Saint Zygmunt Feliński
The saint in exile
Join me today to meet a patriot saint in exile.
Name: Zygmunt, Sigismund Feliński
Status: Saint
Life: 1822 - 1895
Feast: September 17
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Warsaw was on a knife’s edge when Archbishop Feliński arrived in 1862. The tension had been building up for a very long time.
Once, Poland had been great. In the 17th century, it had been the Poles who had summoned their mighty heavy cavalry, the winged hussars, and saved Europe from the Islamic conquest of the Ottoman Turks. But soon Poland slipped into the control of other nations, and eventually the country was conquered and divided. In 1815, the Russian occupiers had made their piece of Poland freer and more independent. The taste of freedom made the Poles want more. Poland had rebelled, rising in 1830 and again when revolutions swept across Europe in 1848. As a result, the Russians had cracked down, and Poland was less free than ever.
By 1861, Russian forces were trying to lock down the city of Warsaw to prevent the beginnings of yet another uprising. The Polish nationalists had devised a plan for holding their meetings away from Russian eyes. They met in churches. The nationalists didn’t think the Russians would dare to enter churches to break up their meetings for fear of stirring up more anger in Catholic Poland. But of course, the trick wouldn’t work forever. In the fall of 1861, Russian forces had entered the Warsaw cathedral to break up a nationalist meeting.
The invasion of the cathedral did, indeed, enrage many Poles. Many looked to the Church to see what the response should be. And just then, when the Church desperately needed leadership, the Archbishop of Warsaw died. Warsaw was under the control of a priest administrator, who ordered that the churches of Warsaw all be closed in protest. As a result, the priest administrator was arrested. The churches stayed closed. Months passed. Now Poles were angry at Russians. Russians were angry at Poles. Catholics were angry that the sanctity of their churches had been violated, and angry again that the churches were closed. This had been going on for four months when Archbishop Zygmunt Feliński arrived in the city, and the whole complicated situation became his problem.
The truth was that the Pope had scrambled to find a replacement for the Archbishop of Warsaw. Still, in many ways, Father Zygmunt Feliński had seemed like the ideal candidate.
For one important thing, Zygmunt Feliński was Polish. He had been born in 1822 in Volyn, in the Northwest tip of modern Ukraine. Feliński’s family story was connected with the Polish fight for independence. His father had died when Zygmunt was only 11. When Zygmunt was 16, his mother was arrested. She had been identified as a Polish nationalist, working for Polish independence. She was sent to Siberia, and Zygmunt and his brothers and sisters were taken in by a family friend. The friend soon recognized that Zygmunt was an unusually intelligent young man, and made sure that Zygmunt got an education, first in school and then in university.
Zygmunt went to Russia, to Moscow, where he studied mathematics. Then he went to Paris to study French. This was especially useful because French remained the language in which most European countries communicated. Russia would try to get off the French standard, sending an important message in Russian to the Chancellor of the Second German Reich, Otto von Bismarck. Bismarck simply ignored the message, and when the Russians finally followed up he told the ambassador that they had received a communication in some foreign tongue but no translator had been available to decipher what it might mean. The Russians went back to using French.
Even though he had studied in Russia, Zygmunt Feliński must have been eager to strike a blow for Polish independence, and in 1848, when he was in his mid twenties, he got his chance. All of Europe seemed to rise up, demanding reforms and change and freedom, although for the most part the revolutionaries did not succeed. Feliński joined the Polish revolutionaries, and was wounded in the last phase of the fighting.
The failure of the revolution was a disappointment. Feliński now had to decide what to do next. He was almost 30. He had worked as a tutor for the wealthy and he was well-placed to begin a career as a professor. But something was tugging him in another direction.
In 1851, Feliński entered the seminary. He was ordained in 1855 and sent back to Russia, to Saint Petersburg. And once there, he began to display the energy he would have for the rest of his life. He was a spiritual director. He worked as a professor of philosophy. He founded an order of nuns, the Congregation of the Franciscan Sisters of the Family of Mary. He helped the poor in his parish. And the dynamic new priest started to make converts, shocking Russian high society when several aristocrats started attending his parish and found religious vocations of their own. Feliński’s profile rose, and soon people were giving him the sideways compliment of calling him the best priest - in Russia.
Father Feliński was in Russia in 1862 as Warsaw looked about to explode and the Archbishop of the city suddenly died. The Pope did not have anyone ready, but the best priest in Russia sounded like the right man for the job. And so it was that Father Feliński became Archbishop Feliński and was sent to Warsaw in February of 1862. The city was under martial law. The churches had been closed for four months. It was a mess.
The first thing that the new archbishop did was to reopen the churches. He reconsecrated the Cathedral which had been profaned by the Russian army violently forcing their way in.A few days later, he reopened all the churches, ordering a forty hour Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament across Warsaw.
To the nationalists, this was a betrayal. The way they saw it, the Church had been on their side, protesting heavy-handed Russian tactics. The new archbishop had given in. Rumours spread that Feliński sympathized with the Russian cause. Some said it had been the Russian tsar, not the pope, who had picked him in the first place.
Archbishop Feliński saw things differently. He recognized that churches cannot be closed. Every day, someone needs confession. People fall in love and need to be married; people get sick and die. The Eucharist assists ordinary people on the path to sanctification. If these things matter at all, they matter all the time. The movement for Polish independence might win or lose. The Church would be needed either way, to help the victors or the vanquished.
There was something else, too. The Archbishop had seen the might of Russia in a way that many Poles had not. He was not sure the nationalists of the moment were in a good position to win. For one thing, they were divided. The Red faction among them wanted more than freedom, they wanted social reforms that would sweep away the old order and hierarchies of Poland. Feliński didn’t agree with the Reds and neither, he suspected, did many Poles.
