A Vatican official has beatified a Polish-born priest deported to
Soviet-ruled Central Asia who volunteered to stay on and minister to
Catholics.
Cardinal Angelo Amato, prefect of the Vatican’s Congregation for
Saints’ Causes, said Father Wladyslaw Bukowinski, who died in 1974,
prayed to overcome “fear, hunger and violence, continuing his service at
risk of being arrested and sent back to the gulag.”
“His trials before Soviet courts and his time in labor camps gave him
a pulpit for witness and evangelization, from which he taught love of
God and neighbor, showing how faith could bring down walls,” Amato said
during the Sept. 11 beatification Mass at Our Lady of Fatima Cathedral.
He said the priest had been a “courageous missionary of Christ in
distant lands of Eastern Europe” and found “safety through faith in God
and divine providence” at a time of religious persecution and “physical
and moral suffering.”
Born in 1904 at Berdychiv, now in Ukraine, Bukowinski studied law and
theology in Krakow, Poland, where he was ordained in 1931. He was
arrested by the Soviet secret police as a “Vatican agent” in 1940.
After a decade ministering to prisoners and forced laborers in
Ukraine, Russia and Kazakhstan, he voluntarily sought Soviet citizenship
in 1954 to continue his work and became the first Catholic priest for
two decades to visit German-speaking Catholics in neighboring
Tajikistan.
Rearrested in 1958 for running “illegal Catholic assemblies,” he
spent three years in Siberia before returning to Karaganda, where he
continued ministering until his death.
The beatification Mass, concelebrated by bishops from Russia and
Poland, was attended by Father Mariusz Kowalski, whose unexplained cure
from a brain hemorrhage at Karaganda in 2008 was attributed to the
intercession of Bukowinski.
Amato said the priest had always been convinced “Russia would return
to Christ” and had viewed his own arrest and deportation as providential
events enabling him to reach “places of suffering.”
In a Sept. 11 Angelus message in Rome, Pope Francis said Bukowinski
“always showed great love for the weakest and neediest,” despite being
“persecuted for his faith.”