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Its a miracle that Colwich survived?
Colwich athlete's story catches eye of Vatican investigator

BY ROY WENZL
The Wichita Eagle


* Chase Kear sits and relaxes at the Wesley Rehabilitation Center a week ago. Kear suffered a traumatic brain injury while pole vaulting during a practice at Hutchinson Community College. The right side of Kear's skull was removed to relieve pressure off his swelling brain after the accident.
* The piece of Chase Kear's skull that was removed during surgery to relieve pressure on his brain has been replaced with a ceramic piece. Kear was injured during a pole vaulting accident last October. An official from the Vatican is scheduled to be in Wichita next week to investigate the canonization of Fr. Emil Kapuan. Relatives of Chase prayed the Fr. Kapaun prayer often while Chase was near death.

Travis Heying/The Wichita Eagle


* Gallery: Father Emil Kapaun


COLWICH - "Chase survived in part because hundreds of people prayed to Father Emil Kapaun to intercede on his behalf. It was absolutely a miracle." — Paula Kear, Chase's mother

People in Colwich like to touch Chase Kear's arm or his shoulder with their fingers. Or they hug him. "Miracle Man," they say. "Let me touch the miracle." With anybody else in Colwich, this would be just talk. But it's not just talk to the Vatican.

Prompted in part by what the Kear family has said publicly, and partly by a preliminary investigation begun by the Catholic Diocese of Wichita, a Vatican investigator named Andrea Ambrosi will arrive from Italy in Wichita on Friday.

He will investigate on behalf of the church in Rome whether 20-year-old Chase Kear's survival qualifies as a miracle; whether he survived a severe head injury last year in part because his family and hundreds of friends successfully prayed thousands of prayers to the soul of Father Emil Kapaun, a U.S. Army chaplain from Pilsen, Kan., who died a hero in the Korean War.

Ambrosi, a lawyer by training, is coming here to thoroughly "and skeptically" investigate whether Chase's story is a miracle, said the Rev. John Hotze, the judicial vicar for the Wichita diocese. The church requires miracles to elevate a person to sainthood.

Hotze has investigated Kapaun's proposed sainthood for eight years, which is only a fraction of the time the church has been considering whether to elevate Kapaun to sainthood.

Soldiers came out of prisoner-of-war camps in 1953 with incredible stories about Kapaun's heroism and faith. Across Kansas, his memory is kept alive at Wichita's Kapaun Mount Carmel High School, in his hometown of Pilsen and elsewhere.

Kapaun is so well-known and so highly regarded by area Catholics that the diocese has received other reports of miracles involving Kapaun, Hotze said. Ambrosi on Friday will consult area physicians in at least three such cases, including Chase's, Hotze said.

Only two American-born people have ever been canonized as saints. For sainthood, the church will require at least one and possibly two miracles be proven on Kapaun's behalf, depending on whether he died a martyr, something the church is also trying to determine.

Among people that Ambrosi will consult on Friday will be Chase's neurosurgeon, Raymond Grundmeyer, who said in a brief e-mail last week that he considers Chase's survival a miracle.

If Ambrosi's report concurs, more church officials would still have to evaluate the case, but it would further a cause that Kapaun's fellow prisoners of war and Catholic Church officials have carried on for years: to persuade the church to declare Father Kapaun a saint.

"There is no doubt in anyone's mind in our family that Father Kapaun helped save our son," Paula Kear said of Chase, who is making a full recovery. "We were told at least three or four times in those first two days that Chase wasn't going to make it.

"Dr. Grundmeyer did a great job in saving him, but even he said he couldn't explain why he survived."

Father Kapaun

Kapaun was a chaplain assigned to the U.S. Army's Eighth Cavalry regiment, which was surrounded and overrun by the Chinese army in North Korea in October and November 1951.

Kapaun became a hero, rescuing wounded soldiers from the battlefield and risking death by preventing Chinese executions of wounded Americans too injured to walk.

He became a hero again in prison camp, stealing food for prisoners, ministering to the sick, saying the rosary for soldiers, defying guards' attempts to indoctrinate soldiers, making pots and pans out of roofing tin so that soldiers could boil snow into drinking water and boil lice out of their filthy clothing.

