HER LIFE FOR PRIESTS

I recently received a book about a little known Benedictine contemplative nun who, while born of Polish parentage, was born in the Ukrainian city of Lviv (then part of Poland).

SISTER BERNADETTE of the CROSS (nee Rozmarynka Wolska) was a Benedictine Nun of Perpetual Adoration born in 1927 of a family of land owners.

Her life was recently brought to light in the book For Their Sake I Consecrate Myself.           

 Sister Bernadette’s mother, when pregnant with her, was tempted to abort her daughter upon receiving medical advice from her gynecologist that her health was too poor to carry the baby to term. A relative persuaded her to keep the baby at the risk of her life. Both mother and child survived, and her mother gave birth to three more children. 

 Rozmarynka (Rosemary) was fun-loving, and had a “strong will and inexhaustible energy.” She was known to have a temper, which she fought her whole life.  She loved reading novels and poetry, singing and art, knitting and sewing, and sports- skiing, hiking, horseback riding, and sailing- in fact anything outdoors.  

While living in Kraków, she became a lay oblate at the Abbey of Tyniec and  under their influence her  spiritual life blossomed as she discovered God in nature, friendship, Scripture, and the liturgy. The first thought of life as a religious, occurred to Roza after a sermon preached in Krakow by  Father Karol Wojtyła—the future Pope St. John Paul II.  An Oblate of this same Abbey was Bl. Hanna Chrzanowska (see Blog  April 6, 2018).

In 1951, after graduating from the Academy of Fine Arts, she joined the Monastery of the Benedictine Nuns of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament. (Order founded in Paris, France in 1653 by Bl. Mechtilde of the Blessed Sacrament- (see Blogs Oct. 9, 2021 & April 7, 2017).

Those were the most difficult years under the Communist regime for Poland; the monastery was being rebuilt after having been bombed in the war and yet it's spiritual life flourished. 

In religious life she was known for her common sense, childlike simplicity, maturity, and love of Christ. She was also know for her humility as well. “Remembering that which IS—that is why God graciously tears down our plans, built on nothingness, so that we may anchor ourselves in Him”.

In her breviary, she kept a bookmark with a quotation from Mother Mectilde - “To be a victim is to accept every tribulation.” Sister Bernadette desired to offer herself as a “holocaust” to God specifically, to offer her life in reparation for the infidelities of the priesthood, of priests abandoning their vocation in Communist Poland. 

 In 1963, it was discovered she had lesions on her reproductive organs, which caused her great pain. She was sent to a Communist hospital for a routine surgery. Before her surgery, she begged the Lord: “Cut me in strips, but let them return to You and give You glory.”  After her surgery, complications arose. She was in terrible pain caused by a “twisted bowel and intestinal adhesions.” Due to neglect on the part of the Communist doctors, little could be done to fix the botched surgery.

Sister Bernadette found joy in her suffering. On her deathbed, she confided to her superior, Mother Celestyna: “But that is not at all why I want to die; suffering is also a great happiness. I want to suffer as much as possible for a few more moments, there is no more suffering there…I feel a great power inside me. It is not from me, but from Him.”  She died on April 30, 1963, at the age of 35. 

The book was written by Sister Jadwiga Stabińska, born in Grodno (then in Poland, today in Belarus) in 1935. After studying psychology at the University of Warsaw, she entered the Benedictine Nuns of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament in Warsaw. She made her solemn vows in1960 and began her work as a writer. Many of her articles, poems and translations were published in various Catholic magazines. Her most important work was the book “Faces of Contemplation” (1977) for which the Holy Father John Paul II himself thanked her. She died in 2016, after a long battle with cancer at 81 years of age, 59 of which were spent in monastic profession.