FROM CONNECTICUT TO CHICLAYO

 

Edinson Farfán Córdova, Bishop Chiclayo, Peru has announced that in the coming months his diocese will begin the cause for the beatification and canonization of MONSIGNOR JUAN TOMIS STACK an American missionary priest who was born and raised in Bridgeport, Connecticut.  He dedicated more than two decades of his life to the most needy of northern Peru and has been cited by Pope Leo XIV on various occasions as a major inspiration for his own missionary vocation.

“How beautiful that he was born in those lands. He came from the United States to serve these communities in Santa Cruz, in the highlands, and later in our beloved Chiclayo, which holds him so dear. I pray, through the intercession of St. John Vianney, that we may begin this process with joy, gratitude, and hope,” Bishop Farfán added.

It all began In 1963, when Bridgeport Bishop Walter Curtis, inspired by the Second Vatican Council, decided to send missionary priests to Latin America.  Among those first volunteers was “a young, enthusiastic priest of Slovak descent", Father Juan Tomis Stack.

In the mountianous region, he faced difficult conditions including lack of roads, electricity, and basic services, as well as high rates of childhood malnutrition, and strong resistance to any pastoral or social change. In 1967, the mission relocated to Chiclayo where he founded St. John Vianney Parish. 

Through perseverance and charity, he helped build roads, a clinic for the poor, promoted priestly vocations, and created lasting pastoral and social programs, including youth activities, medical outreach, libraries, and popular televised Masses.  He also worked to recover Church property that had been illegally occupied.

 In 1979, St. John Paul II named him a monsignor.

When he died in 1986, his funeral drew an estimated 20,000 people, one of the largest gatherings of affection in Chiclayo's history. 

Bridgeport to Peru, was written in 1989 by Monsignor Stephen M. DiGiovanni, but I have not bee able to locate any copies in English.

MYSTIC IN THE NEW WORLD

 

Pope St. John Paul II, hailed her as one of the “founders” of the Catholic Church in Canada. BL. CATHERINE of ST. AUGUSTINE made a promise “to live and die in Canada if God would open its door.”

Catherine was born in Saint-Sauveur-le-Vicomte, Normandy, France in 1632.

At the young age of five, Catherine began experiencing mystical experiences from God and at eight she knew she was being asked to be a saint. She is recorded as saying, “Remove from my heart every impurity, let me die now rather than allow my heart and soul to be soiled by the slightest blemish.”

 At age 14, Catherine became a novice at the Hôtel-Dieu of Bayeux, a hospital run by Augustinian nuns. She took the name Catherine of St. Augustine and offered herself for their mission overseas in New France. A day after her 16th birthday in 1648, she took her religious vows. Later that same month, she boarded the boat for the New World.

While on board “Le Cardinal,” Catherine became sick with the plague, but was miraculously cured by the Blessed Virgin. Arriving in Québec, Sr. Catherine began learning the languages of the natives and aiding the sick. It was hostile territory, and their workplace, she wrote, was “more like a hut than a hospital.”

In 1650 when the nearby Ursuline Monastery burnt down, their nuns moved in with the Augustinian sisters for a time. This is where St. Marie of the Incarnation (foundress of the Ursuline sisters in Quebec) met Sr. Catherine. Saint Marie was profoundly moved by the virtues she saw exemplified in Sr. Catherine.

For the next 20 years, Mother Catherine became the mission’s treasurer, director, and then novice director. She also continued in her mystical prayer life. 

The sufferings Mother Catherine endured she offered up in prayer for Canada and for forgiveness for the sins of its inhabitants. She cited Jesus in the Eucharist as being her main source of strength.

Mother Catherine also claimed God had assigned Fr. (St.) Jean de Brébeuf, a Jesuit missionary to New France, an other native of Bayeux, who had died in 1649. This missionary had never during his lifetime met Mother Catherine. The nun says that from 1662 on, she frequently received visits from this blessed Jesuit, who was entrusted with guiding, comforting, and at times restraining her in her mortifications. But on certain days even he seemed to elude her. To win him to her, Mother Catherine spoke to him with childlike simplicity: “How happy I am, Father, that you are deriving some small joy and satisfaction now from seeing me thus crucified: be vexed with me as much as you like; I shall always look upon you and love you as my kind and charitable Father.”

On many occasions Mother Catherine stated that it was for Canada, which was in danger of undergoing grave punishments for the crimes being committed there, that she was enduring suffering. This role of assumed victim for the colony has placed Mother Catherine among the founders of the Canadian Church. While others overcame the forest, the rivers, and the winter, Mother Catherine bore the sins of her adopted country and grappled in close quarters with the powers of darkness.

Sister Catherine died on May 8, 1668 at only 36 years of age. St. François de Laval, the first Bishop of Québec (considered the founder of the Catholic faith in New France) wrote, “I don’t need to see any extraordinary signs from her to be convinced of her holiness, because her virtues made me perfectly aware of it.” 

The natives gave her the name lakonikonriiostha, the one who makes the interior more beautiful”.

She was beatified by Pope St. John Paul II in 1989, and her bones are preserved within a tomb in a shrine at Le Centre Catherine-de-Saint-Augustin in Quebec City.  Her feast day is May 8.

