Blessed Stefan Wincenty Frelichowski

Blessed Stefan Wincenty Frelichowski was a priest of the Diocese of Chełmno, a parochial vicar in Toruń, and a scout. He spent more than five years in German prisons and concentration camps, where he carried out his priestly ministry among his fellow prisoners to the end. He died in Dachau of typhus, which he caught from the sick he was nursing. The Roman Martyrology commemorates him on February 23, the day of his death.

He was born on January 22, 1913, in Chełmża near Toruń, the third of six children of Ludwik, a baker, and Marta, née Olszewska. In secondary school he belonged to the Sodality of Our Lady, and in March 1927 he joined the scouts, in which he later became a troop leader.

In the fall of 1931, after his final school exams, he entered the seminary in Pelplin. He wanted, as he himself wrote, to be a priest after the Heart of Christ. He was ordained on March 14, 1937, in the cathedral of Pelplin by Bishop Stanisław Okoniewski and became the bishop’s chaplain and secretary. From July 1, 1938, he was parochial vicar of the parish of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Toruń. He visited the sick, worked with children and young people, and as chaplain of the Pomeranian Scout Region he served the scouts.

In the very first days of the war, on September 11, 1939, the Germans arrested him together with the other priests of the parish and released him after two days. In October they imprisoned him again, this time in Fort VII in Toruń, and from then on he never regained his freedom. In January 1940 he was taken to the Stutthof camp, in April to Sachsenhausen, and in December of the same year to Dachau.

Everywhere he remained a pastor. In Fort VII he organized common prayer and heard confessions. Thanks to his efforts, Holy Mass was celebrated in secret at Stutthof on Holy Thursday 1940. The apostolic letter on his beatification says that in the camps he led prayers, heard confessions, celebrated the Eucharist, and distributed Holy Communion. His fellow prisoners remembered that he knew how to reconcile those who had quarreled and to encourage those who doubted, and that he never lost his good cheer.

At the turn of 1944 and 1945 an epidemic of typhus broke out in Dachau. Father Frelichowski made his way into the barracks of the infected, nursed them, and strengthened them with the Eucharist, and by his example he drew 32 Polish priests into this service. He caught the disease himself and died on February 23, 1945, at the age of 32, about two months before the camp was liberated. The camp authorities, as an exception, agreed to let the prisoners pray beside his body. Before it was cremated, fellow prisoners secretly kept small relics.

After the decree on his martyrdom was promulgated, John Paul II beatified him on June 7, 1999, in Toruń. He called him then a priest and martyr, a heroic witness to pastoral love, and expressed to Polish scouts the wish that he would become their patron. In February 2003 the scouts received the decree of the Holy See by which the blessed became the patron of Polish scouting.