POW friends will likely live to see it.

“I’m pushing 98 now,” Dowe said on Tuesday from his home in the Houston area. He had a massive heart attack in 2021 and was hospitalized two weeks ago with congestive heart failure.

“But I hope to stick around. The Vatican needs to get this done.”

This story was originally published February 25, 2025 at 12:16 PM.