“Justice and the right to know the truth require us from this pulpit to repeatedly demand a limit on the tyranny of censorship.”

Jerzy was born in 1947 on the Feast of the Holy Cross in Okopy, a small village in the northeastern part of Poland.  Despite humble roots, he was known for his great faith at an early age.

He walked 2 miles each day to serve Mass and entered the seminary after high school.  This was interrupted when he was inducted into a special unit designed to indoctrinate young soldiers out of Catholicism and into communism.

He resisted and prayed the Rosary in the open, refusing to remove his scapular.  For punishment, he had to stand barefoot all night in rain and snow.  Harsh treatment for 2 years caused him lifelong health problems.  He was allowed to return and was ordained a priest in 1972.  He became a vocal opponent of the repressive communist regime and openly challenged the martial law which was declared in 1981. 

Once a month he celebrated Mass for those imprisoned and killed by the regime in Saint Stanislaus Kostka Church in Warsaw.  They drew ever-growing crowds, upwards of tens of thousands, including the attention of the communist security services.  They began to persecute and harass him, trying to intimidate him into changing his sermons but he did not cease.

Peaceful resistance was always at the core of his advice.  “An idea which needs rifles to survive, dies of its own accord.”

In 1984, the atheistic communist regime abducted him along a country road at night outside of Warsaw.  They hogtied him and subjected him to prolonged torture before killing him.  His body was found in the Vistula River.  Autopsy revealed details so horrifying that even the communists suppressed them.

His mother suffered and forgave them just as the Blessed Mother had for her Son.

“Truth never changes.  It can never be destroyed by any decision or legal act.  Telling the Truth with courage is a way leading directly to freedom.  A man who tells the Truth is a free man despite external slavery, imprisonment, or custody.”

For God’s Glory.