Kapaun pilgrims were walking for a miracle
Staff writer
Ramie Samour knows why people embark on the 60-plus-mile Father Emil Kapaun pilgrimage from Wichita to Ramie’s hometown church in Pilsen.
“Everybody has a why,” she said Friday in Peabody at the second-night encampment of the annual walk. “For somebody it’s healing, for infertility, for somebody to find their faith, for a family member to be reconciled. I just wasn’t prepared to be the why.”
She and her husband, Jacob, and their brood of six, ages 8 to 18, have made the trek multiple times in grief, gratitude, or support of sainthood for Kapaun. This year, Ramie is the focus of her family’s hope for a miracle: Her cheerful-mom demeanor cracked just momentarily to reveal that she was diagnosed in March with Stage 3 breast cancer.
The 18th annual pilgrimage was humanity at its sweatiest, achiest, and most blistered. Yet, at its most buoyantly hopeful, it was full of community spirit. And, event organizer J.P. Brunke noted, pilgrims enjoyed one of the better years for weather the event has ever had. There were no thunderstorms and mostly overcast skies, protecting pilgrims from the direct sear of the sun.
This year’s band of Catholic believers – 400 registered, probably 350 from 22 states and Canada finishing – shuffled across a grid of gravel section roads Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday morning, ending up at a Mass at St. John Nepomucene. That’s the home parish of Pilsen-born Kapaun, the U.S. Army chaplain who died ministering to troops in a North Korean prisoner of war camp in 1951.
The pilgrimage is organized annually by the Father Kapaun Guild and the Catholic Diocese of Wichita in support of the canonization of Kapaun.
The crowd of pilgrims and support teams gathered Thursday in Peabody City Park after a 15-mile day. Among them were many veterans of the cause for Kapaun’s sainthood.
One, Paul Kear, is the father of Chase Kear, a Hutchinson Community College athlete who suffered what doctors diagnosed as a fatal head injury in 2010 when he missed the mat on a pole vault. The family attributes prayers for intercession from Kapaun – enlisting him as a spiritual advocate to God - as the reason for the miraculous healing of Chase, now a Boeing mechanic and father of two.
“All the doctors said, ‘No, he’s not going to make it,’” said the elder Kear, who volunteers every year to haul pilgrims’ luggage and tents. “We just prayed for Father Kapaun to intercede and the Lord to heal him, and they did. And he’s just a walking, talking miracle.”
Kapaun’s nephew, Ray Emil Kapaun, came from Whidbey Island, Washington, not to walk but to talk about gratitude for the POWs who survived to bear witness to his uncle’s ministry, essential for canonization.
Father Don Zimmerman – a 79-year-old priest from Manhattan– marveled that he and a friend completed a 473-mile walk in December on the Spanish portion of the Camino Francés with no sore feet only to get blisters in the first 30 miles of the “Kansas Camino.”
“I’m really impressed with the number of young people who are on this one,” Zimmerman said, adding that the sacrifice of time – four days – was a good lesson of clear focus and purpose for young people to experience.
Ramie Samour agreed that annual walks had helped her had developed focus that she’s now grateful for. She drove along this year as her husband, kids, siblings, and extended family walked the full route, carrying their prayerful longing for a miracle healing for her.
Ramie joined them on foot for the final eight-mile leg of the walk Sunday, still in recovery from a double mastectomy exactly one month before. They arrived in a misty rainfall at St. John Nepomucen,e where she attended as a child and was married.
Father Kapaun has been part of Ramie’s extended family culture since she was a girl. As a fourth grader, she chose him for her Kansas history project. Her mother, Denise Bina, loved taking the family on the pilgrimage — and walked it in June, 2021. She died the following month in a car accident that also killed Ramie’s father, Ray. In 2022, the whole Samour family walked together in their memory.
Since that extended family walk, her husband, Jake, hasn’t completed the full walk.
“But last year, I just felt an inkling, that maybe I should do it again,” he said. “When my wife was diagnosed with cancer, it gave me another reason to do something hard. I figure she’s going to go through chemo and radiation so I can do this, offer it up for her, praying to Father Kapaun to ask for his intercession. Her life might be healed, which is what we’re looking for.”