Blessed Celestyna Faron

Blessed Celestyna Faron was a Little Servant Sister of the Immaculate Conception of Stara Wieś, a teacher of young children, and the superior of the convent in Brzozów. Arrested by the Gestapo in 1942, she died in the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp on Easter Sunday 1944. The Roman Martyrology commemorates her on April 9, the day of her death.

She was born on April 24, 1913, in Zabrzeż near Łącko as Katarzyna Faron and was baptized in the parish church in Łącko. When she was five, her mother died. From then on the girl was raised by childless relatives in nearby Kamienica, people of deep faith. She received her First Holy Communion when she was only seven.

As a teenager she asked to be admitted to the Congregation of the Little Servant Sisters of the Immaculate Conception in Stara Wieś near Brzozów, which grew out of the work of Blessed Edmund Bojanowski. She received permission in 1929, and a year later she began religious life and took the name Celestyna. When asking to be admitted to vows, she wrote that she longed to belong to Jesus Christ as a whole burnt offering. She made her perpetual vows on September 15, 1938.

She prepared for educational and catechetical work in courses in Lwów, Poznań, and Przemyśl, and then worked in the nursery schools run by the congregation. From 1938 she was in charge of the kindergarten in Brzozów, where she also cared for the sick. The sisters relate that while still in Lwów she heard of a priest bearing the same surname who had left the Catholic Church, and declared in their presence that she was ready to give her life for his conversion.

During the German occupation she directed the convent and the nursery school, where children were given meals. On February 19, 1942, she was summoned to the Gestapo station and arrested. The sources speak of a denunciation and of a suspicion that the sisters’ house served the underground. She was held in prison in Jasło and in Tarnów, and on January 6, 1943, she was brought to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where she was given the number 27989.

In the camp she worked digging ditches. She fell ill with typhus and then with tuberculosis of the lungs, and from the spring of 1943 she never again left the barrack for the sick. Her fellow prisoners remembered that she shared the contents of her parcels with them and blamed no one for her fate. She prayed for her homeland, for her congregation, for priests, and for her persecutors. She died on Easter Sunday, April 9, 1944. She was thirty years old.

The priest for whom she had offered her life, Father Władysław Faron, was reconciled with the Catholic Church after the war. Pope John Paul II beatified Sister Celestyna on June 13, 1999, in Warsaw among the 108 martyrs of the Second World War, whose common memorial he set for June 12. During the same Mass Edmund Bojanowski, the founder of the Servant Sisters, was proclaimed blessed.