Jerzy Ciesielski

Jerzy Ciesielski was born on 12 February 1929 in Kraków, in the Second Polish Republic, and was raised in a Catholic family in that city. After the Second World War he studied civil engineering in Kraków and made his career as a specialist in reinforced-concrete structures, teaching at the Cracow University of Technology (Politechnika Krakowska). As a student and young professional he took part in Catholic academic pastoral work. In that setting he met the priest Karol Wojtyła, who gathered a circle of students and young laypeople known as Środowisko. Ciesielski became one of Wojtyła’s closest friends. They shared mountain hiking, kayaking, and sustained conversation about the Christian meaning of work, friendship, and the lay vocation. Wojtyła later remembered him as a man who sought holiness without leaving ordinary professional and family life.

In 1957 Ciesielski married Danuta Kielar; Wojtyła celebrated the wedding. The couple had three children and tried to live marriage as a path of Christian holiness, treating the household as a domestic church. Ciesielski combined academic and engineering work with family duties and parish life. He obtained a doctorate and a habilitation and was known among colleagues as a rigorous and honest specialist in concrete construction. In the 1950s and 1960s he remained a prominent lay figure in Kraków’s Catholic intellectual milieu, close to the pastoral initiatives of Bishop, later Cardinal, Wojtyła and to the world of the Catholic weekly Tygodnik Powszechny. He understood scientific work and married life as the ordinary means of sanctification and practiced a regular sacramental and prayer life alongside his profession.

In 1969–1970 he accepted a visiting appointment connected with UNESCO and lectured at the University of Khartoum, taking his family with him. On 9 October 1970, during a trip on the Nile in Egypt, the vessel in which he was travelling met with disaster. Ciesielski drowned together with two of his daughters. His body was recovered and brought back to Poland. He was buried at Rakowicki Cemetery in Kraków; Cardinal Karol Wojtyła preached at the funeral. The Archdiocese of Kraków later opened a cause for beatification, presenting him as a model of holiness in marriage and professional life. On 18 December 2013 Pope Francis authorized the decree on his heroic virtues, and he is therefore styled Venerable. He has not been beatified or canonized. Among Polish Catholics he is remembered as a husband, father, engineer, and friend of the future Pope John Paul II who sought holiness in the circumstances of lay life in the twentieth century.