Blessed Władysław Bukowiński

Blessed Władysław Bukowiński was a Polish priest and a prisoner of the Soviet labor camps who chose to remain in Kazakhstan in order to serve the Catholics there in secret. In the apostolic letter of beatification Pope Francis called him the apostle of Kazakhstan. His memorial falls on June 20.

He was born on December 22, 1904, in Berdychiv, now in Ukraine, into a Polish Catholic family of noble roots. He studied law and political science at the Jagiellonian University, and in 1926 he entered the seminary in Krakow. In 1931 he was ordained a priest by Archbishop Adam Stefan Sapieha. He taught religion at the secondary school in Rabka and served as parochial vicar in Sucha.

In August 1936 he moved to Lutsk in Volhynia, where his family came from. Under the Soviet occupation the bishop of Lutsk appointed him pastor of the cathedral. In August 1940 he was arrested. When Soviet guards shot the prisoners in 1941, he escaped death, and after the Germans arrived he was set free. Under the German occupation he saved Jewish children and helped refugees and prisoners of war.

In January 1945, after the Soviet troops returned, he was arrested again and imprisoned in Kyiv together with Adolf Szelążek, bishop of Lutsk. Accused of spying for the Vatican and of illegal religious activity, he was sentenced without trial to ten years of forced labor. Among other places, he worked in a copper mine in the camp at Dzhezkazgan. There too, every day before dawn, while the others were still asleep, he celebrated Mass, kneeling by the plank bed that served him as an altar. In his memoirs he wrote that Providence sometimes works even through atheists, who had sent him where a priest was needed.

Released in 1954, he settled in Karaganda. He worked as a watchman at a construction site, and in secret, although the law forbade it, he baptized in the homes of the faithful, prepared people for confession and Communion, and blessed marriages. He ministered to Poles, Germans, and Catholics of the Byzantine rite. In 1955 he refused to return to Poland and took Soviet citizenship so as to remain in Kazakhstan for good. On December 3, 1958, he was arrested once more and sentenced to three years in a camp. In all he spent 13 years, 5 months, and 10 days in prisons and camps.

Later he made eight missionary journeys to remote regions of Kazakhstan and more than once reached Tajikistan. Worn out by years of imprisonment and ill with diabetes, he received the sacrament of the Anointing of the Sick from his bishop. He died in Karaganda on December 3, 1974, and was buried there.

The beatification took place on September 11, 2016, in Karaganda, and the apostolic letter was read by Cardinal Angelo Amato. That day, at the Angelus, Francis spoke of how much this man had suffered and recalled his love for the weakest. The letter set the memorial of the blessed on June 20.