Some great spiritual writers have produced their best writing in jail, or right after release from jail. One of them, though not particularly well known, is Walter Ciszek, a Jesuit priest from Pennsylvania who conducted secret missionary work in the Soviet Union between 1939 and 1963.
For nearly 20 years, his family, and the Jesuits, believed him dead. Falsely accused as a spy, he was imprisoned and tortured, endured solitary confinement, slave labor in Russian coal mines, Moscow’s infamous Lubyanka prison, and even the concentration camps of the Gulag archipelago, which Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, in his famed book of that name, compared to “a sewer system” down which millions were flushed.
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