Hundreds of American prisoners died in the camp of exposure or starvation or illness that first winter. The Chinese guards did nothing to tend Kapaun when he became sick; he died in May 1951, two years before the war ended.

Soldiers who survived have praised Kapaun for decades; some of them have said he deserved not only sainthood but the Medal of Honor, in addition to the lesser Distinguished Service Cross the Army awarded him after his death.

Chase's accident

The Kear family says Kapaun's role in Chase Kear's survival 57 years later began about two hours after their son was injured.

Chase, a member of the Hutchinson Community College track team, fell on his head during pole vaulting practice in October.

By the time a helicopter delivered him to Via Christi Regional Medical Center-St. Francis Campus, his family was already frantically praying as they watched the helicopter land.

Within an hour of that landing, Paula Kear's sister, Linda Wapelhorst, was asking a priest at St. Francis to perform the Catholic sacrament of anointing the sick, which used to be called last rites.

And she was calling Sacred Heart Church in Colwich, asking people there to get everyone in the church praying to Father Kapaun for help.

In the following days, Grundmeyer and others had told the family that Chase's skull had been cracked from ear to ear, that his brain was swelling, and that either the surgery to remove a skull piece or the infection that might follow would probably kill him.

Paula and Paul Kear and dozens of other people made regular trips to the chapel at St. Francis to pray, always with the Father Emil Kapaun prayer.

The Kapaun prayer had become a standard for parishioners in Colwich since a priest from the parish had come down with cancer several months before.

"Father Emil Kapaun gave glory to God by following his call to the priesthood and thus serving the people of Kansas and those in the military," the prayer says. "Father Kapaun, I ask you intercession not only for Chase Kear... but that I too may follow your example of service to God and my neighbor. For the gifts of courage in battle and perseverance of faith, we give you thanks oh Lord."

What happened next, Grundmeyer said last week, was "a miracle."

The family agrees. Only a few weeks after Chase broke his skull, he walked out of a rehabilitation hospital, shaken but alive.

His near-complete recovery stunned all the doctors involved, Paul and Paula Kear said.

"Chase survived in part because hundreds of people prayed to Father Emil Kapaun to intercede on his behalf," Paula Kear said.

"It was absolutely a miracle."

Chase himself says he has little memory of what happened. For interested visitors, he will calmly part his thick hair with his fingers and show the long semi-circular scar that traverses much of the right side of his scalp.

He's working a summer job and plans to coach the pole-vaulters at the Hutchinson Community College. He misses vaulting; he's grateful to Grundmeyer and Kapaun.

"So how does it feel to be a miracle?" his mother asked him last week.

"It feels pretty cool," he said.

I hate to burst their bubble, but Keegan Burnett suffered the exact same injury, also had part of his skull removed to relieve swelling, and ended up surviving (and is doing quite well).

Not to say that everyone is so fortunate, but I think it's an awfully big stretch to canonize a saint over Chase's recovery.

Then you should make the Vatican aware... Not that canonization is a knee-jerk thing, it's a very thorough process, but you should tell someone that... it might help.

I think whenever people attribute an improbable recovery to divine intervention, it's insulting to all those who weren't so lucky; it suggests that it was by God's deliberate omission that they succumbed to their injuries. That the prayers of family and friends enters into it is an even more disturbing notion--what of the pole vaulters who suffered head injuries and died? Did their family and friends simply not pray hard enough?

Chase and Keegan suffered catastrophic injuries and were properly treated by physicians who took immediate and drastic action to give them their bodies the best chance of healing.

"Of several acceptable explanations for a phenomenon, the simplest is preferable."
-Occams Razor

The way I see it, faith is ultimately concerned with things that cannot be seen. I know that no matter what happens in terms of answered prayers, I will still experience pain and loss. Everything is temporary; even the most amazing miracle is only a sign of something eternal that I cannot see. The truth is that even in the white-hot center of unbearable pain, when all I can do is express agony. Even when I am begging for morphine, or paralyzed by grief, there is still something that comforts me. Deep down in the heart of who I am, I am still okay and at peace. It is hard to explain. It is like beautiful music just beyond the range of hearing, like a cool breeze from another country blowing beneath a crack in the door. And it seems as though, at any moment, that door might open and I will hear the full melody, and feel the wind in my face, and see the limitless horizons of a place that is truly home. I know this sounds all mystical and irrational, and maybe it is, but I cannot tell you how precious it is to my experience. This is why I am not offended by people who say they get what they ask for when I am left unanswered. There is too much that I do not know. But the peace in my heart leads me to believe that the ultimate end is good, no matter what is happening now.

