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Biography

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Stefan Grelewski was born on 3 July 1898 in the village of Dwikozy near Sandomierz, in the territory of the former Congress Poland then under Russian imperial rule. He received his priestly formation at the diocesan seminary of Sandomierz and was ordained a priest of that diocese in 1921. After ordination he undertook further studies and obtained a doctorate in canon law from the Catholic University of Lublin. He belonged to a family that gave the Church more than one vocation: his younger brother Kazimierz Grelewski also became a priest of the Diocese of Sandomierz and later shared a similar fate under German occupation.

In the interwar Polish Republic Father Grelewski combined pastoral work with teaching and writing. He served as a prefect and teacher of religion in secondary schools in Radom and was active in Catholic Action, which sought to organize the lay apostolate in accordance with the social teaching of the Church. He was also a Catholic publicist, contributing articles and taking part in the religious press of his region. His ministry thus extended beyond the sanctuary to the classroom and to print, in a period when the newly independent Polish state was rebuilding its educational and civic life after the partitions.

After the German invasion of Poland in 1939, the occupying authorities subjected the Polish clergy to systematic persecution. Father Grelewski continued his priestly duties under these conditions until he was arrested by the Gestapo in January 1941. He was held in prison at Skarżysko-Kamienna and was subsequently deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp and then to Dachau, where the Nazi regime confined large numbers of Polish priests. In the camp he endured the hunger, forced labor, and brutality inflicted on clerical prisoners. He died of exhaustion at Dachau on 9 May 1941.

Pope John Paul II beatified Stefan Grelewski on 13 June 1999 in Warsaw as one of the 108 Polish martyrs of the Second World War, a group that also includes his brother Kazimierz, who died at Dachau in 1942. The Church honors them as having given their lives in odium fidei, out of hatred for the faith. Their collective liturgical commemoration is observed on 12 June. Grelewski remains a figure of the diocesan clergy of Sandomierz whose life joined scholarship, catechesis, and Catholic social engagement with a martyr’s death in a concentration camp.

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