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This Friday’s missionary hero was a young man whose mission work was in his native land, Poland. His name was Jerzy Popieluszko.
Alphons, his baptismal name, was born on September 14, 1947 in a small village, Okopy. His parents were devout Catholic Christians. As a child, Alphons would walk 3 miles to serve Mass, and each evening he would return to church to pray the rosary.
As a teen, Alphons had a desire to become a priest. But because the Communist government tried to discourage religion, Alphons had to keep his desire secret.
After graduating from high school, Alphons took a train to Warsaw to enter the seminary. After one year in the seminary, however, the government drafted him and sent him to a special unit designed to squash priestly vocations.
Communist leaders did what they could to break Alphons, but nothing they did worked. For example, when he refused to crush his rosary beneath under his heel, they put him in solitary confinement for a month. And because he refused to remove a medal from around his neck, they made him crawl around the camp and his hands and knees in the freezing rain.
On May 28, 1972, Alphonse was ordained a priest and given a new name, Jerzy. Soon, he found himself caring for small parishes and as a chaplain in Warsaw.
What Fr. Jerzy became most famous for was speaking against Communism in his sermons, many of them broadcast on Radio Free Europe. Plus, Fr. Jerzy became the chaplain of Solidarity, an anti-Communist workers’ group.
The government agency, SB, which was Poland’s version of Russia’s KGB or East Germany’s Stasi, did what they could to kill Fr. Jerzy without success. Finally, though, on October 19, 1984, after celebrating Mass, Fr. Jerzy was making his way back to Warsaw. He was stopped by SB agents, beaten severely, and had a bag of rocks tied to his feet. Then, the SB agents threw him into a river. His body was discovered 10 days later.
Fr. Jerzy was beatified on June 6, 2010 in Warsaw, Poland. Blessed Jerzy’s feast day is October 19.
