A HOLY CARDINAL AND HIS POPE

Polish Primate CARDINAL STEFAN WYSZNSKI will be beatified on June 7, 2020 in a ceremony held at the Pilsudskiego Square in Warsaw.

Cardinal Wyszynski had been the primate of Poland and one of Pope St. John Paul II’s most ardent supporters, starting when then-Karol Wojtyla was a young bishop.  Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński was often called the Primate of the Millennium.

Born in 1901, his family counted itself among the nobility of Poland, with the coat of arms of Trzywdar,  and the title of baron, although it was not materially well off. His mother died when he was nine and he was sent away to school in Lublin.

He celebrated his first Solemn High Mass of Thanksgiving, at Jasna Góra in Częstochowa, a place of special spiritual significance for many Catholic Poles. The Pauline monastery there holds the picture of the Black Madonna, or Our Lady of Częstochowa, the patron saint and guardian of Poland. Father Wyszyński spent the next four years in Lublin, where in 1929 he received a doctorate at the Faculty of Canon Law and the Social Sciences of the Catholic University of Lublin. His dissertation in Canon Law was entitled The Rights of the Family, Church and State to Schools. For several years after graduation he traveled throughout Europe, where he furthered his education.

He became a priest in 1924 and was made the bishop of Lublin in 1946 at a time when hundreds of thousands of Soviet soldiers were stationed there and communist powers took hold. In 1948, he was made archbishop of Gniezno and Warsaw, and he was named a cardinal in 1953. But he could not be installed until four years later, in 1957, after his release from a communist prison.

His 1953 arrest was one of the most dramatic events of the communist period. It followed the parallel detention of church leaders in Croatia, Hungary and Czechoslovakia. The cardinal, who was primate of Poland from 1948 until his death in 1981, spent three years under house arrest in the 1950s because of his opposition to Poland's communist government.  Even as a child I can remember this and prayers asked for all of Poland.

In 1958, he informed a 38-year-old  Karol Wojtyla that the pope had appointed him as the auxiliary bishop of Krakow.

When then-Cardinal Wojtyla was named to first world Synod of Bishops in 1968, he stayed home to protest the government's denial of a passport to Cardinal Wyszynski. When cardinals were meeting in the Sistine Chapel in October 1978, the Polish pope recalled that Cardinal Wyszynski had approached him and implored, "If they elect you, I beg you not to refuse.''

To many he was the unquestionable leader of the Polish nation (the uncrowned king of Poland), in opposition to the totalitarian government. He is also credited for the survival of Polish Christianity in the face of its repression and persecution during the reign of the 1945–1989 Communist regime. He  is considered by many to be a Polish national hero. Now he will be another saint for them.

The cardinal, who had heard of the assassination attempt on the pope, offered his own life for that of the pontiff's.

Cardinal Wyszynski died at the age of 79 in 1981.

To commemorate the twentieth anniversary of his death, the year 2001 was announced by the Sejm (Polish parliment) as the Year of Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński. The Sejm also honored the Cardinal as a "great Pole, chaplain and statesman".