Andrew Bobola

Life and Ministry

Andrew Bobola was born to the Polish szlachta about AD 1591 in Sandomierz province, entered the Society of Jesus at Vilnius in AD 1611, was ordained in AD 1622, and spent the rest of his life in itinerant missions across the eastern reaches of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth — Lithuania, Polesie, and what is now Belarus. He preached in Polish and in the local Ruthenian dialects, reconciled to the Catholic Church a substantial number of Orthodox families in the region (the so-called Uniate question of seventeenth-century Polesie), founded schools and confraternities at Pinsk, Wilno, and Bobruisk, and was known to peasants of the Pinsk marshes as duszochwat — the soul-hunter — for the determination of his preaching. By his sixties he was operating out of the Jesuit residence at Pinsk in country becoming dangerous for Catholic priests as the Cossack-Polish wars and Russo-Polish wars overran the eastern Commonwealth.

Circumstances of Death

In May AD 1657, during the Khmelnytsky-era warfare in the Commonwealth, a band of Cossacks attached to the campaign of Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky's lieutenants raided the village of Janów Poleski. Bobola was found in a stable hiding-place, recognized as a Catholic priest, and ordered to renounce his faith and turn Orthodox. He refused. He was stripped, scourged, his face was lacerated with knives, his right hand and his left eye were cut out, the skin of his palms and of his back was flayed, and he was finally beheaded on the village market of Janów on 16 May AD 1657. (The killing took place within a war that was, on its political surface, between the Commonwealth and the Cossack hetmanate; but Bobola's interrogators framed the questions in religious terms and the killing was carried out as religious persecution, not as a battlefield casualty.) His mutilated body was buried by surviving Catholics in the Jesuit church at Pinsk.

Legacy

Bobola was canonized by Pius XI in AD 1938. His incorrupt body, hidden during the Soviet anti-religious campaigns of the AD 1920s and recovered in Rome and then returned to Warsaw, lies today in the Sanctuary of Saint Andrew Bobola in Warsaw, where it is the chief Catholic relic of Poland. He is the patron of Poland and of evangelization in the Slavic east. His witness is the witness of the soul-hunter who became himself the hunted: Christ is preached in the country where the preacher is mutilated for the sermon, and the duszochwat of Polesie was, in the end, the soul that the Lord himself caught — preached and bleeding on the same market square.