Bernardo Łubieński

Bernard Alojzy Łubieński was born at Guzów, near Warsaw, on 9 December 1846, the second of the twelve children of Count Tomasz Wentworth Łubieński and Adelajda née Łempicka. The family belonged to the old Polish nobility and was deeply Catholic; among his forebears were a Minister of Justice of the Duchy of Warsaw and an industrialist grandfather, and among his relations a bishop. At about six years of age the boy was entrusted to his father's pious kinsfolk, Maria and Feliks Szymanowski, who had lately buried an infant son, and he was brought up with their boy Teodor, being schooled at home in Warsaw and at Cygów.

Because of the Russian occupation and the persecution of Catholic life in Poland, his parents resolved to send him abroad. In the autumn of 1858, aged eleven, Bernard and his elder brother Henryk crossed to England and entered Ushaw College in County Durham. He was no brilliant scholar, and left without his certificate; an attempt to enter the Society of Jesus after a retreat at Manresa House, Roehampton, in 1864 ended in his application being refused. But God had already sown the priestly vocation in him. In that same year 1864, and against the disapproval of his father and of his uncle the bishop, he began his postulancy with the Redemptorists, entering their novitiate at Bishop Eton near Liverpool. He made his solemn profession on 7 May 1866, pursued his philosophical and theological studies in England and in the Netherlands, and was ordained a priest at Aachen in Germany on 29 December 1870.

The following year he was assigned to Clapham in London, where he remained eleven years. There he laboured among the Polish exiles in the capital, preached to English Catholics and to those still outside the Church in the years after Catholic emancipation, and served his province as chronicler, archivist, bursar, and secretary to the Provincial, Father Robert Aston Coffin. He trained in mission work at Perth in Scotland, visited Ireland, and gave himself to the ordinary care of souls wherever he was sent.

His heart, however, was drawn homeward. The Redemptorists had been driven out of the Duchy of Warsaw in 1809, and Poland, torn among three occupying powers, was without them. On a visit to his homeland in 1879 he met the Austrian Provincial, and with Father Coffin's encouragement the plan was formed to bring the Congregation back. A former Dominican monastery was purchased at Mościska in the diocese of Przemyśl, and in 1883 — having wound up his affairs in London and having twice been received in audience by Pope Leo XIII on the way — Father Bernard returned to Poland after a quarter of a century abroad, first to Kraków and then to Mościska.

Two years later, in 1885, an illness struck him and left his legs permanently paralysed. He went to Austria for treatment, and came back lame for life. He was offered the see of Mohilev and declined it, pleading his poor health and his own attraction to missions, retreats, and writing; he loved the simple, hidden life of the Curé of Ars. From 1886 he resumed his apostolate, and the crippled missionary became one of the most sought-after preachers in the Polish lands, giving parish missions and courses of spiritual exercises in Poland, England, and Germany. From 1894 to 1903 he was superior at Mościska, working also for the foundation of new Redemptorist houses throughout the country. In the communities of Warsaw, Kraków, and Mościska he devoted himself to the young, published books, directed retreats, preached, and above all sat long in the confessional, seeking the true conversion of his penitents rather than a mere formality of absolution. By the end of his life he is said to have made 244 missionary journeys across all three partitions of Poland, to have preached 508 retreats, and to have seen fifty-four churches restored and two newly built. As the descendant of a family that had given Primates to Poland, he is remembered as having spiritually formed four successive future Primates.

In 1926 he was sent once more to the community in Warsaw, where his pastoral labours continued undiminished. In 1928 he preached the spiritual exercises to the whole Polish episcopate, and the following year, infirm as he was, he was named Master of the "second novitiate" for his younger brethren. He embodied the Redemptorist charism, seeking God alone and announcing His word for the salvation of souls. He was a man of faith, most devoted to the Most Holy Redeemer, to the Eucharist, to the Cross, and to the Blessed Virgin Mother of Perpetual Help, as well as to the saints, and especially to Saint Alphonsus. He accepted with fortitude the grave and permanent limitations of his body, which never prevented him from fulfilling his priestly mission, and he deliberately offered his physical sufferings for the good of the Church, of the Redemptorists, and of the people of God. Charity toward God pervaded his whole person and work, and he reserved a particular tenderness for the abandoned and the needy; his life of mortification and poverty was remarked by all who knew him.

He died in Warsaw on 10 September 1933, at the age of eighty-six, and those closest to him judged that he had died in the odour of sanctity. In 1982 his remains were transferred to the Redemptorist church in Warsaw so that the faithful might venerate them more easily. His Redemptorist brethren opened the cause of beatification on 2 June 1961; the diocesan inquiry in the Archdiocese of Warsaw closed on 24 November 1965 after hearing forty-four witnesses, its validity was decreed on 30 March 1998, and the Positio was submitted at the end of January 2005. On 6 March 2018 Pope Francis promulgated the decree recognising that Bernard Łubieński had practised the Christian virtues to a heroic degree, and he is honoured as Venerable. His memory is kept on 10 September.

May Venerable Bernard Łubieński obtain for us the grace to accept whatever weakness God permits and to offer it, as he did, for the salvation of souls.