Posted on 09/14/2016 6:17:36 PM PDT by marshmallow
Cardinal Angelo Amato said Blessed Wladyslaw Bukowinski 'showed how faith can bring down walls'
A Vatican official beatified a Polish-born priest deported to Soviet-ruled Central Asia who volunteered to stay on and minister to Catholics.
Cardinal Angelo Amato, prefect of the Vatican’s Congregation for Saints’ Causes, said Fr Wladyslaw Bukowinski, who died in 1974, prayed to overcome “fear, hunger and violence, continuing his service at risk of being arrested and sent back to the gulag.”
“His trials before Soviet courts and his time in labour camps gave him a pulpit for witness and evangelisation, from which he taught love of God and neighbour, showing how faith could bring down walls,” Cardinal Amato said during the September 11 beatification Mass at Our Lady of Fatima Cathedral.
He said the priest had been a “courageous missionary of Christ in distant lands of Eastern Europe” and found “safety through faith in God and divine providence” at a time of religious persecution and “physical and moral suffering.”
Born in 1904 at Berdychiv, now in Ukraine, Blessed Bukowinski studied law and theology in Krakow, Poland, where he was ordained in 1931. He was arrested by the Soviet secret police as a “Vatican agent” in 1940.
After a decade ministering to prisoners and forced laborers in Ukraine, Russia and Kazakhstan, he voluntarily sought Soviet citizenship in 1954 to continue his work and became the first Catholic priest for two decades to visit German-speaking Catholics in neighboring Tajikistan.
Rearrested in 1958 for running “illegal Catholic assemblies,” he spent three years in Siberia before returning to Karaganda, where he continued ministering until his death.
The beatification Mass, concelebrated by bishops from Russia and Poland, was attended by Fr Mariusz Kowalski, whose unexplained cure from a brain haemorrhage at Karaganda in 2008 was attributed to the intercession of Blessed Bukowinski.
(Excerpt) Read more at catholicherald.co.uk ...
“before returning to Karaganda, where he continued ministering until his death.”
Not a pleasant place...
Makes me think of Solzhenitsyn’s “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”. In that book, there is a character, Alyosha (Alyoshka), who is a Baptist (as opposed to being Catholic). He believes that being imprisoned is something that he has earned, since it allows him to reflect more on God and Jesus.
Imagine the comfort a man of this goodness must have been to the suffering, in Perm 35. With perhaps the worst challenge being the evil delight the organs took, in placing prisoners of conscience amongst hardened common criminals.
Richard Wurmbrand, a Lutheran minister who founded Voice of the Martyrs, believed that he was closest to God during his prison years in Romania.
"The Gulag Archipelago" changed my life. If I had the power, every snowflake would be forced to read it at gunpoint, and tested on it. Those who failed would be forced to live in a cage, facing a sign saying "welcome to communism, @sshole, each morning we'll decide whether to shoot you" and fed out of a dog dish.
Cardinal beatified?
Doesn’t sound right.
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