Blessed Edmund Bojanowski

Blessed Edmund Bojanowski was a landowner from Greater Poland and a layman who, despite poor health, devoted his life to the rural people. He founded nurseries for children, reading rooms and works of charity, and from village girls he formed the Congregation of the Little Servant Sisters of the Immaculate Conception. The Roman Martyrology commemorates him on August 7, the day of his death.

He was born on November 14, 1814, in Grabonóg near Gostyń, into a noble family that was deeply religious and attached to patriotic traditions. At the age of four he fell seriously ill; his parents attributed his recovery to the intercession of the Mother of God venerated on the Holy Mountain in Gostyń. Because of his poor health he did not attend school but was taught at home. He studied at the universities of Wrocław and Berlin, but in 1838 a lung disease forced him to break off his studies.

He then settled in Grabonóg with his half-brother and began to work for the good of the countryside. In the literary section of the Kasyno Gostyńskie society he founded village reading rooms. When cholera struck Gostyń and the surrounding area in 1849, he visited the infected day and night, nursed them, and tried to make sure they received pastoral care and the sacraments. He took special care of the children orphaned by the epidemic.

He attached great importance to nurseries, that is, institutions caring for small children. He decided to entrust the work in them to village girls, with a view both to the children and to the sanctification of the girls themselves. On May 3, 1850, in Podrzecze near Gostyń, he opened the first nursery and gathered a few girls, whom he himself prepared for this service. From this community a religious congregation soon grew. In 1858 Archbishop Leon Przyłuski of Poznań took it under the protection of the Church, and in 1866 his successor approved the sisters’ constitutions.

He remained a layman to the end, although he wished to become a priest. In 1869 he entered the seminary in Gniezno, but the following year he had to leave it because his lung disease returned. He went to live with his friend, Father Stanisław Gieburowski, in Górka Duchowna, and died there, near the Marian shrine, on August 7, 1871. The congregation then numbered 188 sisters in 37 houses in the Grand Duchy of Posen, Galicia, and Silesia.

Because of the partitions of Poland, the congregation later divided into four independent branches: those of Greater Poland, Silesia, Stara Wieś, and Dębica. Each of them was approved by the Holy See, and since 1991 they have formed a federation.

The cause of beatification was opened by the Archbishop of Poznań in 1939. John Paul II beatified him in Warsaw on June 13, 1999. In his homily he called him “a good man with a big heart” and stressed that through his work he had gone far ahead of what the Second Vatican Council said about the apostolate of the laity.