Blessed Bolesława Lament

Blessed Bolesława Lament was a religious sister, the foundress of the Congregation of the Missionary Sisters of the Holy Family. She devoted her life to the education of young people, to helping the poor, and to the unity of Christians. The Church commemorates her on January 29.

She was born on July 3, 1862, in Łowicz, into a craftsman’s family, the eldest of eight children. After finishing school she trained as a dressmaker and opened her own workshop in her hometown. In 1884 she entered the Congregation of the Sisters of the Family of Mary, which was operating in secret. She worked there for nine years as an educator and teacher, but she was not sure of her path, and in 1893, before making perpetual vows, she left the congregation.

A year later her father died, and Bolesława had to support her mother and her younger siblings. She settled with them in Warsaw, where she ran a dressmaking workshop and directed a night shelter for the homeless. In 1900 her brother Stefan, who wanted to become a priest, died. At his coffin she resolved to return to religious life.

In 1903, on the advice of the Capuchin Blessed Honorat Koźmiński, she left for Mogilev on the Dnieper, in present-day Belarus, to bring up and educate girls. There, in October 1905, with the help of the Jesuit Feliks Wierciński, she and two companions began a congregation that later took the name of the Missionary Sisters of the Holy Family. It was to serve the unity of Eastern Christians with the Catholic Church and to strengthen Catholics in the faith. Under the rule of the tsars the sisters had to conceal their religious life. In 1907 they moved to Saint Petersburg, where they ran an orphanage and schools for children of various nationalities and confessions.

After the October Revolution the congregation lost all its works, and in 1921 Mother Bolesława returned to Poland. In 1926 the generalate and the novitiate found a home in a former monastery at Ratowo near Mława. New houses arose mainly in the east of the country, where Catholics lived side by side with Orthodox Christians.

In 1935, on account of her age and health, she resigned from the office of superior general and settled in Białystok, where she went on founding schools and kindergartens. John Paul II recalled that she twice lived through the loss of everything the congregation had built up, and that in hard moments she strengthened herself with the words: “All for the greater glory of God.” In 1941 she was struck by paralysis. She spent the last five years of her life in prayer, offering her suffering for the unity of Christians. She died in Białystok on January 29, 1946, and was buried in the crypt of the Church of Saint Anthony at Ratowo.

John Paul II beatified Mother Bolesława on June 5, 1991, in Białystok. He said then that long before the Second Vatican Council she had become an inspirer of ecumenism in daily life through love. Her relics rest in the shrine in Białystok, built on the site where she died.