Sometimes picking up a magazine at a doctor’s office can change history, if not only one soldier’s life.
In 2003, William Hansen, a Korean War veteran suffering from PTSD, flipped through a copy of Columbia magazine, published by the Knights of Columbus, at his local VA — and read a story about a man he knew well: Father Emil Kapaun.
The U.S. Army chaplain and Medal of Honor recipient who served in World War II and the Korean War died in a POW camp in Korea on May 23, 1951. The Catholic Church declared him “Venerable” In 2025.
As the 2023 documentary The Magazine and the Miracle: Finding Father Kapaun opens, viewers hear the priest’s voice — quoting Jesus about his peace that can be found “even in suffering, in want or even in time of war” — overlaid with war images.
The program will re-air on EWTN on Memorial Day.
The Magazine and the Miracle explains more of what happened in that VA office in 2003: The doctor advises Hansen to contact Father John Hotze, the co-postulator of Father Kapaun’s cause for canonization.
That decision ultimately led to a Department of Defense discovery almost 20 years later: the location
