Saint Andrew Bobola

Saint Andrew Bobola was a Polish Jesuit, preacher, and missionary who suffered martyrdom at the hands of the Cossacks in 1657. The Roman Martyrology presents him as a priest who strove strenuously for the unity of Christians. His memorial falls on May 16, the day of his death; in Poland, of which he is one of the patrons, it is kept as a feast.

He was born in 1591 into a noble family devoted to the Catholic faith. He studied at the school of a Jesuit college founded by his paternal uncle Andrew. In 1611 he entered the novitiate of the Society of Jesus in Vilnius, and in 1613 he took his first vows. Pope Pius XII wrote that by temperament he was proud, impatient, and sometimes obstinate, and that he learned humility in a long struggle with himself.

After his studies in philosophy he taught young people at the Jesuit colleges in Braniewo and Pułtusk, and then returned to Vilnius to study theology. He was ordained a priest on March 12, 1622, the day on which Saints Ignatius of Loyola and Francis Xavier were canonized in Rome. He served as a pastor in Vilnius and in Bobruisk. During the plague epidemics of 1625 and 1629 he served the sick at the risk of his life. His sermons drew crowds, and people called him an apostle and a hunter of souls. In 1630 he made his solemn religious profession.

In the middle of the 17th century the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was ravaged by wars, and Cossack troops destroyed churches and monasteries and killed priests and faithful. Andrew was then working as a missionary in the region of Pinsk, in Polesia. He led many people to unity with the Catholic Church, which aroused the anger of his opponents.

On May 16, 1657, Cossacks seized him near Janów, not far from Pinsk. Beaten and tied to a horse, he was dragged to Janów. Asked whether he was a Latin priest, he answered that he was a Catholic priest, that he had been born in the Catholic faith and wished to die in it, and he called on his persecutors to repent. He was then subjected to cruel tortures, until at last one of his tormentors finished him off.

The martyr’s body was buried in Pinsk. After years of oblivion it was found incorrupt in 1702. In 1808 it was moved to Polotsk, and after the revolution the Bolsheviks took it to Moscow. Pius XI brought the relics to Rome in 1923, and after the canonization they were taken to Warsaw, where they rest in the shrine that bears his name.

Pius IX beatified him on October 30, 1853, and Pius XI canonized him on April 17, 1938, Easter Sunday, in the hope that the saint would obtain the unity of the Christian East and West. On the 300th anniversary of his death Pius XII devoted to him the encyclical Invicti athletae Christi. In 1992 John Paul II proclaimed him patron of the ecclesiastical province of Warsaw, and in 2002 the Holy See confirmed him as a secondary patron of Poland.