Hedwig Borzecka

Hedwig Borzęcka, known in Polish as Jadwiga Borzęcka, was born on 1 February 1863 at the family estate of Obremszczyzna in the eastern Polish lands then under the Russian Empire after the partitions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. She was a daughter of the Polish nobleman Józef Borzęcki and of Celina Chludzińska, who had been born in 1833 near Orsha and who married Józef in 1853. The household was Catholic and patriotic, formed under the pressures of imperial rule and of the failed Polish insurrections of the nineteenth century. Józef died in 1874, when Hedwig was eleven. His death left Celina a widow responsible for the estate and for her remaining children. In the years that followed, mother and daughter drew together in a shared life of prayer and in a growing sense that they might be called to consecrated life rather than to the continuation of a conventional aristocratic existence.

In 1882 Celina and Hedwig went to Rome. There they came under the influence of the Congregation of the Resurrection of Our Lord Jesus Christ, the community of priests and brothers founded by Polish exiles earlier in the nineteenth century, and they received spiritual direction from Resurrectionist fathers, among them Piotr Semenenko. After a period of discernment, on 6 January 1891, the feast of the Epiphany, Celina, Hedwig, and a few companions began in Rome the Congregation of the Sisters of the Resurrection of Our Lord Jesus Christ. Celina became the first superior general. Hedwig, then twenty-eight, was co-foundress, made religious profession, and served as her mother’s closest collaborator in government, formation, and the shaping of the institute’s spirit. The congregation took the Resurrection of Christ as the heart of its spirituality and devoted itself especially to the education and Christian formation of girls and young women, together with other works of charity and parish apostolate.

In the 1890s and the first years of the twentieth century the Sisters of the Resurrection opened houses beyond Rome. Communities were established in the Polish lands, including a foundation at Kęty in Austrian Galicia. The congregation also undertook work among Eastern-rite Catholics in the Balkans and, in 1900, sent sisters to Chicago to serve Polish immigrants in the United States. Hedwig shared in the visitation of houses, the training of novices, and the practical organization of a still-young institute. Those who knew her described a woman of humility and interior prayer who accepted a secondary public role beside her mother, yet who exercised real influence on the character and discipline of the congregation. Her health, never strong, declined in the early twentieth century.

Hedwig Borzęcka died on 27 September 1906 at Kęty, at the age of forty-three. Celina remained superior general until her own death in Kraków in 1913. The congregation continued to expand in Poland, North America, and elsewhere during the twentieth century. A cause for Hedwig’s beatification was later introduced, and she is honored as a Servant of God, but she has not been beatified or canonized; her mother was beatified in 2007. Hedwig is remembered in Resurrectionist history as co-foundress and as an example of hidden fidelity in the first generation of the Sisters of the Resurrection.