Most people who know anything about Polish Catholicism can name three saints without thinking. A pope from Wadowice. A nun with a diary. A friar in a bunker. Those names deserve every candle lit for them. They are not the whole cupboard.
Behind them stand a Hungarian princess who laid down a title at Stary Sącz and is still remembered in the salt of Wieliczka; a Dominican who would not leave the Host in a burning city; a one-legged painter who sat down with the homeless of Kraków; a sixteen-year-old girl killed on a forest path in 1914; thirteen farmers at Pratulin who would not let an empire rewrite their liturgy; a nun who carried schools across other people’s countries; an uprising officer who came home from Siberia as a Carmelite; and a priest who founded a congregation to pray for the dead nobody else remembered.
This little book walks through those rooms so that a reader who has never heard the name can still see the door. It is not a catalogue and it is not a souvenir. It is a correction of memory.
Read it if Poland has become, in your mind, a short list. The calendar is larger. So is the mercy.
A Silent Homilies booklet. Written to be read in one or two sittings.