Saint Raphael Kalinowski

Saint Raphael Kalinowski, in religion Raphael of Saint Joseph, was an engineer and an officer, a participant in the January Uprising and an exile in Siberia, and in his mature years he became a Discalced Carmelite and a priest. He contributed to the renewal of Carmel in the Polish lands. The Roman Martyrology commemorates him on November 15, the day of his death.

He was born on September 1, 1835, in Vilnius and at baptism received the name Józef (Joseph). His father, Andrzej, taught mathematics at the Institute for Nobles in Vilnius, from which Józef graduated. After two years of agronomy studies at Hory-Horki he trained at the Academy of Military Engineering in Saint Petersburg, where he obtained an engineering degree and the rank of lieutenant. He worked on the design of the Kursk-Kiev-Odessa railway. In those years he stopped receiving the sacraments.

When the January Uprising against Russian rule broke out in 1863, he did not believe it could succeed, and he wrote that the homeland needed sweat, not blood. Yet he did not want to stand aside: he resigned from the tsar’s army and in Vilnius directed the military affairs of the insurgent authorities of Lithuania. In August of that year, after a break of nearly ten years, he went to confession. Arrested on March 24, 1864, he was sentenced to death; the sentence was commuted to ten years of hard labor in Siberia.

After nine months on the road he reached the region of Lake Baikal. He served his hard labor at Usole and later lived in Irkutsk. He kept up the spirits of his fellow exiles, shared with them what he had, and taught children the catechism. He regained his freedom in 1874, but he was not allowed to settle in Lithuania. For three years, mainly in Paris, he was tutor to Prince August Czartoryski, later a Salesian and now beatified.

In 1877, at the age of forty-two, he entered the Discalced Carmelites at Graz in Austria and received the name Raphael of Saint Joseph. He was ordained a priest on January 15, 1882, at Czerna near Krakow, at that time the only monastery of Discalced Carmelite friars in the Polish lands. Before that year was out he became its prior. He helped bring about the foundation of monasteries of Discalced Carmelite nuns at Przemyśl and Lviv, and in 1892 he founded at Wadowice a monastery with a minor seminary.

He spent many hours in the confessional and in spiritual direction; his confreres called him a martyr of the confessional. The unity of the Church was close to his heart, above all reconciliation with the Orthodox. He died on November 15, 1907, at Wadowice, in the monastery he had founded himself. He was buried in the monastery cemetery at Czerna, and today his relics rest in the church there.

John Paul II, who was born in Wadowice, heard of his holiness from his youth. He beatified him on June 22, 1983, in Krakow together with Brother Albert Chmielowski, likewise an insurgent of 1863, and canonized him on November 17, 1991, in Rome. In Poland the memorial of Saint Raphael is kept on November 20.