The Wichita Catholic Diocese held a mass Friday evening finalizing the three-year process for the Beatification and Canonization of Father Emil Kapaun.
Kapaun was an Army chaplain from Kansas who died during the Korean War. He was held in a POW camp and passed away from pneumonia and starvation after he gave his food to the other prisoners.
"All together we collected about 8,000 pages of documents that we'll be sending over to Rome, so a little bit of work in the past three years," explains Fr. John Hotze.
The documents are packaged into a box that was notarized and sealed at the mass. They will now be sent to the Vatican where the final decision, on whether Fr. Kapaun will be granted sainthood, will be made.
"Even if he isn't named a saint I think we've all been truly blessed by learning more about his life and about the man that Father Kapaun was."
If canonized, it would make him only the third American to become a saint.
