Name: Jan Sarkander
Life: 1576-1620
Status: Saint
Feast Day: March 17
Join me today as we encounter a saint who lived in a confusing age, an indecisive scholar who found complete certainty at the time of his martyrdom.
Jan Sarkander was born in 1576 in Skoczów, in present day Poland. The year of his birth marked 30 years since the death of Martin Luther. Jan’s father died when Jan was still a boy, in 1589, and his mother took Jan and his brothers into the modern Czech Republic, or as it used to be known, the Kingdom of Bohemia, then a part of the Holy Roman Empire.
Jan’s mother moved the family to the town of Příbor, where Jan attended the parish school. He did well there, and after three years he moved to a Jesuit school in Olomouc, still within the modern day Czech Republic. After that, he went to study in Prague. Clearly, Jan was on track to be a scholar and a priest, the same vocation as his older brother Nicholas. He obtained his bachelor’s degree in 1602, and his MA one year afterward. By 1604 he was in Graz, present day Austria, to get his doctorate in theology. And then, he seems to have lost his way.
Sarkander struggled with his priestly vocation. He delayed his studies for a while. And then he did something even more out of the ordinary for someone who had already put so much time into his studies: he met a woman called Anna, and he fell in love. Jan and Anna were married in 1606.
When Jan had met Anna, as it happened, she was a Lutheran, though she had converted to Catholicism before the marriage. Even Sarkander’s marriage was a microcosm of the way the Protestant Reformation had spread through Europe in just a few decades. The Roman Catholic Church had badly mishandled Martin Luther’s attempts at reform, and Luther had left the Church. New churches, not in communion with Rome, sprang up in England, across the North, and in Bohemia. Rome was left trying to catch up by launching the Counter-Reformation. But it was not enough to put the Protestant genie back in the bottle, and the religious divide remained the major issue of Jan Sarkander’s day.