Michal Tomaszek

Michał Tomaszek was a Polish Conventual Franciscan friar and missionary priest martyred in Peru in 1991 and later beatified by the Catholic Church. He was born on 23 September 1960 in the village of Łękawica in southern Poland. Raised in a Catholic family, he entered the Order of Friars Minor Conventual, completed philosophical and theological studies in Poland, made religious profession, and was ordained to the priesthood in 1987. He then volunteered for the Franciscan missions in Latin America rather than remaining in a domestic assignment.

In 1989 he was sent to the remote Andean parish of Pariacoto in the Department of Ancash, in the Diocese of Chimbote, Peru. There he served with his fellow Conventual Franciscan Zbigniew Strzałkowski. The two priests worked among a largely poor rural population, celebrating the sacraments, offering catechesis, and supporting local social and agricultural efforts. Their ministry unfolded during Peru’s internal armed conflict, when the Maoist guerrilla movement Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) attacked the state and also targeted the Catholic Church, whose pastoral and charitable work it treated as an obstacle to revolutionary control of the countryside.

On the evening of 9 August 1991, armed Sendero Luminoso militants seized Tomaszek and Strzałkowski from the parish house in Pariacoto, took them a short distance from the village, and shot them. The Catholic Church later judged the killings to be martyrdom in odium fidei, that is, out of hatred for the faith, because the friars were slain for their priestly and missionary activity. An Italian diocesan priest of the same region, Alessandro Dordi, was murdered by the same organization later that month. The bodies of the two Franciscans were recovered and buried at Pariacoto.

A cause of beatification was introduced in the Diocese of Chimbote. After the Congregation for the Causes of Saints recognized the deaths as martyrdom, Pope Francis authorized the beatification. On 5 December 2015 Cardinal Angelo Amato, as papal legate, presided at the beatification in Chimbote of Michał Tomaszek, Zbigniew Strzałkowski, and Alessandro Dordi. Blessed Michał Tomaszek is venerated especially among Conventual Franciscans and in Poland and Peru; he has not been canonized.