A MODERN MYSTIC

 

Somehow the month of August got away from me, but I thought perhaps we could study some of the Church’s newer mystics. This category of saints is probably one of the hardest to understand, as well as the most difficult for the Church to sort out due to the unusual aspect of the saint's life.

BL. EDVIGE (HEDWIG) CARBONI spent her life between her humble daily life and mystic phenomena, even receiving the stigmata which she tried to hide in every way possible. She had to deal with gossip and slander and she was even subjected to a Canonical Enquiry from which she was absolved. She was able to dedicate her life to service of the poor and sick.

Born in Pozzomaggiore, Sardinia in 1880, she was the second of six children.  Her father, Giovanni Battista Carboni, was a working man of modest means. She had to leave school in the fourth grade to care for her chronically ill mother and care for her younger siblings.

Her mother taught her embroidery as a child, and she would work with her father in the embroidery business. She also spent time in the convent of the Sisters of Saint Vincent in Alghero, where the nuns led a course in embroidery. Her desire to become a religious was thus thwarted and she would spend a sober and collected domestic life, alternating household chores with moments of prayer.

She became a professed member of the Third Order of Saint Francis in 1906 and belonged to an association known as the Friends of Saint Thérèse of the Child Jesus; she began recording her thoughts in a spiritual journal. Her mother died in 1910, and her responsibilities tripled.

On July 14, 1911, the signs of the Passion of Jesus appeared on her body. Edvige experienced a number of visions from Our Lady and many saints. She began to experience bilocation in 1925, and this grew greater during World War II. These and other mystical phenomena that were attributed to her were investigated in the canonical process of 1925, to which she underwent with complete obedience. She then moved to Rome with the rest of her family, just as the Second World War was about to begin.

Edvige belonged to the parish of the Salesians "Saint Mary Help of Christians" on Via Tuscolana. There she went almost every morning for Mass and Communion, where she usually prayed in the chapel of Saint Anne. Most of the ecstasies and extraordinary events took place there. She died suddenly in 1952 of angina pectoris.

Blessed Edvige Carboni's life was characterized by an unceasing charity, especially toward the weakest, Cardinal Becciu pointed out. A friend of the poor, she had words of comfort for all.

Cardinal Becciu said in the homily of the beatification rite: “Blessed Edvige embodies the most beautiful virtues of the Sardinian woman of the time. And yet from her experience, data emerge that make her testimony more relevant than ever ... Her simple and profound spiritual experience, marked by limitless charity, boundless humility and incessant prayer, is still a current model, because it shows that even in a simple life and ordinary it is possible to experience a solid communion with God and an apostolate characterized by a passion for wounded and disadvantaged humanity.”

" The new Blessed had “a heart that was humble and full of charity because the long hours of prayer banished any trace of barrenness and spiritual idleness. Through prayer, Edvige performed acts of reparation for those who were in the shadows of sin, and implored divine mercy for those who insisted upon not allowing themselves to be reached by grace”.

 She was a Sardinian laywoman who kept house, did embroidery, taught catechism to children, visited the sick, yet carried in her body the wounds of Jesus Christ for more than four decades without seeking any attention for it. Her feast day is February 17.

ANGEL OF AUSCHWITZ

 

SERVANT OF GOD STEFANIA LACKA (pronounced “Wonska”) was born on Jan. 6, 1914, in Wola Żelichowska, a village in southern Poland to a devout, peasant family.  From a very young age she experienced a deep faith. Every day she found a moment during the long days of work in the fields to take refuge in the church and pray.

At the parish, she took the opportunity to read, because the parish priest opened his doors to anyone who wanted to read in his extensive library.   She attended a teacher-training institution, graduating in 1933.

 

From 1934 to 1939, she worked for Nasza Sprawa (“Our Case”), the Catholic weekly publication of the Diocese of Tarnów, writing 700 articles and editing the children’s supplement Króluj nam Chryste (“Christ, reign over us”). 

After the Nazi German invasion of Poland on Sept. 1, 1939, the editorial team offered its skills to the Polish underground movement. The Gestapo arrested Stefania and other members of the team on April 16, 1941. 

 She was held at the Gestapo headquarters in Tarnów and later at the local prison. She was interrogated and tortured, but did not reveal the names of any of her associates.

 She was transported on April 27, 1942, with 60 other female prisoners to Auschwitz, where she was assigned the number 6886.

 In June 1942, a female prisoner escaped the camp. The authorities forced the prisoners to stand in the roll-call square for two days waiting to discover who would be killed in retribution for the escape.

 Bishop Jeż’s edict, dated July 26 but reported on the diocesan website on Aug. 8, said that Stefania was standing beside her friend, Helena Panek, as they awaited their fate. Stefania promised that if Helen was selected then she would go to her death with her. But the authorities were ordered not to proceed with their planned punishment. In spite of torture and dire living conditions, she refused to lose her humanity and encouraged other women

While caring for the sick Stefania fell ill with typhus and was admitted to the camp hospital in block 23. She recovered by the spring of 1943 and began working in the camp hospital as a nurse. Using her proficiency in German enabled her to gain access to some documents.

