Saint Zygmunt Szczęsny Feliński

Saint Zygmunt Szczęsny Feliński was Archbishop of Warsaw, an exile deep in Russia, and the founder of the Congregation of the Franciscan Sisters of the Family of Mary. His memorial falls on September 17.

He was born on November 1, 1822, in Wojutyn in Volhynia, into a noble and religious family, the son of Gerard Feliński and Ewa née Wendorff. In 1838, five years after his father’s death, the Russians exiled his mother to Siberia for her patriotic activity, including her work for the peasants. Zygmunt studied mathematics in Moscow and, from 1847, literature in Paris, where he was a friend of the poet Juliusz Słowacki. In 1848 he took part in the failed uprising in the Grand Duchy of Posen.

In 1851 he entered the seminary in Zhytomyr and then studied at the Ecclesiastical Academy in Saint Petersburg. He was ordained a priest on September 8, 1855. He served as a pastor in Saint Petersburg, then as spiritual director and professor of philosophy at the Academy. In 1857 he founded the Congregation of the Franciscan Sisters of the Family of Mary in Saint Petersburg.

On January 6, 1862, Pope Pius IX appointed him Archbishop of Warsaw. He arrived in Warsaw on February 9, at a time when, after the bloody suppression of the Polish protests of 1861, the churches of the city were closed. Soon afterward he reconsecrated the cathedral, which the army had profaned, and reopened the churches. Some of the faithful, and even some clergy, received him with distrust, because the authorities spread rumors that he was collaborating with the government. He visited the parishes, worked for the release of imprisoned priests, and opened an orphanage run by the Sisters of the Family of Mary.

He warned against needless bloodshed, but when the January Uprising broke out in 1863 and bloody repression followed, he resigned from the Council of State in protest, and on March 15 he wrote to Tsar Alexander II urging him to put an end to the violence. He also protested against the hanging of the insurgents’ chaplain, the Capuchin Agrypin Konarski. On June 14, 1863, he was deported to Yaroslavl on the Volga, where he spent twenty years cut off from his diocese. He helped his fellow exiles, especially priests, and built the first Catholic church there.

Released in 1883 through the efforts of the Holy See, he was appointed titular Archbishop of Tarsus by Leo XIII, but he was not allowed to live in Warsaw. He spent his last twelve years in Dźwiniaczka in Austrian Galicia as chaplain of a manor chapel, among Polish and Ukrainian peasants. At his own expense he founded a school and a kindergarten in the village and built a church and a convent for the sisters. Benedict XVI recalled his prayer: “O God, protect us not from the tribulations and worries of this world... only multiply love in our hearts.”

He died in Krakow on September 17, 1895. Since 1921 his remains have rested in the Archcathedral of Warsaw. John Paul II beatified him in Krakow on August 18, 2002, and Benedict XVI canonized him on October 11, 2009.