A Visitor from Heaven, Part I: Apparitions in Northern Italy
Last year, in remote Poland, an intriguing book appeared around private apparitions of Blessed Jerzy Popiełuszko. This publication may serve as a spiritual guide for all who desire to enter through the narrow gate and live forever with Jesus. It is available for purchase online, though unfortunately only in Polish for now. I hope it will one day be translated into English.
Relics of Fr. Jerzy are present in approximately eleven hundred locations in Poland and seven hundred locations abroad, across six continents. They can be found in countries such as Australia, South Korea, Vietnam, the Ivory Coast, and the United Arab Emirates.
The many graces and miracles occurring through his intercession may indicate that Providence wishes to convey something important to modern man living in an ultra-secularized world. This provides even greater reason to believe that the experiences of an unknown woman from the small town of Fiumicello are of divine origin.
For those who have never heard of Fr. Jerzy Popiełuszko, I will briefly present this Polish Martyr for the Truth. I will then turn to another remarkable figure: the Italian Francesca Sgobbi, whom readers may well be tempted to call a mystic. In each section of this series, except this one, there will be a short message reportedly given from Heaven offered as a reflection.
A DIFFICULT PATH TO THE PRIESTHOOD
Jerzy Popiełuszko was born in Okopy in 1947, in northeastern Poland. Following his graduation in 1965, he entered the Metropolitan Seminary in Warsaw. At the start of his second year, his studies were abruptly interrupted when Seminarian Popiełuszko was conscripted for military service from 1966 to 1968 in an infamous special unit for clergy in Bartoszyce.
It was in the ranks of the communist army that his extraordinary fortitude and deep Christian witness truly became known. Private Popiełuszko courageously led forbidden religious devotions and gave spiritual strength to his fellow soldiers, even as he endured harsh reprisals: public ridicule, gruelling drills, crawling through the bitter frost, and the humiliation of cleaning latrines while wearing a gas mask.
After his ordination in 1972 by Poland’s primate, Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński, he served in several parishes in Warsaw and worked as a hospital chaplain before becoming an assistant priest at St. Stanislaus Kostka Church in the Żoliborz district in 1980.
THE CHAPLAIN OF SOLIDARITY
In August 1980, as strikes spread across the country, the protesting workers at the nearby Huta Warszawa steelworks needed a priest to celebrate what would be a historic first: Mass inside a communist workplace. Since no other priests were available, Fr. Jerzy stepped forward to take on this dangerous task. It was there that he blessed the Solidarity banner.
From then on, the steelworkers began coming to see him with their whole families—wives and children included. “This approachable, down-to-earth priest, who could bridge any divide and spoke in plain, simple language, was truly extraordinary,” the workers recalled. A spiritual renewal followed: men returned to the confessional after decades away, couples regularized their marriages, and many adults sought the sacrament of Baptism.
In February and November of 1981, Fr. Jerzy also accompanied striking students of the Medical Academy in Warsaw and cadets at the Higher Officer School of Fire Service. As Fr. Teofil Bogucki, then-pastor of St. Stanislaus Kostka Parish, recalled, his presence during the strike “exerted a great formative influence on him and directed the course of his future life.”
Following the imposition of martial law in Dec 1981, Fr. Jerzy attended court hearings and organized help for the Interned and began celebrating monthly “Masses for the Homeland.”
DARKNESS CLOSING IN
Month by month, the atmosphere surrounding Fr. Popiełuszko grew increasingly tense. He was constantly followed and knew that both his apartment and telephone were bugged. There were frequent attempts at intimidation.
In December 1983, the priest was interrogated by the prosecutor’s office, and a search was ordered of an apartment left to him by his aunt. There, ammunition, illegal publications, and many other incriminating materials—previously planted by the Security Service—were “found.” He was detained for one day and released only after the intervention of Bishop Dąbrowski. In response, a fierce media smear campaign was launched against him, initiated by the Soviet newspaper Izvestia, and promoted in Poland by the government spokesman Jerzy Urban, who accused Fr. Jerzy of organizing “sessions of hate.”
ABDUCTION AND MARTYRDOM
On that fateful day, October 19, 1984, Fr. Popiełuszko travelled to Bydgoszcz, where he celebrated the Mass and led the Rosary meditations at the Church of the Holy Polish Martyrs. The final words of these reflections were: “Let us pray that we may be free from fear and intimidation, but above all from the desire for revenge and violence.”
On his way back, late in the evening, Fr. Jerzy was abducted by three secret service agents on the highway near Górsk, close to Toruń, and placed in the trunk of a Fiat 125. After being gagged and severely beaten, he was handed over—according to the findings of Dr. Milena Kindziuk and former Prosecutor Andrzej Witkowski—to officers of the Military Information Services.
He was subsequently taken to a prearranged torture site, a heavily guarded bunker on the grounds of a military unit in Kazuń Polski, not far from Warsaw. Subjected to severe physical and psychological torture, he lost consciousness several times from the pain. Praying for a quick death, he most likely died around noon on October 25, 1984, choking on his own blood. His horribly mutilated body was thrown into the Vistula River near the dam in Włocławek around midnight.
“After years of archival research, new documents, new witness testimonies, and new operational analyses have emerged, as well as independent opinions from three professors of forensic medicine from 2002, which indicate that Fr. Popiełuszko’s death occurred between Oct. 25 and 26, rather than on [Oct.] 19,” said Dr. Milena Kindziuk, a distinguished biographer of the Blessed Jerzy Popiełuszko and a lecturer at Warsaw’s Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski University.
His funeral, held on November 3rd, drew nearly a million mourners. At St. Stanislaus Kostka Church, the priest’s grave is shaped like a rosary, in tribute to the one sent to him by St. John Paul II. The Holy Father personally visited the site in June 1987, joining the more than twenty-three million pilgrims who have since come there to pay their respects.
“The humble figure of the priest has transcended geographical, cultural and generational boundaries. He has become the patron saint of Solidarity, of persecuted Christians, and of societies struggling against totalitarianism, consumerism and the chaos of values,” the bishops said.
Pope Benedict XVI formally recognized Fr. Popiełuszko’s martyrdom on December 19, 2009, paving the way for his beatification in June 2010.
There is a common misconception that a single person lacks the power to change the world. Yet the ministry of Fr. Jerzy Popiełuszko is a testament to the fact that a man who has consciously made a total sacrifice of himself to God can influence not only a handful of admirers, but millions. Faithfulness to the truth can be costly—it can even require the ultimate sacrifice.
Author’s Note: In Part 2 of this series, we will learn how these apparitions began and about the extraordinary occurrence in the visionary’s husband’s life.
Image from Wikimedia Commons
