Zygmunt Gorazdowski

Zygmunt Gorazdowski was born on 1 November 1845 in Sanok, in the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, then a crownland of the Austrian Empire. He came from a Polish family of noble origin. In childhood he contracted tuberculosis, an illness that interrupted his schooling and left him in frail health for the rest of his life. After a period of recovery he studied at the Jesuit college in Stara Wieś and briefly began legal studies at the University of Lwów before turning to the priesthood. He entered the seminary of the Latin Archdiocese of Lwów and was ordained a priest on 25 July 1871.

After ordination he served in parish ministry in the archdiocese, including at Wojniłów, and then for many years in the city of Lwów. He became known for practical charity among workers, the homeless, the sick, and abandoned children. In the later 1870s he organized a soup kitchen that offered inexpensive meals to the poor, together with shelters and a home for people with incurable illnesses. He also promoted religious instruction, writing catechetical texts that circulated widely in Galicia, and used the Catholic press to reach his parishioners. Later sources often called him a priest of the poor and the homeless of Lwów.

In 1884 he founded the Congregation of the Sisters of Saint Joseph, a community of women religious dedicated to the care of the poor, the sick, and children, and to staffing the charitable houses he had begun. Gorazdowski himself remained a diocesan priest rather than a member of a religious order; he was later named an honorary canon of the Lwów cathedral chapter. Despite recurring illness he continued pastoral and organizational work in the city through the First World War.

He died in Lwów on 1 January 1920. Pope John Paul II beatified him in Lwów on 26 June 2001 during an apostolic visit to Ukraine. Pope Benedict XVI canonized him in Rome on 23 October 2005, in the same ceremony as Archbishop Józef Bilczewski of Lwów. His liturgical memorial is kept on 6 January.