Blessed Anastazy Pankiewicz

Blessed Anastazy Pankiewicz was a Bernardine, a priest of the Order of Friars Minor, the builder of a friary and a school in Łódź, and the founder of the Antonian Sisters. He died in 1942 as a prisoner of the German concentration camp at Dachau. The Roman Martyrology commemorates him on April 20.

He was born in 1882 at Nagórzany near Sanok and at baptism was given the name Jakub. In 1900 he entered the Order of Friars Minor in Lwów, in the province whose friars are known in Poland as Bernardines, and received the name Anastazy. He made his perpetual vows in 1904 and was ordained a priest in 1906.

He was a preacher at Wieliczka and novice master at Włocławek. During the First World War he was a military chaplain and a pastor to the Poles in Hungary. From 1919 to 1930 he was guardian of the friary at the Church of Saint Bernardine in Krakow.

In 1930 he bought a plot of land at Doły, on the outskirts of Łódź. In 1932 a religious house and a small church of Saint Elizabeth of Hungary were established there, and by 1937 the building of the friary and the school had been raised. Father Anastazy opened in it a private secondary school for boys, intended above all for poor boys. In 1939 it had two hundred pupils.

He wanted religious sisters to help at the school and among poor families. He helped three sisters who had come from Włocławek to buy a house near the friary and gave direction to their charitable work. This was the beginning of the Congregation of the Antonian Sisters of Christ the King, which Bishop Michał Klepacz of Łódź approved in 1959. Today the Antonian Sisters run a home for single mothers in Łódź.

After the outbreak of the Second World War the Germans took over the friary and the school and turned the church into garages and stables. Father Anastazy did not abandon his post and moved nearby, onto the grounds of the cemetery. In October 1941, during the mass arrests of priests in Łódź and the surrounding area, he was detained and sent to Dachau. In the spring of 1942 the camp doctor assigned him to the invalids, who were being taken to their death in the gas chamber at Hartheim near Linz in Austria. Before he was taken away, he went to confession and said, “I am calm now and ready to die.” Witnesses remembered that he was helping a fellow prisoner climb into the vehicle when the door, slammed shut, cut off his hands.

The Holy See’s decree on his martyrdom states that he died on April 20, 1942, probably on the way from Dachau to Hartheim. The Bernardines and Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance give May 20, 1942, as the day he was taken from the camp. John Paul II beatified him on June 13, 1999, in Warsaw among the 108 martyrs of the Second World War, whose common memorial he set for June 12. Blessed Anastazy is the second patron of the church he built in Łódź, and the Bernardine school there bears his name.