Blessed Jerzy Popiełuszko relic in diocese

By Tanya Connor
The Catholic Free Press

Members of Our Lady of Czestochowa Parish in Worcester have another saint to promote and relic to share.
The parish’s newly acquired relic of Blessed Jerzy Popiełuszko was installed on his feast day, Oct. 19, said Father Richard W. Polek, pastor. So, their remembrance of all saints and this blessed man started a little early this year. Sunday is All Saints Day.
“We just brought the relic in procession” at that weekday Mass, the pastor said. The relic remained in a place of honor for people to venerate at last weekend’s Masses, then was placed with other relics on side altars in the front of the church.
The parish did not previously have a relic of this Polish martyr, Father Polek said.
The story of the priest was told in the parish’s Oct. 18 bulletin. According to a Catholic News Agency article, Communist officials captured the 37-year-old Father Jerzy on Oct. 19, 1984, beat him and threw his body into a river. His “crimes” were “encouraging peaceful resistance to Communism … and working as chaplain to the workers of the Solidarnozć (Solidarity) movement and trade union, which was known for its opposition to Communism.” Father Jerzy was declared a martyr in 2009 and beatified in 2010.
At Our Lady of Czestochowa, Father Polek said, Blessed Jerzy’s relic joins relics of other “saints of our times.”
St. Faustina Kowalska, recipient of Jesus’ Divine Mercy messages, who died in 1938; St. Maximilian Kolbe, who gave his life for a fellow prisoner in Auschwitz in 1941, and St. John Paul II, the popular Polish pope who died in 2005, all are represented there.
Father Polek had planned to have a parish pilgrimage “in the footsteps of” the three saints last July, but it was postponed because of the coronavirus.
On previous pilgrimages to Poland, Father Polek and parishioners visited the parish where Father Jerzy had served, St. Stanislaus Kostka Parish in Warsaw.
A non-Polish parishioner who traveled on pilgrimage with her daughters saw Father Jerzy as a patron of those fighting for religious freedom, as Catholics in the United States are doing now. So, she brought her husband on the next pilgrimage.
“And then I got this idea to have the relic here,” Father Polek said. He said he got the needed permission and planned to receive the relic on this year’s pilgrimage. Since the trip was postponed, he picked up the relic when traveling to Poland in August to visit his family, and saved it to present to his parish for Blessed Jerzy’s feast day.
“As an ethnic Polish parish, this is what we would like to share with the Church here … in the United States,” he said.
People can visit Our Lady of Czestochowa Church, 34 Ward St., Worcester, to venerate this and other relics and participate in special devotions for the saints’ feast days, he said.