Blessed Marcelina Darowska

Blessed Marcelina Darowska was a wife and mother and, after being widowed young, a religious, co-foundress of the Congregation of the Sisters of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary, known in Poland as the Niepokalanki, and the creator of their schools for girls. The Church commemorates her on January 5.

She was born in January 1827 at Szulaki in Ukraine, then under Russian rule, into the wealthy Polish landowning family of Jan and Maksymilia Kotowicz. Although her family home was not especially religious, she thought of religious life from childhood. She was educated at a boarding school in Odessa, then helped her father manage the estate, taught the catechism to village children, and visited the sick.

Obedient to her father’s will and her confessor’s advice, on October 2, 1849, she married Karol Darowski, a landowner from Podolia. She gave birth to a son, Józef, and a daughter, Karolina. In 1852 her husband died of typhus, and a year later little Józef died as well. The young widow then understood that God was calling her to a life given to him alone.

She went abroad to restore her health. In Rome she met Józefa Karska, who, under the guidance of the Resurrectionist Father Hieronim Kajsiewicz, intended to found a congregation devoted to the education of girls. Marcelina joined this work and on May 12, 1854, made private vows of chastity and obedience. She returned to Podolia, however, to bring up her daughter, and there she helped the peasants. The congregation came into being in Rome in 1857. Józefa Karska died in 1860, and on January 3, 1861, Marcelina made her religious profession and became superior of the small community.

In 1863 she moved the congregation from Rome to Jazłowiec in Galicia, today in Ukraine. There she opened an educational institute for girls and, for girls from the surrounding villages, a free school. She was convinced that Poland would be reborn through the Christian education of the young generation, especially of women, and she wanted to form her pupils into truly Christian wives, mothers, and citizens of their country. Mother Marcelina led the congregation for fifty years and founded six major houses: after Jazłowiec, at Jarosław, Niżniów, Nowy Sącz, Słonim, and Szymanów near Warsaw.

She lived a life of deep prayer and left her sisters ascetical writings, meditations, and conferences. She also knew want, obstacles from the authorities, and years of inner darkness. In 1910 she offered her life to God in reparation for the sacrilege committed at the shrine of Jasna Góra. Soon afterward she fell ill. She died on the morning of January 5, 1911, at Jazłowiec and was buried there.

John Paul II recognized her heroic virtues in 1994 and beatified her in Rome on October 6, 1996. He said then that only a family founded on God can be, as the new Blessed taught, the foundation of a new society. The Sisters still run schools in Poland today and also work in Belarus and Ukraine.