http://www.tuscaloosanews.com/article/2 ... 9&tc=yahoo

Prayers, healing could mean path to sainthood for Army chaplain

Miracle
Rich Sugg
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When Chase Kear fractured his skull while pole vaulting last October, doctors left him with little, if any chance of living. His parents, along with the entire community around tiny Colwich, Kans., began praying to Father Emil Kapaun, a local priest and chaplain during the Korean War. Kear is pictured in July 2009 at Sacred Heart Catholic Church where so many prayed for his recovery.
By Eric Adler McClatchy-Tribune News Service
Published: Saturday, July 18, 2009 at 3:30 a.m.
Last Modified: Friday, July 17, 2009 at 6:43 p.m.
COLWICH, Kan. | On the first day — long before the lawyer from the Vatican showed up, long before talk of saints and miracles — young Chase Kear lay on the edge of death in the intensive care unit.

It was an accident: pole vaulting.

The 19-year-old athlete's skull was cracked from ear to ear across his forehead.

His bleeding brain swelled. Machines hummed and beeped. Tubes jutted from his nose, mouth and veins.

Dozens of family and friends flocked crying to the St. Francis campus of Wichita's Via Christi Regional Medical Center to wrap Chase's parents, Paul and Paula Kear, in their arms and prayers.

It is to whom they prayed that is part of the wonder of the thing.

The supplications went to an Army chaplain — a priest from Colwich, Kan., who died long ago in the cold and brutality of a POW camp in North Korea.

The aura surrounding the late Rev. Emil Kapaun and his deeds is only strengthened by Chase's story.

'It was miraculous,' Chase's neurosurgeon, Raymond Grundmeyer, later would write. Now the Catholic Church must seriously ponder:

Should a new member from the Kansas prairie join its pantheon of Catholic saints? What really occurred in that intensive care ward?

'God won't do this to our family twice,' one of Paula Kear's sisters assured her.

Fifteen years ago the sister had lost her 16-year-old son when he climbed a tree and grabbed a power line.

Now this: the withering call on Oct. 2, 2008.

'There's been an accident,' Chase's coach said.

How many thousands of times had Chase completed this simple practice move, launching up with the pole and landing on the mat? No crossbar to clear. No pressure.

Small and lithe, 150 pounds of muscle and speed, Chase had been a state-ranked vaulter at Andale High School. He was in the second year of a track scholarship at Hutchinson Community College, 35 miles from home.

But on this autumn day, Chase felt something different when he launched.

The pole had more energy. More flex. It propelled him too far. His rear end caught the far edge of the mat. His torso snapped back, whipping his skull to the ground.

'It's bad,' the coach told Paula. She could hear the womp of rotor blades of the helicopter landing to speed her unconscious son to Wichita. 'It's real bad.'

At the hospital, a chaplain led them to a tiny conference room, the place for terrible news. Paula's older sister, Linda Wapelhorst, sat nearby. She would quietly request that a priest enter Chase's room and perform the Catholic sacrament of 'anointing of the sick,' most commonly thought of as last rites.

'She asked us if we wanted her to call our parish, Sacred Heart,' Paula said, 'and put Chase on the prayer line and pray the prayer to Father Kapaun.'

That, some said, is when the miracle began.

Because seven weeks later — against all medical odds and his doctors' abilities to explain it — Chase Kear came back.

'Hey, hi,' Chase, 20, said cheerfully last week. He swung open the front door of his family's home — a one-story ranch with a sculpture of the Virgin Mary and a tiny angel out front.

He stood strapping in shorts and blue sport shirt. His curly brown hair popped from the edges of his Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. baseball cap.

He wears his hair long to cover the scar from his surgeon's last-ditch effort to save his life. That involved removing a saucer-sized hunk of his skull to reduce the pressure on his brain. Later, the hole was covered by a ceramic plate.