And so, the new Archbishop ignored the whisper campaign that said he was a Russian stooge and went about improving Warsaw. Over the next few months, he seemed to be everywhere at once. He went from church to church, trying to understand the particular situation of each one. He helped the poor and created a new orphanage. When priests were caught up in the political storm, he worked to free them from imprisonment. He reorganized the way priests were trained at the seminaries of Warsaw.
Outside the Church, though, history was speeding up. The authorities had come up with a clever scheme to stop the nationalists. They had a list of young troublemakers. In January of 1863, the authorities changed the mechanism for the military draft. Now they produced a new list of people being drafted. It didn’t take the nationalists long to realize that, by strange coincidence, they were the only ones on the list. They were going to be rounded up and sent to die in some war far from home. The British Consul General thought it was a master plan, and reported back to London that this would be the end of the trouble in Warsaw.
Things did not work out as the Consul General had foreseen. Once all the nationalists realized they were on a list, they faced a choice. They could go get killed in foreign wars. Or they could stay at home and fight. Young men began to slip away to the forests to organize themselves into insurgent groups. The uprising of 1863 had begun.
The insurgents began with momentum on their side, attacking where the Russians were weak and fading back into the woods. It helped that many Poles were sympathetic, especially at first. The Russians used trains to move their soldiers, and the telegraph network to communicate, so the insurgents broke the train tracks and pulled down the wires. One of my favourite stories from the early stages of the uprising comes from a time when the Russians laboriously fixed a railroad so they could move their troops. The engineers on their only locomotive were Polish. The engineers volunteered to take the locomotive ahead to scout the tracks and make sure the rails were sturdy enough to hold the cars with all the troops. They detached the locomotive from the train cars and steamed out. But once the locomotive was going, they kept on down the rails and out of sight, waving goodbye to the furious Russian commander.
As the fighting went on it became more bitter. Both sides accused the other of killing prisoners. And as the revolution progressed, the dynamics that Archbishop Feliński had feared began to make themselves felt. The Red faction alienated many Poles, including many who owned property. And the difference between the Russian professional army and insurgents, some of whom were armed with nothing more than scythes and agricultural implements, began to show.
Across Europe, many people were sympathetic to the Polish struggle for independence. The English and the French tried to intervene diplomatically, but with little success. The foreign press managed to make things worse, vastly exaggerating the size of the uprising which convinced would-be ‘humanitarians’ to interfere in ways that got more Poles killed. By October, the insurgents had finally found a general, Romuald Traugutt, but they were already losing.
Many of the nationalists had already written off the Archbishop of Warsaw, because he was not willing to sacrifice access to the Sacraments for the sake of their cause. Now the nationalists were being slowly defeated. But as things got worse and worse in the terrible year of 1863, Archbishop Feliński decided there was one thing he would not mind sacrificing for Poland: himself.
And so it was that the Archbishop wrote a blistering letter to the Russian tsar. He told the tsar that Poland ought to be set free, to determine its own future as a nation. This was, to put it mildly, a break with protocol. The letter was a sensation in Europe, and was republished in Paris. The Russian government was not amused. Archbishop Feliński was arrested and taken to Saint Petersburg. He had served in his position for 16 months.
The January Uprising, as it came to be called, would fail. Hundreds of leaders would be executed. Thousands more would be exiled, sent to Siberia. The Tsar didn’t want the diplomatic fallout that would come from exiling an archbishop that way, but he had something else in mind for Feliński. He would be sent to Yaroslavl, North of Moscow. The advantage of the location was that it had no Catholics.
Feliński might be an archbishop, but in Yaroslavl he would be a bishop with no flock. He would be completely cut off from Poland. He would live under the surveillance of the police, a political prisoner among his enemies.
Or at least, that was the plan. The problem was that, from the time he first became a priest, Feliński had been full of energy. He slowly found a few other exiles. It turned out there were a few Catholics in the region after all. And very slowly, he began to build. In time, he had scraped together enough to build a Catholic church in Yarolslavl, a church which still exists today. And although others might have thought of him as an exile among his enemies, by the time twenty years had passed, Feliński was a beloved figure in Yaroslavl. The locals had a name for the old man: the Holy Polish Bishop.
Archbishop Feliński was in his sixties when news came that his exile was coming to an end. He was going to be allowed to leave the Russian Empire. The Vatican had helped him get free, but he was still politically radioactive. He ended up just outside Russian control, near Krakow in the South of modern Poland, with the title of bishop but only a small chapel to look after. It was a retirement job, in a poor farming community. Feliński had no intention of slowing down. So, once again, the archbishop began to build. Over the next twelve years, he built the first school the town had ever had, as well as a kindergarten. He built a church. He set up a convent. By now he was in his early 70s, but he was sick. He went to Krakow for treatment. It was not successful. Archbishop Feliński would die in exile, and never see Warsaw again.
Over the period of his exile, Saint Zygmunt Feliński thought a lot about what a man owes his nation. He had fought for Poland and stood up for Poland, and it had not been enough. And yet he never lost the certainty that the Polish people should live free, as Poles and with Poles. Rather, it seemed to him that this truth fit into God’s plan, for a wise man could “always see the finger of Providence in the course of historical events”. The life of a nation, like the life of an individual man, has high points and low points. It contains suffering as well as glory. There are moments of punishment but also, always, the hope of redemption:
“If it is true that God has punished us for our national sins, then it must also be true that He will also save us as soon as we correct those sins.” (Brian Porter translation)
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