Antoni Beszta-Borowski

Antoni Beszta-Borowski was a Polish Roman Catholic diocesan priest of the Latin rite who served in the Podlasie borderlands of northeastern Poland and was killed by German occupation forces during the Second World War. He was born on 9 September 1880 in the village of Borowskie Olki, then in the Grodno lands of the Russian Empire. He received priestly formation at the theological seminary in Vilnius (Wilno) and was ordained in the early twentieth century. His early ministry unfolded in the multi-ethnic former Grand Duchy of Lithuania and Podlasie, where he worked as a vicar and later as a parish priest among Polish and Belarusian Catholics.

After Poland regained independence in 1918 he continued pastoral work in the northeastern voivodeships of the Second Polish Republic. He was appointed parish priest of Bielsk Podlaski and dean of the local deanery, responsible for a town parish that included Poles and Belarusians and stood beside a large Jewish community. He was regarded as a conscientious pastor who remained with his people through the political crises of the late 1930s.

War in 1939 brought first Soviet and then, from 1941, German occupation to the Białystok region. Occupying authorities singled out Polish clergy and other members of the intelligentsia. On 15 July 1943 German security police arrested Beszta-Borowski in Bielsk Podlaski and shot him the same day, together with other hostages, in a punitive action of the kind repeatedly used against Polish civilians. Contemporary accounts locate the execution at or near the Jewish cemetery in the town. He was sixty-two years old.

Pope John Paul II beatified him in Warsaw on 13 June 1999 as one of the 108 Martyrs of World War II, Polish Catholics killed under Nazi persecution and judged to have died in odium fidei. The group is commemorated liturgically on 12 June. Beszta-Borowski has not been canonized. Memory of him is local, centered on the parish of Bielsk Podlaski and on the wider cult of Poland’s wartime martyrs; no widely documented individual patronages are attached to his name.