Blessed George Matulaitis

Blessed George Matulaitis, in Lithuanian Jurgis Matulaitis and in Polish Jerzy Matulewicz, was Bishop of Vilnius and the renewer of the Congregation of Marian Fathers. A Lithuanian bound for years to Poland, he is venerated by the Church in Lithuania and in Poland. His memorial falls on January 27.

He was born on April 13, 1871, in the village of Lūginė near Marijampolė in Lithuania, the youngest of eight children. He was orphaned early: he lost his father in 1874 and his mother in 1881. Tuberculosis of the bone and poverty forced him to break off his secondary schooling and work on the land. The illness stayed with him to the end of his life.

In 1889 a relative, Jan Matulewicz, took him to Kielce. Two years later George entered the seminary there and took the Polish form of his surname. He then studied in Warsaw and at the Ecclesiastical Academy in Saint Petersburg, where on November 20, 1898, he was ordained a priest of the Diocese of Kielce. He earned a doctorate in theology at Fribourg in Switzerland. He served in Kielce in parish ministry and as a seminary lecturer. The social question occupied him; from 1907 he taught sociology at the Academy in Saint Petersburg.

The Marians, founded in the 17th century by Saint Stanislaus Papczyński, had almost died out under tsarist rule. Matulaitis decided to renew them in secret. On August 29, 1909, in Warsaw, he made his religious vows and wrote new constitutions, which Pope Pius X approved in 1910. A year later he became superior general. He opened a novitiate in Fribourg, and further houses in Chicago, in Poland, and in Lithuania. During the First World War he founded a home in Warsaw for two hundred orphans and himself begged for their upkeep.

On October 23, 1918, he was named Bishop of Vilnius. He resisted this dignity, but obeyed Pope Benedict XV. He received episcopal consecration in Kaunas, and on December 8, after a pilgrimage to the Gate of Dawn, he entered the cathedral of Vilnius. He led the diocese for seven years, while the city passed from hand to hand and the faithful of different nationalities were at odds. He wanted to be a shepherd to all, faithful to his motto, “Conquer evil with good.” He also founded two congregations: in Lithuania the Poor Sisters of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and as Bishop of Vilnius the Handmaids of Jesus in the Eucharist.

After the concordat between Poland and the Holy See in 1925, when Vilnius became a metropolitan see, he resigned his bishopric. Pope Pius XI, who had known him as nuncio in Poland, named him titular archbishop and apostolic visitor to Lithuania. In less than two years Matulaitis brought about the establishment of the Lithuanian ecclesiastical province and prepared a draft concordat between Lithuania and the Holy See.

He died in Kaunas on January 27, 1927, after a sudden illness. He rests in the Marian church in Marijampolė. Pope John Paul II beatified him on June 28, 1987, in Saint Peter’s Basilica, on the six hundredth anniversary of the baptism of Lithuania. He called him a great son of the Lithuanian nation, bound also to the Church in Poland.