Józef Achilles Puchała

Józef Puchała, known in religion as Achilles, was a Polish Conventual Franciscan friar and Catholic priest killed by German occupying forces in 1943 and later beatified as a martyr. He was born on 18 March 1911 in the village of Kosina near Łańcut, in Galicia, then under Austro-Hungarian rule. As a young man he entered the Order of Friars Minor Conventual and received the name Achilles. After philosophical and theological formation in the order he was ordained a priest in 1936. His early assignments were in Franciscan houses in the eastern provinces of the Second Polish Republic, a borderland of mixed Polish, Belarusian, and other communities.

In 1939 he was sent to Iwieniec (now Ivyanets in Belarus), then in Poland’s Nowogródek Voivodeship, where Conventual Franciscans served the parish and countryside. Soviet occupation followed the 1939 partition of Poland; after the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 the same district passed under Nazi administration. Father Achilles remained at his post, celebrating the sacraments and supporting the local faithful through successive occupations.

In the summer of 1943 Polish partisans attacked the German garrison in Iwieniec. Occupying security forces answered with a campaign of terror against civilians and clergy. On 19 July 1943 German police seized Father Achilles Puchała and his confrere Father Herman Stępień. The two friars were taken to a barn in the hamlet of Borowikowszczyzna, where they were shot; surviving accounts state that their bodies were then burned in the barn. They were among many priests killed in the pacification of the district.

Pope John Paul II beatified Achilles Puchała in Warsaw on 13 June 1999 as one of the 108 Martyrs of World War II, Polish bishops, priests, religious, and lay people put to death out of hatred for the faith during the German occupation. The group is commemorated on 12 June. He has not been canonized. He is remembered as a Franciscan of the eastern borderlands who stayed with his people and died as a martyr.