Władysław Błądziński was born in 1908 — 6 July according to the Polish accounts of his life — in the village of Myślatycze in the district of Mościska, then in Poland and today in Ukraine. He grew up in the ordinary hardship of a Galician farming countryside, and while still a boy he was drawn to the young Polish congregation founded to gather in and educate abandoned children, the Congregation of St Michael the Archangel, the Michaelites, born of the charity of Blessed Bronisław Markiewicz.
At the age of sixteen he entered the Congregation, and on 12 December 1926 he made his religious vows, binding himself to a life whose watchword was the cry of the Archangel: who is like God? He then went on to philosophical and theological studies in the Major Seminary of Przemyśl, and at their completion was ordained a priest on 26 June 1938 — barely a year before the German invasion would shatter his country.
His first and only assignment as a priest was the Michaelite educational institute at Pawlikowice near Wieliczka, where he served as an educator of poor youth. There he gave himself to boys who had little else in the world: teaching them, forming them in faith and work, standing to them as a father. It was hidden, patient, unglamorous charity, and it was exactly the charity that would prove, a few years later, to be strong enough to die for.
When the German occupation closed Polish schools and made the education of the young a crime, Father Władysław organized a secret gymnasium and lyceum for the clerics and students in his care. He knew what the risk was. He continued anyway, believing that the minds and souls of the young could not be surrendered to the occupier. On 25 April 1944 the clandestine school was discovered and he was arrested.
Under interrogation he was pressed to sign depositions that would have incriminated his religious superior. He refused. He took the entire "guilt" upon himself, choosing to bear alone the punishment that would otherwise have fallen on another — a priest's act of substitution, quietly imitating the Master who said that no one has greater love than to lay down his life for his friends. From the Montelupich prison in Kraków he was deported to the German concentration camp of Gross-Rosen.
At Gross-Rosen he was set to exhausting labour in the stone quarry, the work that broke and killed so many. The witnesses who survived remembered him: he always had a word of consolation for his fellow prisoners, he shared his own scrap of a food ration with the hungrier, and in defiance of a strict prohibition punishable by death he continued to exercise his priestly ministry among them. What struck them most was his peace. In that place he remained calm and full of confidence in God and in the Most Holy Mother.
About 8 September 1944, the feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, his life was ended when a German guard pushed him over the edge of the quarry into the abyss. He was thirty-six years old, a priest for six years. His body was never returned to his brethren; his grave is the camp of Gross-Rosen.
The memory of him was kept by those who had known him in the institute and in the camp, and the Church gathered his witness with that of the other Polish priests, religious and lay faithful who had been murdered under the German occupation. Pope John Paul II beatified him in Warsaw on 13 June 1999, in the group of 108 Polish Martyrs of the Second World War. His feast is kept on 8 September, the day of his death and of Our Lady's Nativity — the Mother in whom he trusted to the last.
May Blessed Władysław Błądziński obtain for us his courage to take the blame rather than betray another, and let us practise today one concrete act of charity that costs us something of our own bread.