'I feel good,' he said to the obvious question and introduced his parents in a living room where framed prayers and four small crucifixes adorned the walls.

It's also where, two weeks ago, the postulator from the Vatican, Andrea Ambrosi, came to talk. It is his task to collect evidence and present the cases of would-be saints back in the halls of St. Peter's.

The Catholic Diocese of Wichita has offered Chase's case as miraculous healing brought on, it believes, by thousands of prayers to the late priest Emil Kapaun, whom the diocese hopes to see canonized.

To declare an individual a saint, the Roman Catholic Church requires proof of at least two posthumous miracles on his or her behalf or one miracle if the individual died a martyr. Should the church accept Chase's healing as divine, it would be the first miracle credited to Kapaun toward sainthood.

Ambrosi is also investigating evidence collected by the Wichita diocese of two other healings credited to Kapaun. One involves a 16-year-old girl and the other a man in his 80s.

'[Ambrosi] sat on my front living room couch and took his coat off and loosened his tie,' Paula, a middle school language arts teacher, said of Ambrosi. 'I'm just amazed. We're not special people.'

But the Kears do believe something special, something divine, happened to their son. And Chase believes it, too.

'I was dead. Here I am now,' Chase said, and then of Kapaun: 'I think he saved me.'

To be sure, the story of Emil Kapaun is well-known in this region of Kansas, where a Catholic high school bears his name.

As recently as June, 11 worshippers completed a 59-mile pilgrimage in support of the cause to make him a saint.

Born in 1916 near Pilsen, Kan., Kapaun was a priest in the Wichita diocese who volunteered to be a U.S. Army chaplain. His selfless behavior became well-known during the Korean War.

'They say his pipe was shot out of his mouth by a sniper and that didn't stop him,' said the Rev. John Hotze, who is coordinating the diocese's cause to make Kapaun a saint.

After the 8th Cavalry Regiment stumbled into a Chinese ambush and disaster, Kapaun stayed behind with the wounded instead of joining the pell-mell retreat. Time and again, the gentle priest risked his life to keep the enemy from finishing off wounded Americans on the battlefield.

Taken prisoner, he suffered with other GIs in a camp of squalor and deprivation along the Yalu River. In the bitter winters of 1950 and 1951, hundreds would die of starvation and illness. Kapaun stole food to keep others alive before his own death from pneumonia after about six months as a prisoner.

The U.S. Army awarded him the Distinguished Service Cross. Former prisoners make the case to award him the Medal of Honor.

In Colwich, at Sacred Heart, it had become common to repeat 'the Father Kapaun Prayer' for people ill or troubled. The congregation had begun doing so regularly a few years ago to help a parish priest who had fallen ill and eventually died.

When Chase teetered near death, asking people to recite the prayer was natural.

Hundreds of people complied, every day, hoping to reach the combat priest.

Miracles come in forms — divine and medical.

The brain and its ability to heal contain their own mysteries, said neurosurgeon Gail Rosseau, chief of surgery at Chicago's Neurologic & Orthopedic Hospital and a Catholic.

At times, she said, a brain injury can seem relatively minor when, suddenly, events turn tragic.

'I have also seen cases where I fully expected the worst and prepared the family, where I didn't think they would make it. Happily, I was wrong.'

What sets this case apart is that Chase's neurosurgeon, Raymond Grundmeyer — according to the Wichita diocese — apparently told the Vatican investigator Chase's recovery was 'miraculous.'

In a short e-mail message to The Kansas City Star, he wrote: 'We didn't think he was going to survive.'

Ambrosi reportedly met with Chase's physicians, studied medical reports and looked at scans of the battered brain.

The Kears said that doctors told them that if Chase survived, a subsequent infection could kill him later. If he survived that, he could be severely brain-damaged.

'I remember going to work one day,' said Paul Kear, who sells farm chemicals, 'trying to figure out how I'm going to tell Paula that Chase is going to be a vegetable.'

But Chase got better. Not slowly. Fast.

Seven days after his surgery, he moved a hand. Then around Day 10, a nurse put a line in his left arm. Chase swatted it away.

'Chase, if you can hear me, squeeze my hand,' a nurse said around Day 12. A squeeze.

Paula gave him a kiss good-night. He puckered his lips.

