Adèle Mardosewicz

Adèle Mardosewicz, known in religion as Sister Maria Stella of the Blessed Sacrament, was a Polish nun of the Congregation of the Sisters of the Holy Family of Nazareth and superior of that congregation’s house in Nowogródek. She was born on 14 December 1888 in the village of Ciasnówka, in a region of historic Poland then under the Russian Empire. Widely available historical and hagiographical sources record little about her family or childhood beyond her Polish origin and the date and place of her birth. She entered the Sisters of the Holy Family of Nazareth, a congregation devoted to the Christian education of youth and to pastoral work, and received the name Maria Stella of the Blessed Sacrament. In the interwar period she was assigned to Nowogródek (now Navahrudak in Belarus), then a town of the Second Polish Republic, and became superior of the local community.

During the Second World War Nowogródek passed from Soviet occupation (1939–1941) to German occupation. The sisters continued educational and charitable work among the townspeople under increasingly dangerous conditions. In 1943 the Gestapo carried out mass arrests, detaining many laymen, including fathers of families, and Catholic clergy of the town. According to the consistent testimony preserved by the congregation and by local witnesses, the sisters, led by their superior Sister Maria Stella, offered their own lives to God in exchange for the prisoners.

On 31 July 1943 eleven sisters of the Nowogródek community, including Sister Maria Stella, were arrested by the German security police. They were taken to a wooded area outside the town and shot on 1 August 1943. Their bodies were buried in a mass grave in the forest. A twelfth sister of the house, who had not been seized with the others, later helped to identify the site. After the war the remains were exhumed and in due course transferred to the Church of the Transfiguration (the Fara) in Nowogródek, where they are venerated.

Pope John Paul II beatified Adèle Mardosewicz and her ten companions on 5 March 2000 in Rome, as the Martyrs of Nowogródek. They have not been canonized. Their memory is kept especially by the Sisters of the Holy Family of Nazareth and by the faithful of the Nowogródek region. Sister Maria Stella is remembered as the superior who guided her community in an act of self-offering during the occupation.