Blessed Elżbieta Róża Czacka

Blessed Elżbieta Róża Czacka was a religious sister who lost her sight at the age of twenty-two and devoted the rest of her life to the blind. She founded the Congregation of the Franciscan Sisters Servants of the Cross and the center for the blind at Laski near Warsaw. The Church commemorates her on May 19.

She was born on October 22, 1876, in Biała Cerkiew, in present-day Ukraine, into a Polish aristocratic family. Before entering religious life she bore the name Róża (Rose). In 1882 the family moved to Warsaw. Her eyesight had been weak since childhood, and a fall from a horse in her youth hastened the disease. In 1898 she became completely blind. A doctor who judged her condition hopeless advised her to devote herself to the plight of the blind.

Róża accepted her blindness as a sign of her vocation and for ten years prepared herself for work with the blind. In Warsaw she opened the first facilities for blind children and adults, and then founded the Society for the Care of the Blind. She also adapted the Braille alphabet to the Polish language.

In 1915 she traveled to Ukraine and because of the war could not return home for three years. There, through a priest she had met, she entered the Third Order of Saint Francis, received the habit, and took the name Elżbieta (Elizabeth). After her return, on December 1, 1918, she founded the Congregation of the Franciscan Sisters Servants of the Cross in Warsaw. The sisters were to serve the blind and to carry their daily cross in reparation for the spiritual blindness of people. Her work was supported by the apostolic nuncio Achille Ratti, later Pope Pius XI.

In the early 1920s a center for the blind with schools and workshops, together with the mother house of the congregation, was established at Laski. The spiritual father of the work was Father Władysław Korniłowicz. Thanks to him, Laski also opened its doors to people far from God and in search of faith. Despite serious illnesses, including two operations for cancer, Mother Elżbieta tirelessly led the work.

After the outbreak of the Second World War, the institution at Laski was turned into a hospital for the wounded. Mother Elżbieta herself was wounded in Warsaw during a bombing. During the occupation the sisters supported the Polish underground, and their chaplain was Father Stefan Wyszyński, the future Primate of Poland, with whom she shared a deep spiritual bond. In 1950, weakened by illness, she ceased to lead the congregation. She died with a reputation for holiness on May 15, 1961, at Laski.

In 2017 Pope Francis recognized her heroic virtues, and in 2020 he approved a miracle attributed to her intercession: the healing of a severely injured girl from Łomża. She was beatified on September 12, 2021, in Warsaw together with Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński. In the apostolic letter the Pope wrote that, deprived of the light of her eyes, she recognized with the eyes of faith Christ, the light of the world, and with loving fidelity bore witness to him before those who walk in the darkness of body and soul. Her relics rest in the chapel at Laski.