 Even though she knew it would cost her life if she was discovered, she altered data to get some people off the lists of those condemned to the gas chambers or to receive a lethal injection. She also wrote letters to the families of prisoners, and shared the power of prayer with everyone she could.

When she was unable to save babies condemned to the gas chamber along with their mothers, Stefania didn’t hesitate to baptize them in secret. 

“Risking her own life, she baptized newborns and ministered to people who were seriously ill,” Bishop Jeż noted in the edict. “She also watched over the dying, sweetening their last hours of life.” She encouraged other female prisoners to pray together with the dying.  Her fellow prisoners called her the ‘earthly guardian angel.'”

 She wrote a camp prayer book that survived the Second World War intact.

Stefania left Auschwitz with five companions on Jan. 23, 1945, days after the camp was bombed. She returned to her family home in Wola Żelichowska, where she attended daily Mass and helped her family.

 She began studying Polish philology at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, but her health deteriorated and she was admitted to a hospital in the city in October 1946. She died on Nov. 7, 1946, at the age of 33 of tuberculosis

 In his edict, Bishop Jeż said that Stefania ’s spirituality offered an example for Christians today.“Stefania Lacka was distinguished for her high degree of the virtues of faith, hope, love, and moral virtues. From the day of her funeral to the present, her private cult has been growing.

At the Basilica of Our Lady of Consolation in Pasierbiec, a village near Krakow, in 2010 the people dedicated the outdoor Stations of the Cross with figures from recent Polish Catholic history. At the the Eighth Station, where Jesus speaks to the women,  He greets Stanislawa Leszczynska, who delivered over 3,000 babies at Auschwitz and Servant of God Stefania Lacka.

LAY MARTYR- APOSTLE OF MERCY

 

BLESSED STANISLAUS KOSTKA STAROWIEYSKI was born in Poland in 1895, into a wealthy political family, who were very active Catholics. Graduating from high school in 1914, Stanislaw went on to study law at Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland. However, his academic pursuits were interrupted by the outbreak of World War I.

Undeterred by the obstacles presented by the war, Stanislaw joined the Austro-Hungarian army and became a soldier and officer, serving on the eastern front and in Italy.

After the war, he played a vital role in the establishment of the Polish army in 1918. Stanislaw's dedication to his country led him to actively participate in the Polish-Ukrainian War of 1918 & 1919, where he notably defended the citadel of Lviv.

 He continued his military service in the Polish‚ Russian war of 1920, rising through the ranks to become a captain and earning numerous decorations for his bravery. However, his military career was cut short by a near-fatal bout of dysentery in 1920.

Returning to civilian life, Stanislaw exhibited exceptional organizational and people skills. Recognizing the importance of agriculture in the country, he studied the subject and, in 1921, assumed the management of the 1,000-acre Zamosc farms in Labunie, Poland.

His reputation as a fair employer who ensured just wages and medical coverage for his workers quickly spread.  Bl. Stanisław was a model for living a vibrant Catholic life. He went to daily Mass, organized retreats and pilgrimages, visited orphans, and later in the concentration camps he cared for the spiritual needs of other prisoners.

In 1921 he married Maria Szeptycka, niece of Bl. Klymentiy Sheptysky and of Venerable Andrey Sheptysky of the Ukranian Greek Catholic Church. The couple moved into a war-damaged estate given to them by Stanisław’s father-in-law, but rather than use their money to rebuild the estate, they lived in a small building on the property, giving generously to the poor, and raising six children.

 After housing refugees during World War II, he was arrested together with his brother Marian in November 1939, by the Nazis for being a Catholic leader. While they initially managed to escape, Marian was recaptured and sent to the Russian interior, never to be heard from again.

 Stanislaw's freedom was short-lived, as he was apprehended by German troops and taken to the notorious Nazi concentration camp at Dachau, Germany.

He became known as an apostle of mercy, living as a concentration camp prisoner, sharing his food with fellow prisoners, and urging them to hope. For those reasons, and because he came from a family of Polish nobility, he was regularly beaten by guards, often brutally. Taking those beatings, his health declined fast, and Stanislaw died on Easter Sunday, April 13, 1941.

His unwavering faith, his commitment to his fellow human beings, and his martyrdom for the Catholic cause have made him a symbol of inspiration and holiness.

Pope St. John Paul II, recognizing his heroic virtues and sacrificial death,  beatified him on June 13, 1999.

 In his homily at the beatification, St. John Paul II talked about the hope of Polish people amid the horrors they experienced in the Second World War:

 “Faith in divine mercy made it possible for hope to endure in us. This hope did not concern social rebirth alone, or merely the restoration of dignity to man in the different world contexts.

Our hope penetrates far deeper: it is directed in fact to the divine promises which go far beyond temporal realities. Its definitive object is the sharing in the fruits of the saving work of Christ.”

His feast day is commemorated on June 4, and he is also honored as one of the 108 Martyrs of World War II on June 12.

Blessed Stanislaw Kostka Starowieyski remains an enduring example of selflessness, devotion, and courage in the face of adversity.