Blessed Michał Kozal

Blessed Michał Kozal was an auxiliary bishop of the Diocese of Włocławek and a martyr. He was consecrated a bishop less than three weeks before the outbreak of the Second World War, and less than three months later he was arrested by the Germans. He died in the Dachau concentration camp. The Roman Martyrology commemorates him on January 26, the day of his death; in Poland his memorial is kept on June 14, the anniversary of his beatification.

He was born on September 25, 1893, in Nowy Folwark near Krotoszyn, into a poor, large, and deeply religious family. He completed secondary school in Krotoszyn and in 1914 entered the seminary in Poznań. He finished his studies in Gniezno, and there, in the cathedral, he was ordained a priest on February 23, 1918.

He served as a parochial vicar in several parishes and then as a religion teacher at a girls’ secondary school in Bydgoszcz. A teacher from that school testified in the beatification process that this quiet priest of few words quickly won the respect of the young people, and that his confessional was besieged. In 1927 he became spiritual director of the seminary in Gniezno, and two years later its rector.

On June 12, 1939, Pope Pius XII appointed him auxiliary bishop in Włocławek. He was consecrated on August 13 in the cathedral there by Bishop Karol Radoński. When, after the outbreak of the war, the diocesan bishop found himself outside the country, Kozal stayed in the city and governed the diocese. He protested to the occupation authorities against the wrongs done to the Church. On November 7, 1939, the Gestapo arrested him together with a group of priests and seminarians.

He was held first in the prison in Włocławek and, from January 1940, in the Salesian house at Ląd on the Warta River, where the Germans interned clergy. On April 3, 1941, he was taken away from there. In Inowrocław he was severely beaten, and then, by way of a series of prisons, he reached Dachau before the end of April. He was given camp number 24544 and, like the other imprisoned priests, worked beyond his strength. He shared his starvation ration with those who were weaker and brought spiritual care to the sick and the dying.

In January 1943 he fell ill with typhus. On January 26, in the camp infirmary, he was killed by an injection, and his family was informed that he had died of typhus. His body was burned in the crematorium. He was 49 years old and had spent more than the last three of those years in captivity. During the war the Diocese of Włocławek lost 220 priests, more than half of its clergy.

John Paul II beatified him as a martyr on June 14, 1987, in Warsaw, during the Mass that closed the Second National Eucharistic Congress. He said then that Bishop Kozal had accepted the love of Christ in the fullness of its demands and had not drawn back even from the hardest of them, the love of enemies. He called him a patron of our difficult times, full of tension, enmity, and conflict. Blessed Michał is the patron of the Diocese of Bydgoszcz and of the city of Włocławek.