It’s a rare occasion when the word “unprecedented” can be used for a Church whose history extends over two millennia. Yet something unprecedented happened in the Polish village of Markowa on September 10, when an entire family, including their unborn child, was beatified. It seems not quite right to refer to the new blesseds by the traditional formula, “Blessed Józef and Wiktoria Ulma and Companions,” the “companions” in question being the Ulmas’ six living children and their unborn child. Let’s instead think about the Blessed Ulma Family and what they might mean for us.
Beginning in late 1942, Józef and Wiktoria Ulma sheltered eight Jews in the attic of their wooden farmhouse: a capital crime during the German Occupation of Poland in World War II. On March 24, 1944, German gendarmes came to the house, murdered the Jews, and then shot Józef and Viktoria, who was late in her pregnancy. The terrified children – Stanisława (8), Barbara (6), Władysław (5), Franciszek (4), Antoni (3), and Maria (1½) – were then gunned down. The bodies were dumped in a pit and later reburied in the local church cemetery.
Visiting the nearby Museum of Poles Saving Jews in World War II this past July 23 and praying at the Ulma family tomb near their parish church of St. Dorothy, lessons for 21st-century Catholicism came to mind.
The first involves the sources of Christian heroism. While both Józef and Wiktoria Ulma were well-educated by the mid-20th century standards of rural Poland, they were not theological sophisticates. They read the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10.25-37) not as a general injunction to love of neighbor that could be adapted to circumstances but as a specific instruction from Christ the Lord – if you encounter people in distress, you must help them, irrespective of their ethnic or religious identity and regardless of the cost.
Some contemporary Catholic leaders find such a literal reading of the Lord’s words uncomfortable; they suggest that the moral code that follows from such biblical “fundamentalism” is “rigid,” “ideological,” and insufficiently pastoral. Yet the same “rigid” sense of biblically-grounded moral obligation that animated the Ulmas’ heroic sheltering of persecuted Jews led Father Maximilian Kolbe to offer his life in the starvation bunker at Auschwitz in exchange for that of a condemned prisoner, just as it led Mother Teresa to spend out her life in service to the poorest of the poor, whom she regarded as “Jesus in his most distressing disguise;” just as it led U.S. Navy chaplain Father Vincent Capodanno to sacrifice his life bringing comfort to wounded and dying Marines in Vietnam. Neither the Ulmas, Father Kolbe, Mother Teresa, nor Father Capodanno indulged in the “proportionalist” weighing of moral obligations that have returned to favor during the present pontificate. They lived the parable of the Good Samaritan literally—those who find that “rigid” and “ideological” should think again.
The second lesson involves the nature of martyrdom, which the death of St. Maximilian Kolbe and the drama of the Blessed Ulma Family invite the 21st-century Church to reconsider.
Traditionally, a “martyr” was someone killed in odium fidei [in hatred of the faith]. Did Kolbe’s self-sacrifice satisfy this definition, such that he was a “martyr” as well as a confessor of the faith? Were the Ulmas’ murderers motivated by odium fidei? The hybrid category “martyr of charity” has come into vogue in recent decades since Pope Paul VI used it of Kolbe. But it seems that Kolbe’s sacrifice, and that of the Ulmas, satisfies while developing the traditional definition.
Certain modern political theories teach a radical contempt for the dignity and value of human life, or at least the dignity and value of some human lives. That was certainly the case with German National Socialism: to the Nazis, Jews and the Poles who sheltered them were lower life forms to be exterminated. Is that not hatred of the biblically informed faith that, in Genesis 1.26, teaches that every human being is created, like Adam and Eve, in the divine image and likeness? Is not hatred of those made in God’s image and likeness hatred of God? And is not odium Dei a form of odium fidei?
The Synod that opens next month bids us to be a Church of “communion, participation, and mission.” The Blessed Ulma Family lived in communion with the persecuted Jews of Subcarpathian Poland and participated in the Mystery of the Cross by living the mission of the Good Samaritan, to which they were called in Baptism. May their example inspire Synod-2023 to a similarly radical embrace of the Catholic faith.
