Artículo de Bernardino Montejano.
THE MARTYRDOM OF THE POLISH ULMA FAMILY
Thanks to the Stork of the Tower, we learn about the martyrdom of
a Polish family whose members were beatified collectively. We are situated in the context of World War II,
in Poland. There live Józef and Wiktoria Ulma with their six children, in
Markowa, a small rural village in southeastern Poland.
We are in 1944; since 1941 the Nazis have implemented a law that
prohibits helping Jews in any way. Despite this law,
punishable by death, Józef and Wiktoria decide to give shelter in their home
to two families of Jewish neighbors from the village, in total, eight people
Jewish sheltered and kept hidden in their house in secrecy for
months.
But some informer denounced them and the eight Jewish refugees
plus all the Ulmas were murdered. In less than an hour
16 people died shot: the entire family died together out of hatred for the faith and out of love for their neighbor, a case practically
unique in the history of the Church. The Church opened the diocesan phase of the
canonization process for the Ulma family in 2003. On September 10,
2023, Cardinal Marcello Semeraro presided over the beatification ceremony in Markowa.
But, if this were not enough, we must go further
to note another even more admirable fact. Sixteen
people were executed, we said: the 8 Jews, the parents and their 6 children add up
to 16. And the beatified are 17. The case is that Wiktoria was
pregnant with her seventh child when the Nazis arrived at her
home. Apparently, her state of pregnancy must have been very advanced
because Wiktoria began to give birth at the moment of her martyrdom to
her last child. When that same day some neighbors exhumed
the family’s corpses, poorly buried hastily in a common
grave dug in the ground, they saw that Wiktoria had begun to
give birth to her child, so they found outside the mother the
head and part of the body of the creature.
And so, along with the admirable family martyrdom, beatified jointly parents and their six children, we admire an even greater prodigy, since the seventh child also received recognition
of martyrdom from the Church in the same beatification ceremony.
The Dicastery for the Causes of the Saints explained
officially that that seventh child was found already
born during the moment of his mother’s martyrdom
(during the birth) and, therefore, considered among the children who received in the ceremony the title of
blessed.
The statement explains it: “At the moment of the murder, Mrs.
Wiktoria Ulma was in an advanced state of pregnancy with her
seventh child. This child was born at the moment of the martyrdom of
his mother… In fact, with the martyrdom of the parents, he received the
baptism of blood and was added to the number of martyred children”.
The little blessed did not have time to live more than a few
seconds outside his mother’s womb, since he immediately received
the reward of his martyr’s crown. “Without ever having uttered a
word, today the little Blessed shouts to the modern world that welcomes,
loves and protects life, especially that of the defenseless and
marginalized, from the moment of conception until natural
death…”
(Homily at the beatification of the Ulma family).
A martyrdom never arises as a mere heroic reaction to
a final and supreme moment of trial. Rather, it is the result of
an entire life of Christian virtues, lived with generosity and
constant dedication. So it was also in the case of the Ulmas.
Józef was a farmer with little education, he only finished
elementary school, but his life of faith was intense. Habitual reader of
the parable of the Good Samaritan
.
His wife, Wiktoria, was in turn
a deeply believing woman, of simple and persevering faith, that
“lifelong faith”, which she knew how to live embodied in the everyday life of
her day-to-day as a wife and mother.
Therefore, the heroic shelter that Józef and Wiktoria gave to the
two Jewish families is a final act of supreme charity
that, in their
case, has
precedents
:
it was common for them to welcome into their home
needy people, orphans and beggars, and to share their harvests
with those in need when there was scarcity. In this way, the help
that the Ulmas gave to the Jews was not an exceptional and
one-time gesture, but the coherent culmination of a life already oriented toward
charity.
The National Socialist regime was an expression of a post-Christian paganism
denounced by the Catholic Church and to which Pope Pius
XI dedicated the encyclical Mit Brennender Sorge in which the temporal elements of society are placed in
their place: “If race or people, if the State or a form of it has in the natural order
a place worthy of respect… whoever uproots them from this scale of
earthly values, raising them to supreme norm of everything, even of the
religious values, deifying them with idolatrous worship, perverts and
falsifies the order created and imposed by God, is far from the
true faith and from a conception of life according to it”.
In the same document it states that “infidelity to Christ the King
is testimony of fidelity to the current regime”; they were other men and
other times. And something very current for China: “It is not lawful for whoever
sings the hymn of fidelity to the earthly homeland to become
a deserter and traitor with infidelity to his God, to his Church and to his
eternal homeland”.
Buenos Aires, February 22, 2026.
Bernardino Montejano