ALL IN THE NAME OF CHRIST JESUS

BLESSED JOZEF CEBULA was born into a modest family in 1902, at Malnia in southern Poland. He suffered tuberculosis as a youth. After an unexpected recovery, he visited an Oblate shrine where he shared his story with an Oblate priest. The priest advised Józef to study with the Oblates at the newly-established Oblate minor seminary.

At the age of 19 he entered the Congregation of the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate. Following ordination to the Oblate priesthood in 1927, Father Józef spent the next ten years teaching Oblate seminarians. From 1931 on, he was the director of the minor seminary in Lubliniec. In 1937, he became novice master at Markowice where his humility and gentleness were noteworthy. During this time he was also active in the preaching ministry and was much sought after as a confessor.

 When the Nazis occupied Poland during the Second World War, they declared loyalty to the Church illegal. All Church associations were forbidden, and many priests were arrested. On May 4, 1940, the Oblate novices at Markowice were arrested by the Nazis and sent to the concentration camp at Dachau, Germany.

  Father Józef was forbidden to exercise his priestly ministry and obliged to work in the fields. But at night, the zealous priest celebrated the Eucharist and administered the sacraments in the surrounding villages, until he was arrested on April 2, 1941. He was taken to a concentration camp at Mauthausen in Austria.

Known for his humility, Bl. Józef was a man of quiet prayer with a deep spiritual life. He radiated peace in the very middle of the death camp, even when tormented by the Nazis. In Mauthausen he was harassed and forced to work hard, to break rocks in the quarry, simply because he was a Roman Catholic priest. He was forced to carry 60-pound rocks from the quarry to a camp two miles away. He had to climb the 186 "Death Stairs" while being beaten and insulted by his tormentors. *

The guards humiliated and mocked him by ordering him to sing the texts of the Mass while he worked. Three weeks later, Father Józef summoned up his strength and said, “It is not you who are in charge. God will judge you.” The Nazis ordered him to run, with a rock on his back, towards the camp’s barbed wire fence, where a guard shot him with a submachine gun and declared that Father Józef “was shot while trying to escape”. He died a martyr on May 9, 1941, in this volley of bullets. His body was taken to a crematorium and burned.

 

He was declared blessed by Pope John Paul II along with the other 107 martyrs of WWII. While there were so many in this group, and each story different, all gave their lives in the name of Jesus Christ.

*The Stairs of Death at Mauthausen concentration camp

Several times throughout the day, prisoners were forced to carry blocks of stone, often weighing as much as 60 pounds, up the 186 stairs of the so called "Stairs of Death". Often, exhausted prisoners would collapse and drop their load on top of those following, creating a horrific domino effect with prisoners falling onto the next, all the way down the stairs. The heavy stones would crush their limbs and bodies. People died on these stairs every day.

 Sometimes, the SS guards would force the exhausted prisoners to race up the stairs carrying blocks of stone. Those who survived the ordeal would then be placed in a line-up at the edge of a cliff, the SS called "The Parachutists Wall". At gun-point each prisoner would have the option of being shot or pushing the prisoner in front of him off the cliff. Some prisoners, unable to bear the tortures of the camp, would willfully jump off the cliff. Such suicides were frequent.

Today, the "Stairs of Death" form part of the guided tours at the Mauthausen Memorial. The stairs have been redone and straightened so that tourists can easily climb up and down them, but at that time they were tilted and slippery.