Saint Stanislaus of Szczepanów

Saint Stanislaus of Szczepanów was bishop of Krakow and a martyr. He died in 1079 at the hand of King Bolesław the Bold, whom he had rebuked. For centuries he has been venerated as the principal patron of Poland. The universal Church commemorates him on April 11, the day of his death, while in Poland his solemnity falls on May 8.

He was born in Szczepanów, today in the Diocese of Tarnów. The year of his birth is not known; tradition points to about 1030. Little is known of his youth, and what is said of his studies abroad remains conjecture. He was a canon of Krakow cathedral under Bishop Lambert, and after Lambert’s death he was elected his successor. He took possession of the episcopal see in 1072.

He led the diocese for only seven years. The Roman Martyrology records that he governed the Church of Krakow like a good shepherd, helped the poor, and visited his clergy every year, and that amid the injustices of his time he steadfastly defended humanity and Christian morals. At first he worked together with Bolesław the Bold, an outstanding ruler, well disposed toward the Church, who was crowned king in 1076.

Later a conflict arose between them, the course of which cannot be fully reconstructed. Gallus Anonymus, the earliest chronicler, writing several decades later at the court of the king’s nephew, called Stanislaus a traitor bishop, yet he also reproached the king for taking a shameful revenge by condemning him to the cutting off of his limbs. Blessed Vincent Kadłubek, later bishop of Krakow, writing at the turn of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, presented Stanislaus as the shepherd who alone dared to rebuke the ruler for his cruelty toward his subjects and, when that had no effect, excommunicated him.

According to the tradition that the liturgy has adopted, the king killed the bishop on April 11, 1079, at the altar, during Holy Mass in the Church of Saint Michael on Skałka in Krakow. The relic of the martyr’s head bears the marks of the blows to this day. Bolesław soon lost his throne and fled to Hungary, where he died; legend has it that he departed this life reconciled with God. In 1088 the bishop’s body was moved to the cathedral on Wawel Hill, where his tomb is.

Devotion to the martyr grew from generation to generation. Later lives added legends: of Piotr, the deceased owner of a village, raised from the dead to testify in court that the bishop had bought it honestly, and of the miraculous growing together of the dismembered body. In the age when Poland was split into separate duchies, this second story became a sign of hope that the divided country would be one again.

Innocent IV canonized Stanislaus on September 8, 1253, in Assisi, at the tomb of Saint Francis. John Paul II, who had earlier been his successor in the see of Krakow, called him the patron of the moral order. In 1979, on the nine hundredth anniversary of the martyrdom, he raised his memorial in the calendar of the universal Church to the rank of an obligatory memorial. Saint Stanislaus is patron of Poland together with the Blessed Virgin Mary, Queen of Poland, and Saint Adalbert.