Franciszek Drzewiecki

Franciszek Drzewiecki was a Polish Roman Catholic priest of the Society of the Catholic Apostolate, the congregation founded by Saint Vincent Pallotti and commonly called the Pallottines. He was born on 26 February 1908 in Zduny, in the historic Greater Poland region. At the time of his birth that territory still belonged to the Prussian partition of the former Polish lands. He entered the Pallottine congregation, completed novitiate, religious profession, and the usual course of philosophical and theological studies, and was ordained a priest during the years of the Second Polish Republic.

After ordination he exercised ministry within the Polish Pallottine province. The congregation’s work in interwar Poland included formation of candidates for the priesthood and religious life, education, and parish and missionary apostolate. Drzewiecki’s life as a religious priest belonged to that ordinary labor of a still relatively young Polish province of the Society, which had taken firmer root after Poland’s restoration in 1918.

The German invasion of September 1939 and the occupation of Polish territory brought a systematic assault on the Catholic clergy, whom the Nazi authorities treated as pillars of Polish religious and national life. Like hundreds of other Polish priests, Drzewiecki was arrested and in time deported to the Dachau concentration camp in Bavaria. Dachau was the principal camp used to hold clergy from Poland and other occupied countries; inmates of the priest barracks suffered starvation rations, forced labor, disease, and repeated maltreatment.

He died at Dachau on 10 September 1942, at the age of thirty-four. The Catholic Church regards his death as martyrdom in hatred of the faith. On 13 June 1999, during a pilgrimage to Poland, Pope John Paul II beatified him in Warsaw together with 107 other Polish victims of the Second World War, the group known as the 108 Martyrs of World War II. Their collective liturgical memorial is kept on 12 June. Blessed Franciszek Drzewiecki has not been canonized. Memory of him is preserved especially in Poland and in the Pallottine congregation.