A special mass is to be celebrated by the Archbishop of Warsaw, Cardinal Kazimierz Nycz, in Warsaw’s St Andrzej Bobola Church, where the saint’s body has been interred in a metal coffin since 1938, the year of his canonization.
Andrzej Bobola entered the Jesuit Order in Vilnius at the age of 14. Having taken monastic vows in 1630, aged 39, he served for several years as a preacher.
From 1652 he also worked as a country missionary in such places as Polotsk and Pinsk in Lithuania (present-day Belarus).
Captured in 1657 by the Cossacks, he was subjected to torture, with his limbs amputated, wood slivers driven underneath his fingernails and his nose cut off. He died a martyr’s death.
At the beginning of the 18th century, his body was said to have been found completely undecomposed, which was recognized by the Church as proof of his holiness.
In the 1920s the Bolsheviks moved the body to Moscow as an exhibit, due to its good condition, in the Museum of Hygiene of People’s Commissioners for Health. In 1924, as a kind of reciprocal gesture for help during a famine, the holy relic was delivered to the Vatican in the wake of diplomatic efforts by a secret envoy of Pope Pius XI.
In 2002, Andrzej Bobola was declared a patron saint of Poland and of the Warsaw Archdiocese.
A commemorative plaque at the site of his death in Ivanava in Pinsk district, Belarus, has been damaged by an unidentified perpetrator.
Father Andrey Rylka of the Pinsk Curia has told the Polish Press Agency that the incident took place last Saturday. “According to a witness report, the plaque was broken by a man using some kind of tool. It looks like the act of a hooligan,” he said.
The plaque is located close to the two crosses – Catholic and Orthodox, which are known as the Crosses of Reconciliation. “They symbolize dialogue and reconciliation between Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christians, causes championed by St. Andrzej Bobola,” Father Rylka said. (mk/pk)