Stephen Pongrácz was born in 1582, a scion of the Hungarian nobility, in the castle of Alvincz in Transylvania (Vințu de Jos, in present-day Romania). He received his classical education in his native land and then at the Jesuit college of Cluj, where the sons of noble houses were formed in letters and in piety. There the young nobleman discovered that the true greatness of his name lay not in arms or estates but in the service of Jesus Christ, and in 1602 he entered the novitiate of the Society of Jesus at Brno.
His long Jesuit formation carried him across Central Europe: philosophy at Prague, further study and teaching in the Austrian lands — tradition records a year at Ljubljana and two years teaching at the college of Klagenfurt — and then theology at Graz in Styria, where he was ordained a priest in 1615. He was sent as prefect of studies to the college of Humenné in the Kingdom of Hungary (today in Slovakia), and above all as a preacher, for his gift was the word: patient, gentle, persuasive, spoken in a region where Catholics were a small and often frightened minority.
Those were bitter years. Upper Hungary was a land of violent religious and ethnic conflict, and the Catholic remnant lived under pressure from an overwhelming Calvinist majority. In 1619 Father Pongrácz was sent to Kassa (Košice) as chaplain to the imperial Hungarian troops and to the few Hungarian Catholic civilians of the city. He knew what awaited him: his very ministry, quiet as it was, provoked the anger of the city's Calvinist leaders. When Gábor Bethlen, the Calvinist prince of Transylvania, began his war against the Emperor at the beginning of 1619 — the Jesuits having already been expelled from Bohemia and Moravia and taken refuge in Austria, Poland and Hungary — the storm broke. Tradition relates that Stephen was making his spiritual exercises in a village near Sáros with the Croatian priest Marko Krizin when word came of the army's violence against the Catholics of Kassa; instead of fleeing, he hurried back to the city with Marko and his Jesuit brother Melchior Grodziecki, to stand by the little flock in danger.
In September the army of George I Rákóczi laid siege to Košice. The Catholic governor was betrayed by his own mercenaries, and the Calvinist population handed him over to Rákóczi together with the three priests who were his guests: it was 5 September 1619. The head of the municipal council, Reyner, urged on by the Calvinist preacher Alvinczi, demanded the death of every Catholic in the city. The majority refused so total a slaughter — but the condemnation of the three priests satisfied everyone. The three were shut up, left for days without bread or water, and told to renounce what their captors called "the religion of the tyrants," the Catholic faith of the Habsburgs.
On the night of 7 September the torture began, designed to break their spirits and force them to abjure. Rákóczi's soldiers carried it out in the presence of Alvinczi and Reyner. Marko Krizin was beheaded after the first torments; a little later Melchior Grodziecki was beheaded as well. Stephen Pongrácz had to suffer longest. He was mutilated, hung head downward, and burned with torches until his entrails were exposed. Neither hunger nor the tortures of the wheel and of fire could draw from him a single word of denial. Believed dead, he was thrown the next morning with the bodies of his companions into a drainage pit — and there, the sources relate, he lived on some twenty hours, praying the whole time, until he died on 8 September 1619. He was thirty-seven years old.
The murder of these gentle men appalled even the Protestant population of Košice; everyone knew the priests' mildness and knew they had deserved nothing of the kind, and the news of their martyrdom spread through the country like fire. Yet funerals were forbidden, and only after six months, when pleas came from every side, were the bodies given honourable burial. The relics were later translated toward Trnava, and today rest in the church of the Ursulines there.
Soon after the martyrdom Cardinal Péter Pázmány — who years before had ordained Marko Krizin — opened the canonical process, and a formal petition was laid before Pope Urban VIII asking that public veneration be allowed. The cause moved slowly through the centuries until Pope Pius X beatified the three Martyrs of Košice on 15 January 1905. On 2 July 1995, during his pastoral visit to Slovakia, Pope John Paul II canonized them at Košice itself, singing the Te Deum in the very city that had seen their blood shed, and holding them up as men who, amid the murderous violence of the seventeenth century, sacrificed their lives for the cause of Christ and the Gospel. Their memorial is kept on 7 September, and the Jesuit calendar honours them again among the martyrs of the Reformation era in Europe on 19 January.
Saint Stephen Pongrácz teaches that love of neighbour is proved by staying: he returned to a hostile city when he could have remained safely away, because Catholics there had no priest. His charity was disarming even to his enemies, and his fortitude was total — hunger, fire and the wheel could not purchase one syllable of apostasy, and his last strength was spent not in cursing his torturers but in prayer.
May Saint Stephen Pongrácz obtain for us the courage to remain where God has placed us, and grace today to answer hostility with gentleness and unwavering fidelity to the faith.
