Priest and Beggar: The Heroic Life of Venerable Aloysius Schwartz

In 1957, at twenty-seven years old, Father Aloysius Schwartz of Washington, D.C., asked to be sent to one of the saddest places in the world: South Korea in the wake of the Korean War. Just a few months into his priesthood, he stepped off the train in Seoul into a dystopian film. Squatters with blank stares picked through hills of garbage. Paper-fleshed orphans lay on the streets like leftover war shrapnel. The scenes pierced him.

Within just fifteen years, Father Schwartz had changed the co...