If you value the news and views Catholic World Report provides, please consider donating to support our efforts. Your contribution will help us continue to make CWR available to all readers worldwide for free, without a subscription. Thank you for your generosity!
Click here for more information on donating to CWR. Click here to sign up for our newsletter.
Yes, and we read: “you encounter people in distress, you must help them…” and about “the ‘proportionalist’ weighing of moral obligations that have returned to favor during the present pontificate,” and advice for “Synod-2023 [toward] a similarly radical embrace of the Catholic faith.” On these three key points, a question and two supportive comments:
FIRST, with instant communication, what to do when this “encounter” directly and simultaneously includes every grief in the world associated with the fallen and vulnerable human condition?
SECOND, yes, the Church has become an uncertain and even mute trumpet, with “proportionalism” displacing the innate natural law and moral absolutes as affirmed in the Catechism AND fully incorporated into the Magisterium by (the silenced) Veritatis Splendor (see below).
THIRD, about the Synod, which ITSELF, in addition to hijacking the specific nature and meaning of a “synod of bishops” (while heroically embracing nearly every “concern” and “tension”) is actually a “rigid” and “ideological” throwback (!) to Medieval casuistry…
Medieval canonists distinguished between divine law and natural law, SUCH THAT divine law could not be touched while natural law could be “compromised” according to institutions of long standing “custom” (or as Hollerich says today about the customary homosexual lifestyle: a needed accommodation in “attitude” if not doctrine?).
In this way, canonists accommodated the enslavement those captured in battle, a customary practice (and a violation of natural law), while AT THE SAME TIME affirming divine law regarding the innate liberty of the human person (Walter Ullmann, “Medieval Papalism: The Political Theories of the Medieval Canonists,” 1949).
ABOUT SYNODALITY. Done correctly, the Synod as now practiced should at least be framed as something other than a “synod” (a focus-group call to action?). But, with regard to omnibus “encounter,” why fail to mention modernday human slavery (reported to be 50 million persons on any given day) or, at least, sexual slavery and trafficking, neither of which merits a single mention in the Instrumentum Laboris?
Unlike Medieval times, the natural law and moral absolutes now CANNOT be compromised or harmonized. Two citations from the Magisterium: “This is the first time, in fact, that the Magisterium [!] of the Church has set forth in detail the fundamental elements of this [‘natural law,’ ‘moral’!] teaching, and presented the principles for the pastoral discernment necessary in practical and cultural situations which are complex and even crucial” (Veritatis Splendor, n. 115). AND, “The Church is no way [!] the author or the arbiter of this [‘moral’] norm” (n. 95).
Very much as in Medieval times, “In ironic contrast to the canonist the civilian thinks that theology stands on a level higher than that of his civil knowledge. The civilian modestly looks up to theology—the canonist looks down [!] on it” (Ullmann).
Synodalists, Hollerich and now Fernandez, why so amnesiac, “rigid,” and “backwardist”?
Amen to the witness given by the Ulmas, and the martyrs named in the opening paragraph.
May the Holy Spirit, who filled them and taught them The Way, guide all on The Way, who desire to walk with Jesus.
Excellent article and commentary!
Glad to finally see an oblique reference to Francis by Weigel, although not by name, and with a less than complete description of what ideology implies. The Nazis were not merely haters of “some people”. Their self-hatred encompassed the whole of humanity, as all ideologies do.
It requires bend over backwards charity towards Francis to think of him as simply not able to ascertain the self-evident, with frequency. Religion can never be ideological. Secular political philosophy always is. Rights and obligations are divine endowments, not political inventions, which is why there can never be “new truth” from secular saviors instituting global government or prelates instituting an Orwellian Catholicism.
It is a refreshing to see Weigel rebuke Francis reminding us that responding to God’s holy prompting by anyone, consciously or not, is never rigid fidelity or ideologically doctrinal but living the very virtues and heroics that doctrines, precisely, clearly define—what only a cynic or a foolish mind needing reflection would call rigid—call us to live.
Thank you. You remind us that despite everything, we have the witness of our heroes, the saints.