Michał Sopoćko

Michał Sopoćko was born on 1 November 1888 in Juszewszczyzna (also known as Nowosady), near Valozhyn in the Vilnius region of the Russian Empire, in territory that today lies in Belarus. He came from an impoverished Polish noble family and received his early education under the constraints of Russian imperial rule in a predominantly Catholic, Polish-speaking milieu. After studies at the seminary in Vilnius he was ordained a priest in 1914 for the Archdiocese of Vilnius. During the First World War he served as a military chaplain, first in the Russian army and subsequently with Polish forces, work that shaped his later pastoral concern for soldiers and for people living under occupation.

In the interwar years Sopoćko combined parish and chaplaincy duties with academic formation. He studied at the University of Warsaw, where he obtained a doctorate in theology in 1926, and from 1928 he taught pastoral theology at Stefan Batory University in Vilnius while also serving as spiritual director of the Vilnius seminary. He was a diocesan priest rather than a member of a religious order, and he remained celibate in accordance with the Latin-rite discipline of the Catholic Church. His reputation in Vilnius was that of a rigorous moral theologian and a practical pastor, not yet associated with any extraordinary devotion.

In 1933, while serving as confessor to the Congregation of the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy in Vilnius, he became the spiritual director of Sister Maria Faustina Kowalska. Initially sceptical of her reported visions of Jesus as Divine Mercy, he subjected them to theological and medical scrutiny before concluding that they were authentic. At her request he commissioned the painter Eugeniusz Kazimirowski to execute the first image of the Merciful Jesus in 1934, arranged for the public veneration of the image, and began to write and publish the earliest theological expositions of the Divine Mercy devotion, including the chaplet and the proposed feast. He also worked to give canonical form to Faustina’s desire for a new congregation dedicated to Mercy; the Congregation of the Sisters of Merciful Jesus traces its origins to this collaboration. Faustina died in 1938; Sopoćko continued to promote the devotion despite later wartime disruption and, for a time, official caution in Rome toward the forms associated with her diary.

During the Second World War, under successive Soviet and Nazi occupations of Vilnius, Sopoćko remained in the region, assisted people in danger (including Jews), and himself went into hiding when sought by the Gestapo. After the war, when Vilnius was incorporated into the Soviet Union, he settled in 1947 in Białystok, in northeastern Poland, where he taught in the diocesan seminary and continued to write on pastoral theology and Divine Mercy. He spent his last decades in relative obscurity as a professor and confessor, still advocating the devotion that would later be restored and universalized under Pope John Paul II. He died in Białystok on 15 February 1975 and was buried there; his remains were later transferred to the Church of Divine Mercy in that city. He was beatified on 28 September 2008 in Białystok, in a ceremony celebrated by Cardinal Angelo Amato on behalf of Pope Benedict XVI. His liturgical memorial is observed on 15 February. He has not been canonized.