'We just kept praying,' the Father Kapaun Prayer, Paula said. 'I prayed it at least morning, noon and night. I would always pray it.'

The family taped up the prayer near Chase. The diocese sent over a laminated picture of Kapaun set with a minuscule relic, a piece of Kapaun's clothing a quarter the size of a contact lens.

On day 17, he was moved from the ICU to a regular room and, on day 19, to a rehabilitation hospital. He was weak, unable to stand on his own. That was Oct. 21.

One month later, Paula said, 'he walked into our home by himself. He went to a football game.'

Chase hasn't thought too much yet about the larger ecclesiastical questions:

Why him? For what purpose?

Does this mean he's supposed to do something special with his life?

'It does make me wonder.' But he will leave it at that for now.

His parents think that maybe the idea was to bring others closer to their faith or perhaps even to help Kapaun become a saint.

'Mostly people are just glad I'm still here,' said Chase, although there have been scares and signs that a miracle doesn't necessarily equal perfection.

Chase has had two small seizures since being released from the hospital. 'I'm not exactly the same guy,' he said.

His temper is shorter, he said, and erupts all too easily these days, something he's working to control. His speech is a shade slower and he thinks his wit is not as sharp.

'I used to be real funny, real quick with the comebacks,' he said. 'My mind doesn't work like that anymore.'

He has felt heartache: a breakup with a girl he'd asked to marry.

He has a summer job, cutting lawns for the school district. He lifts weights and plays touch football with friends at night. Next year he plans to return to junior college to finish studies to become a firefighter. He hopes to help out as an assistant pole vault coach on the track team.

'I miss it,' he said, and thinks about taking a pole and soaring through the air again. His timing is off, though, and he knows he may not be ready.

He has felt one more change as well.

Church. Sundays.

'It has a lot more meaning,' he said. 'I go in there and pay attention more to what the priest is saying. When I pray, I'm really praying hard.'

And Kapaun's cause?

Although sainthood is conferred regularly, the process can take centuries. Of some 10,000 saints, only two were born in the United States.

So Ambrosi's work is not done. The man some call the saint-maker is expected back in Kansas in January.

'Before, I used to say, ‘I hope this would happen in my lifetime,' ' said Hotze of the canonization. 'Now, I say: ‘When it happens in my lifetime.' '

http://www.cathnewsusa.com/article.aspx?aeid=14815

Vatican rep greenlights Kapaun cause
Published: June 30, 2009

Vatican investigator, Andrea Ambrosi, has found enough evidence of a miracle in the survival of Kansas man Chase Kear that it intends to keep studying his survival, with an eye toward declaring it an official miracle, church officials say.

Declaring it a miracle would help determine whether Fr Emil Kapaun of Pilsen will be canonized as a saint of the Catholic church, Kansas.com reports.

Andrea Ambrosi, a lawyer and investigator for the Vatican, visited family members and doctors for two Wichita-area families on Friday who believe the survival of their children during nearly lethal medical crises recently should qualify as miracles.

One of them involved Chase Kear, a 20-year-old Colwich athlete severely injured in October.


Fr John Hotze, judicial vicar for the Wichita diocese, is not allowed to say who or what families are being investigated for miracles. But he said there was one other "alleged miracle" in the Wichita area that Ambrosi studied during his time here.

With both families, Hotze said, Ambrosi met with the doctors involved and studied medical reports and X-rays.

"Afterward, the Vatican investigator said that in years of investigating miracles, he had never seen doctors who made such a compelling case for miracles occurring," Hotze said.

Fr Hotze has investigated Kapaun's proposed sainthood for eight years, which is only a fraction of the time the church has been considering whether to elevate Kapaun to sainthood.
American soldiers came out of prisoner-of-war camps in 1953 with incredible stories about Kapaun's heroism and faith. They said that in the fierce winter of 1950 and 1951, when 1,200 out of 3,000 American prisoners starved to death or died of illness in Camp 5 along the Yalu River, Kapaun kept hundreds of survivors alive by stealing food and by force of will.

Kapaun was assigned to the U.S. Army's Eighth Cavalry regiment, which was surrounded and overrun by the Chinese army in North Korea in October and November 1950. He stayed behind with the wounded when the Army retreated. He allowed his own capture, then risked death by preventing Chinese executions of wounded Americans too injured to walk.

