Blessed Władysław Goral

Blessed Władysław Goral was an auxiliary bishop of the Diocese of Lublin and a martyr. He spent more than five years in isolation in the German concentration camp of Sachsenhausen and died there in 1945. The Roman Martyrology commemorates him on April 26 together with Blessed Stanisław Kubista, a priest of the Society of the Divine Word, who died in the same camp on April 26, 1940. In Poland the 108 martyrs of the Second World War, Bishop Goral among them, are commemorated together on June 12.

He was born on May 1, 1898, in the village of Stoczek in the Lublin region, the son of Kajetan and Julianna née Zielińska, and was baptized in the parish church at Dys. After the seminary in Lublin he went to Rome to study in 1920, and there, on December 18 of that year, he was ordained a priest in the Basilica of Saint John Lateran. He earned a doctorate in philosophy at the Gregorian University, then studied theology in Fribourg, Switzerland, and did pastoral work among Poles in France.

After returning from his studies abroad, he became a professor at the seminary in Lublin. For many years he edited the diocesan bulletin “Wiadomości Diecezjalne Lubelskie,” was a valued confessor, led the priests’ association “Unitas,” and was committed to fighting unemployment and poverty. In 1938 Pope Pius XI appointed him auxiliary bishop of the Diocese of Lublin. He received episcopal consecration on October 9, 1938, in Lublin Cathedral from Bishop Marian Leon Fulman.

His ministry as a bishop lasted little more than a year. On November 17, 1939, the Germans arrested him together with Bishop Fulman and a group of clergy, as part of an operation aimed at the Polish intelligentsia. On November 27 a German summary court sentenced both bishops and eleven priests to death on false charges. After an intervention by the Holy See the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, and on December 4, 1939, the prisoners were brought to the Sachsenhausen camp near Berlin.

In the camp he was held in strict isolation, in a cell of the camp bunker, cut off from the other prisoners. He was allowed to write letters to his family, and fellow prisoners who managed to see him remembered his dignity and serenity despite humiliation and loneliness. The Roman Martyrology says that he bravely defended the dignity of man and the faith.

The exact day and circumstances of his death are not known. The apostolic letter of beatification states that he died in April 1945 at Sachsenhausen as a result of torments and illnesses. The Martyrology speaks of his death in captivity from illness, on an uncertain day. April 26 is therefore not the date of his death but the day of his joint commemoration with Blessed Stanisław Kubista.

John Paul II beatified him on June 13, 1999, in Warsaw, among the 108 martyrs of the Church in Poland from the time of the Second World War. He said on that occasion that Bishop Goral was tortured with particular hatred simply because he was a Catholic bishop.