Stanislaus of Szczepanów

Life and Ministry

Stanislaus was born around AD 1030 in the village of Szczepanów in southern Poland to noble parents, educated at the cathedral school of Gniezno and possibly at Liège, ordained a priest, and became a canon of Kraków cathedral. In 1072 he was elected the second native Polish bishop of Kraków and was a close advisor to King Bolesław II the Bold during the early years of his reign. As Bolesław's military ambitions grew — long campaigns into Kievan Rus and Hungary that kept him absent from Poland for years at a time — moral discipline in the kingdom collapsed, and Stanislaus undertook a campaign of public correction of the king and his court that culminated, by the medieval sources, in formal excommunication.

Circumstances of Death

The bishop's excommunication of the king was an event without precedent in eleventh-century Poland and a direct challenge to royal authority. Bolesław refused to accept the censure. The earliest source, a chronicle by Gallus Anonymus written within a generation, says only that the king "ordered the bishop to be hewn limb from limb." The fuller account by Wincenty Kadłubek in the early thirteenth century specifies that on April 11, 1079, Bolesław came in person to the Church of Saint Michael on Wawel Hill where Stanislaus was celebrating Mass at the altar, ran him through with his sword, and then ordered the body dismembered and thrown into a pool. The same chronicler reports that the dismembered limbs were miraculously rejoined on the third day.

Legacy

Bolesław II was forced into exile within the year — driven out by the Polish nobility, who held the murder of a bishop at the altar to be intolerable — and died in obscurity in Hungary. Stanislaus was canonized in 1253 and is the patron saint of Poland, his cathedral at Wawel the coronation church of every Polish monarch from the thirteenth century onward, his feast day (May 8) one of the high holy days of the Polish church. The parallel with Thomas Becket — bishop killed at the altar by a king he had excommunicated — was drawn in both directions across Europe within the lifetimes of those who remembered the Canterbury murder ninety years later.