Leon Nowakowski

Leon Nowakowski was a Polish Roman Catholic diocesan priest venerated as a blessed martyr. He was born on 28 June 1913 in the village of Bytoń in Kuyavia, then in the Russian partition of Poland. He received a Catholic upbringing in a rural parish setting and entered the major seminary of the Diocese of Włocławek. On 20 June 1937 he was ordained to the priesthood by Bishop Karol Mieczysław Radoński. His entire ministry belonged to the last years of the Second Polish Republic.

After ordination he served as a curate, first at Izbica Kujawska and then in the parish of Piotrków Kujawski in the same diocese. He was engaged in ordinary pastoral work among the faithful of Kuyavia when Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939. In the territories annexed to the Reich as Reichsgau Wartheland, the occupiers moved rapidly against the Polish clergy, whom they regarded as a mainstay of national and religious life. Mass arrests of priests in October 1939 formed part of the Intelligenzaktion, the campaign to destroy the Polish intelligentsia.

Nowakowski was arrested by the Gestapo in late October 1939. On 31 October 1939, at the age of twenty-six and after little more than two years of priesthood, he was taken from detention and shot in a forest near Piotrków Kujawski. His killing was one of many extrajudicial executions of Polish priests in the first months of the occupation.

On 13 June 1999, during a liturgical celebration in Warsaw, Pope John Paul II beatified him together with 107 other Polish victims of Nazi persecution, the group known as the 108 Martyrs of World War II. Their collective memorial is kept on 12 June. Nowakowski has not been canonized. He is remembered in the Diocese of Włocławek and among Polish Catholics as a young priest who died for the faith at the outset of the German occupation of Poland.