Franciszek Stryjas

Franciszek Stryjas was born on 26 January 1882 in the village of Popów near Kalisz, in the countryside of Congress Poland then under Russian imperial rule. He came from a large and devout Catholic family and spent his working life as a farmer. He married and became the father of children; after his wife’s death he continued to raise his children and later helped with his grandchildren. Alongside farm work he took part in ordinary parish life and belonged to the Living Rosary.

Under the German occupation of western Poland in the Second World War, the Nazi authorities in the Wartheland forbade the teaching of the Catholic religion and tried to suppress Polish Catholic identity. Stryjas, a layman with no ecclesiastical office, nonetheless gathered children in secret and instructed them in the catechism, preparing them for the sacraments at a time when such activity was treated as a crime. His quiet apostolate of religious education made him a target of the Gestapo.

He was arrested on 6 July 1944. Imprisoned in Kalisz, he was interrogated and tortured. He died in that prison on 11 July 1944 from the effects of the mistreatment he had received. The Catholic Church later judged his death to be martyrdom suffered out of hatred for the faith.

Pope John Paul II beatified him in Warsaw on 13 June 1999 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 commemoration is kept on 12 June. Stryjas is remembered as a married lay catechist and family man whose fidelity to handing on the faith under persecution cost him his life.