Blessed Hanna Chrzanowska

Blessed Hanna Chrzanowska was a lay nurse and Benedictine oblate who in Krakow organized care for the gravely ill in their own homes. The Church commemorates her on April 28, the anniversary of her beatification.

She was born on October 7, 1902, in Warsaw. Her father, Ignacy Chrzanowski, was a Catholic, and her mother, Wanda née Szlenkier, came from a Protestant family. In 1910 the family moved to Krakow, where her father became a professor of Polish literature at the Jagiellonian University. Hanna attended the Ursuline sisters’ school, and in 1920, after a short nursing course, she helped soldiers as a volunteer during the Polish-Bolshevik War.

She broke off her studies in Polish philology to enter the newly opened Warsaw School of Nursing, from which she graduated in 1924. A Rockefeller Foundation scholarship then allowed her to continue her training in France. She taught at a nursing school in Krakow, and from 1929, in Warsaw, she edited the monthly Pielęgniarka Polska. In 1937 she co-founded the Catholic Association of Polish Nurses.

In October 1939 she returned from Warsaw to Krakow and worked for the Polish Welfare Committee. Her father, arrested together with the university professors in the Sonderaktion Krakau, died in the Sachsenhausen camp, and her only brother was killed at Katyn. During the occupation, supported by the Krakow curia, she helped displaced persons, refugees, and children, organizing canteens, shelters, orphanages, and summer camps.

After the war she studied home nursing in the United States and then taught it in Krakow. In 1956 she became a Benedictine oblate attached to the abbey of Tyniec. In 1957 she was put in charge of the school of psychiatric nursing in Kobierzyn, but a year later the school was closed and she was forced into early retirement. According to the apostolic letter, the reason was the religious practice at the school and the pilgrimages to Jasna Góra that she led.

It was then that, with the support of Father Ferdynand Machay and Father Karol Wojtyła, she organized parish nursing in Krakow and throughout the archdiocese, that is, care for the gravely ill in their homes. She was helped by nurses, religious sisters, and volunteers, and she also organized retreats for the sick and for nurses. In the second half of the 1960s she fell ill with cancer; after surgery she worked for several more years, but the illness returned.

She died in her home in Krakow on April 29, 1973. Her funeral was led by Cardinal Karol Wojtyła, who thanked her for having been an embodiment of Christ’s Beatitudes, above all the one about the merciful. Her beatification took place on April 28, 2018, at the Divine Mercy Sanctuary in Krakow-Łagiewniki, where Cardinal Angelo Amato read Pope Francis’s apostolic letter. Her mortal remains rest in St. Nicholas Church in Krakow.