Blessed Roman Archutowski

Blessed Roman Archutowski was a priest of the Archdiocese of Warsaw, an educator of young people, and the rector of the Warsaw seminary during the years of the German occupation. He died in the Majdanek concentration camp on Palm Sunday 1943. He is one of the 108 Polish martyrs of the Second World War. The Roman Martyrology commemorates him on April 18, the day of his death.

He was born on August 5, 1882, at Karolin near Serock, into a wealthy family of landowners. His older brother Józef also became a priest and later a professor of biblical studies at the Jagiellonian University. Roman attended the secondary school in Pułtusk. In 1900 he entered the seminary in Warsaw, and in 1904 he was ordained a priest. After a short period of parish work he studied theology at the Theological Academy in Saint Petersburg.

From 1910 he served in Warsaw as a prefect, that is, a teacher of religion in secondary schools, among them the Saint Stanislaus Kostka Secondary School for boys. In the mid-1920s he became the principal of that school and directed it for more than a decade. He wrote a school textbook of Church history that was reprinted many times in Poland and, during the war and just after it, also in exile. He was also one of the authors of the Podręczna encyklopedia kościelna, a concise Church encyclopedia.

In 1940 he became rector of the Metropolitan Major Seminary in Warsaw and directed it under the occupation. The biography published at the time of his beatification calls him an exceptional educator, a man of great authority and integrity. In 1942 the Gestapo arrested him twice and held him in the Pawiak prison, where he was tortured.

In March 1943 he was deported to the Majdanek concentration camp in Lublin. There he was first assigned to garden work. When a typhus epidemic broke out, he was ordered to carry and cart corpses to the crematorium. Soon he fell ill himself and was taken to the camp hospital, where he heard the confessions of the sick.

He died on April 18, 1943, worn out by hunger and disease. His body was burned in the crematorium. According to the beatification biography, his sufferings did not break him, and he tried to unite them with the sacrifice of Christ.

Pope John Paul II beatified him on June 13, 1999, in Warsaw, among the 108 martyrs of the Second World War. In Poland their common memorial is kept on June 12. A high school in the Bielany district of Warsaw bears the name of Blessed Roman. Neither the martyr’s remains nor any of his personal belongings have survived, and so in June 2026 a document bearing his signature was brought into the seminary church in Warsaw as a relic.