Blessed Achilles Puchała and Herman Stępień

Blessed Achilles Puchała and Herman Stępień were priests of the Order of Friars Minor Conventual. During the Second World War they served the parish of Saint George in Pierszaje near Iwieniec, in what were then the eastern lands of Poland and is today Belarus: Achilles as parish priest, Herman as curate. They were killed at Borowikowszczyzna because they would not abandon their parishioners arrested by the Germans. The Roman Martyrology commemorates them on July 19, the day of their death.

Józef Puchała was born on March 18, 1911, at Kosina near Łańcut, into a farming family, and he had seven brothers and sisters. After elementary school he attended the Franciscan minor seminary in Lviv. In 1927 he entered the order and received the name Achilles. He studied philosophy and theology in Krakow and was ordained a priest in 1936. He worked in the friaries at Grodno and Iwieniec.

Karol Stępień was born on October 21, 1910, in Łódź, into a poor working-class family. He too attended the Franciscan minor seminary in Lviv. In 1929 he entered the order, received the name Herman, and made his novitiate at Łagiewniki near Łódź. His superiors sent him to study in Rome, where he was ordained a priest in 1937. After returning to Poland he worked in Radomsko and then in Vilnius.

After the outbreak of the war Achilles took over the parish in Pierszaje, which its previous pastor had left in September 1939. Herman later joined him as curate. Under the German occupation the parish priest supported poor families and interceded for people detained by the gendarmerie, which had a post in the rectory.

In June 1943 an uprising against the Germans broke out in nearby Iwieniec, and the occupiers responded with a reprisal operation. On July 19 a German unit arrived in Pierszaje and rounded up the inhabitants. The friars could have hidden, because a German gendarme who lived in the rectory warned them. They chose instead to stay with their parishioners and voluntarily joined the detained men, who were driven to Borowikowszczyzna. In the evening the two priests were separated from the others and murdered in a barn, which was then set on fire. Accounts differ on the details of their death. The other detainees were spared and deported to forced labor in Germany.

The parishioners gathered the charred remains of the two Franciscans and buried them in a common grave by the church in Pierszaje. Today their relics rest in that church, to which pilgrims come.

In a decree of March 26, 1999, the Holy See recognized that they had been killed out of hatred of the faith. John Paul II beatified them on June 13, 1999, in Warsaw among the 108 martyrs of the Second World War, for whom he set a common memorial on June 12 in the formula of beatification. In his homily he spoke of diocesan and religious priests who died because they would not abandon their ministry.