Saints Mark Križin, Stephen Pongrácz and Melchior Grodziecki

Saints Melchior Grodziecki, Mark Križin and Stephen Pongrácz, known as the Martyrs of Košice, were priests killed in 1619 in Košice, in present-day Slovakia, because they refused to renounce the Catholic faith. Melchior was a Pole from Silesia, Mark a Croat, and Stephen a Hungarian. The Roman Martyrology commemorates them together on September 7.

Melchior Grodziecki was born in 1584 in Cieszyn, into a Polish noble family. He studied with the Jesuits in Vienna, entered their order in Brno in 1603, and was ordained a priest in Prague in 1614. There he spent several years educating young people, especially those from poor families. When the Thirty Years’ War broke out, the Jesuits had to leave the city. Melchior traveled through Moravia and Slovakia and came to Košice as chaplain to Polish and Czech imperial soldiers.

Stephen Pongrácz was born in 1582 in Transylvania, into a Hungarian noble family. He gave up the prospect of a secular career and entered the Jesuits in 1602. As a priest he was a preacher at the college in Humenné, and in 1619 he came to Košice to serve the Hungarian Catholics. Mark Križin was born in 1588 in the Croatian town of Križevci. He studied in Rome, at the Germanicum-Hungaricum College and the Gregorian University. He became a canon of Esztergom, and at the beginning of 1619 the chapter entrusted him with the administration of the estates of the former abbey at Krásna near Košice.

In that same year the Calvinist prince of Transylvania, Gabriel Bethlen, took up arms against the emperor. In September the troops of George Rákóczi besieged Košice, where Calvinists were in the majority. On September 5 the Catholic governor of the city, betrayed by his mercenaries, was handed over to Rákóczi together with the three priests, his guests. A Calvinist preacher and the head of the town council demanded the death of all the Catholics, but only the sentence against the three priests was agreed to.

Before dawn on September 7, Rákóczi’s soldiers began to torture the priests to force them to abandon their faith. According to the Martyrology, neither hunger nor the torments of the wheel and of fire could break them. Mark Križin was beheaded first, and soon after him Melchior Grodziecki. Stephen Pongrácz was tortured the longest. Thought to be dead, he was thrown with the bodies of his companions into a sewage pit, where he lived for about twenty more hours, praying. The bodies were buried only six months later, and the relics of the martyrs now rest in the Ursuline church in Trnava.

The faithful venerated them from the moment of their death, but because of the difficult times Pope Saint Pius X beatified them only on January 15, 1905. John Paul II canonized them on July 2, 1995, in Košice. In his homily he recalled that they belonged to three nations but were united by one faith. He also paid tribute to twenty-four Evangelical Christians killed in Prešov in the seventeenth century, and that afternoon he prayed there before their monument.