The description of how this accident occurred leaves provides little information to determine exactly how it happened. Has this been the case with all of the accidents that have taken place in the vault or is there usually a thorough investigation into what happened?

altius wrote:The description of how this accident occurred leaves provides little information to determine exactly how it happened. Has this been the case with all of the accidents that have taken place in the vault or is there usually a thorough investigation into what happened?

The amount of investigation depends largely on whether or not there is a lawsuit. Jan Johnson keeps records of the known facts in these cases in the US. It can be very difficult to get anyone to say anything. Someone can decide to sue years down the road, and the people involved have to be careful not to say anything incriminating (so generally they say nothing).

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/art ... QD9BACNP00



Army agrees Kansas priest worthy of Medal of Honor
By JOHN MILBURN (AP) – 19 hours ago
TOPEKA, Kan. — A Kansas priest already under consideration for sainthood has won the endorsement of the Army's top civilian leader to receive the Medal of Honor.
The Rev. Emil Kapaun was a captain and chaplain in the Army in the Korean War and was taken prisoner in 1950 when the Chinese captured his unit. Kapaun continued to serve the men's needs, risking his life to provide them with food and water amid squalid conditions.
Kapaun, a Roman Catholic, died in a prison camp seven months later.
In one of his final acts as Army secretary, Pete Geren wrote Rep. Todd Tiahrt, R-Kan., saying he agreed that Kapaun was worthy of the honor. Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has also endorsed Kapaun's honor.
Seven chaplains have received the Medal of Honor, including Vincent Capodanno, a Navy chaplain from New York, killed in Vietnam in 1967. In 2006, Capodanno was declared a Servant of God by the Vatican, a step toward canonization.
Helen Kapaun, the chaplain's sister-in-law, said her husband Eugene, 85, has prayed that he would live to see his brother honored.
"We hoped it would have been sooner," Helen Kapaun said Monday. "I think there were a lot of circumstances that had to be finished in God's hands. Now, it proves that he was a saintly, holy man."
Tiahrt began efforts to honor Kapaun in 2000 after reading about his life.
"It's hard to imagine living through something like that. He handled it like a saint," Tiahrt said Monday. "This is the kind of person that we ought to emulate."
Congress must approve legislation sending Kapaun's award to President Barack Obama, which Tiahrt hopes happens by year's end.
The Rev. John Hotze of the Wichita diocese said Kapaun's recognition has been a long time in the making.
"He saw it as a role of serving his men and laying down his life for his men," said Hotze, who has a Web site honoring Kapaun. "It's like Christ coming to the world to serve instead of being served. That's what Father Kapaun was all about."
Kapaun was born in 1916 near the central Kansas town of Pilsen, about 60 miles north of Wichita. Ordained in 1940, he was a parish priest and auxiliary chaplain at the Herrington Army Air Base near Pilsen.
He was later sent to Southeast Asia during World War II, driving thousands of miles to say Mass, often using his Jeep hood as an altar.
Kapaun returned to Kansas, but when the Korean War began he pleaded with his bishop to let him go back to the Army.
"They needed chaplains. He loved the service boys very much," said Helen Kapaun, whose marriage was one of the last civilian ceremonies performed before Kapaun left for Korea.
The Vatican, which is investigating Kapaun for sainthood, has sent an investigator to Kansas to visit with the family of Chase Kear, who was injured when he fell on his head during pole vault practice in 2008. He cracked his skull and had swelling of his brain, and his family prayed for Kapaun to intercede on Kear's behalf.
"I think they go hand in hand," said Hotze, adding medical records were being compiled and translated to bolster Kapaun's case. Kear, now 20, is attending Hutchinson Community College and driving again.
Paula Kear, Chase's mother, said members of Sacred Heart parish in Colwich have long prayed to Kapaun for those needing healing.
"I think it's about time and well deserved. I hope that it hope it helps," she said. "We just prayed constantly."

What do answers to prayers depend on?... God's Grace

http://www.desiringgod.org/ResourceLibrary/TopicIndex/35_Prayer/275_What_Do_Answers_to_Prayer_Depend_On_Part_1/

Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need. Hebrews 4:16