Venerable Father Emil J. Kapaun, M.A. 1948
By Nicholas Koas
Editors’ Note: There was an error in the print version of this story in the summer 2026 magazine, not properly attributing the quote to President Obama. It’s corrected below.
In 2025, Pope Francis elevated Father Emil Kapaun’s journey to sainthood to “Venerable” — and here, we are telling his story.
Father Kapaun was a captain in the U.S. Army and the most decorated military chaplain in American history — posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor by President Barack Obama in 2013.
At the White House ceremony where the medal was presented to Father Kapaun’s nephew, President Obama said: “After the Communist invasion of South Korea in 1950, Father Kapaun was among the first American troops who hit the beaches and pushed their way north through hard mountains and bitter cold…. In his understated Midwestern way, he wrote home, saying, ‘this outdoor life is quite the thing’... but he had hope, saying, ‘It looks like the war will end soon.’”
China entered the war at that point with a massive surprise attack — perhaps 20,000 soldiers pouring down on a few thousand Americans. In the chaos, dodging bullets and explosions, Father Kapaun raced between foxholes, out past the front lines and into no-man’s land, dragging the wounded to safety.
When his commanders ordered an evacuation, he chose to stay, gathering the injured and tending to their wounds. When enemy forces bore down, it seemed like the end, but Father Kapaun spotted a wounded Chinese officer. He pleaded with this officer and convinced him to call out to his fellow Chinese. The shooting stopped, and they negotiated a safe surrender, saving those American lives.
Then, as Father Kapaun was being led away, he saw another American — wounded, unable to walk, laying in a ditch, defenseless. An enemy soldier was standing over him, rifle aimed at his head, ready to shoot. Father Kapaun marched over and pushed the enemy soldier aside, and as the soldier watched, stunned, Father Kapaun carried that wounded American away.
Virtue and Valor
This is the valor we honor today — an American soldier who didn’t fire a weapon, but who wielded the mightiest weapon of all: a love for his brothers so pure that he was willing to die so that they might live. And yet, the incredible story of Father Kapaun does not end there.
He carried that injured American, for miles, as their captors forced them on a death march. When Father Kapaun grew tired, he’d help the wounded soldier hop on one leg. When other prisoners stumbled, he picked them up. When they wanted to quit — knowing that stragglers would be shot — he begged them to keep walking.
In the camps that winter, deep in a valley, men could freeze to death in their sleep. Father Kapaun offered them his own clothes. They only had tiny rations of millet and corn and birdseed, so Father would sneak past the guards, forage in nearby fields, and return with rice and potatoes.
The guards ridiculed his devotion to his Savior. They took his clothes and made him stand in the freezing cold for hours. Yet, he never lost his faith. At night, he slipped into huts to lead prisoners in prayer, saying the rosary, administering the sacraments, and offering three simple words: “God bless you.” One of them later said that with his very presence, he could just for a moment turn a mud hut into a cathedral.
That spring, he held an Easter service for the soldiers. As the sun rose that Sunday, he put on his purple stole and led dozens of prisoners to the ruins of an old church in the camp. He read from a prayer missal that they had kept hidden and held up a small crucifix that he had made from sticks. And as the guards watched, Father Kapaun and all those prisoners — men of different faiths, perhaps some men of no faith — sang the Lord’s Prayer and “America the Beautiful.” They sang so loud that other prisoners across the camp not only heard them, they joined in, too — filling the valley with prayer and song.
Glimpse of the Eternal
This faith was perhaps the greatest gift to those men — that even amidst such hardship and despair, there could be hope and some touch of the divine. Looking back, one of them said that that is what “kept a lot of us alive.”
Yet, for Father Kapaun, the horrific conditions took their toll. Thin, frail, and with a blood clot in his leg, he began to limp. And then came dysentery followed by pneumonia. That’s when the guards saw their chance to finally rid themselves of this priest and the hope he inspired. Over the protests and tears of the men who loved him, the guards sent him to a death house — a hellhole with no food or water — to be left to die.
And yet, even then, his faith held firm. As he was taken away, he blessed the guards. “Forgive them,” he said, “for they know not what they do.”
Two days later, in that house of death, Father Kapaun breathed his last breath.
Catholic University: Forging Saints
Emil Joseph Kapaun was born in 1916 outside Pilsen, Kan., to Eastern European immigrants. His early life was marked by signs of a vocation to the priesthood.
He was ordained for the Diocese of Wichita in 1940 and assigned to his home parish in Pilsen, where he also ministered at nearby Herington Army Airfield. His service there inspired him to request permission to join the Army Chaplain Corps in 1944; he then served in the Burma Theater during World War II.
The G.I. Bill brought him to The Catholic University of America, where he earned an M.A. in education in 1948. His dissertation was A Study of the Accrediting of Religion in the High Schools of the United States. Soon after receiving his degree, Father Kapaun was called to Korea, where his battlefield heroism and pastoral ministry became hallmarks.
When he died as a prisoner of war in 1951, he was buried with many other Americans in a mass grave near the North Korean camp, where his ministry of service would later become renowned. The remains of Americans buried in unmarked graves were later returned and reinterred in Japan and Hawaii. Scientific advances over time allowed Father Kapaun’s remains to finally be identified in 2021, and he is now buried in the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Wichita.
Pope St. John Paul II declared Father Kapaun a Servant of God in 1993 and in 2025, Pope Francis elevated him to Venerable. Evidence of miraculous interventions have been submitted to the Vatican to advance the cause of Father Kapaun’s beatification and canonization.
In a 1954 feature in The Saturday Evening Post, which brought national attention to Father Kapaun’s virtuous life, U.S. Army Lt. (later Colonel) Mike Dowe, who was a POW with Kapaun, wrote: “He wore the cross of the corps of chaplains instead of the crossed rifles of the infantry, but he was the best foot soldier I ever knew, and the bravest and kindest.”
Nicholas Koas, B.A. politics, 1984, is a former member of the Alumni Association Board of Directors.
