It-Tnax -il Appostlu Is-Sena tal-Fidi A Martyr's Letter Extraordinary ...

39-year-old tailor named Jan Tyranowski who
offered to take charge of the Living Rosary.
The Salesians, recognizing “his gifts of good
sense, piety, and apostolic zeal” (ANS),
entrusted the pastoral care of the young men
and women to him. This unpretentious and
devout man was steeped in the spirituality of
the Carmelite mystics, especially St. John of
the Cross and St. Teresa of Avila.
When the Gestapo arrested Fr. Jan Swierc,
St. Stanislaus Kostka’s pastor, and 11 other
Salesians from the parish and the Salesian
seminary on Tyniecka St. on May 23, 1941, the
parish was left with only one elderly priest
and the provincial, Fr. Adam Cieslar. Within
12 months Fr. Swierc and 7 others had been
killed at Auschwitz. One, Fr. Joseph Kowalski,
is among 108 Polish martyrs of the Nazis
beatified in 1999, including 5 young leaders
of the Salesian youth centre in Poznan—
evidence of just how dangerous youth
gatherings were, during the occupation, and
for that matter, the underground seminary
program that Archbishop Sapieha of Krakow
organized in the fall of 1942 and in which
Hajja Salesjana
Karol enrolled (cf. G&M 12-13).
During his last visit to Poland, John Paul
II stopped in front of St. Stanislaus Church
on August 17, 2002,
and declared: “I
always remember
those Salesians who
were taken away
from this parish to
the concentration
camp.... I also
remember Mr. Jan
Tyranowski’s Living
Rosary...” (ANS). He
was a special “person from whom I received
much during that period” (G&M 23); from this
spiritual mentor Karol “learned the basic
methods of self-formation which would later
be confirmed and developed in the seminary
program. Tyranowski…helped me to read the
works of Saint John of the Cross and Saint
Teresa of Avila, something uncommon for a
person my age” (G&M 24). Many of the Living
Rosary Group eventually became priests or
religious.
After his ordination on Nov. 1, 1946, Fr.
Wojtyla returned to St. Stanislaus on Nov.
3 to celebrate one of his “first Masses” as
a priest, “with a beaming Jan Tyranowski
present” (Szulc, p. 133).
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