20th-Century Mystic Wanda Boniszewska Bore the Stigmata for Priests| National Catholic Register

The 20th-century Polish nun bore the stigmata and received visions calling her to suffer for the sanctification of priests. Her cause for beatification is now open.

Wanda Boniszewska was a Polish nun, a member of the Congregation of the Sisters of the Holy Angels, who died March 2, 2003. The process for her beatification was launched by the Archdiocese of Warsaw in 2020.

She was born in 1907 in Nowa Kamionka, a village then in Poland, now in Belarus, near the town of Navahrudak (Nowogródek). In 1925, she entered the Congregation of the Angels in Vilnius (Wilno), now-Lithuania/then-Poland. 

What is distinctive about her? Two things.

Sister Wanda was said to have had mystical visions, which she wrote down. She also was said to have borne for some period of her life (at least in the 1930s) stigmata — wounds in her hands, feet and side, and marks of scourging. They manifested themselves irregularly, but usually on Thursdays and Fridays, and particularly during Lent.

In her visions, Sister Wanda understood her suffering and wounds to be for the purification and salvation of priests. The writings speak of the need of atoning suffering for priests who treated their work of saving others too cursorily or who were in despair. She regularly wrote of Our Lord’s desire for priests to realize their sublime vocation as alter Christus.

The second phase of Sister Wanda’s sufferings began in the 1940s. The area where she was born was seized from Poland by the Soviet Union as part of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact, when Russia was Nazi Germany’s ally. The next year Lithuania (including Vilnius, which until World War II was part of Poland) was also occupied by the USSR under the terms of the Pact. 

As a nun and as a Pole, Sister Wanda was deemed suspect by the Soviet authorities, subject to constant investigation. In 1950, she was arrested and also charged as a Vatican agent, sentenced to 10 years in a labor camp in the Urals. She also left behind a written account of her spiritual experiences as a prisoner of the Russian Gulag.

Stalin’s death in 1956 produced a limited thaw in Soviet repression and, after six years in the camp, Sister Wanda was released to the vicinity of Moscow. As a Pole, she was then repatriated by the Soviets to their Polish satellite state. She lived out the rest of her years in various homes of her congregation until she died in 2003 in Konstancin-Jeziorna, just outside Warsaw, where she is buried.

My interest in making Sister Wanda known to the wider world comes from a variety of experiences.

First, my impression is that the place where she was born, near today’s Navahrudak in Belarus, produced its fair share of 20th-century saints. I visited there in 2003 and prayed at the grave of the “martyrs of Nowogródek,” 10 sisters buried in St. Michael’s Church. At the height of German occupation, as people were being rounded up and killed, the sisters offered themselves in prayer to substitute for these men. Soon afterward, they were rounded up for questioning one Saturday night in late July 1943 by the local Gestapo, then taken the next morning into the forest, shot, and buried in a mass grave.

Two things: After their execution, the pace of persecution slackened. And one of the nuns, Sister Józefa Chrobot, may have found her mystical promise fulfilled. She broke off her engagement and went to today’s Belarus, where she joined a religious order because she felt God tell her, “Your beloved waits for you there and will give you a red dress for your wedding present.” When the nuns’ bodies were exhumed, it was clear that Sister Józefa had fallen into the grave in such a way that the blood of all the sisters had poured upon her. The wedding feast of the Lamb is unexpected. 

Second, I came to know Sister Wanda’s story purely by accident. I picked up a book off a rack in a parish I rarely attended one Sunday after her death, telling her story. I was struck by the realization that a modern stigmatic lived about 10 miles from me. I was also struck by seeing the name of the author of the book, Father Jan Pryszmont.

I knew Father Pryszmont intellectually, as a moral theologian I had studied. From what I had read, I knew he was a serious theologian and did not suspect he would be inclined toward flights of fantasy. That said, I never knew this side of him nor that he lived about five miles from me. I went to visit him. We talked and he showed me his original typed scripts of Sister Wanda’s diaries, about 600 pages of manuscripts. 

Finally, I realized — and remain convinced — of the prescient timeliness of Sister Wanda’s vocation. Her story came to my attention not long after the first wave of priestly sexual abuse — the Boston crisis — hit American public attention. Since then, the second wave — the McCarrick scandal and subsequent drip-drip-drip of clerical predation and episcopal coverup — seems even to have outstripped the filth of the first. It convinces me that the kind of sacrificial and atoning suffering that Sister Wanda (and, from what I’ve heard, other souls) endured for clerical sanctity could not have been their psychological hangups but come from a far different place: as heaven’s response to hell’s attack.

So, as the investigatory process for Sister Wanda gets underway, I suggest the value of invoking her intercession to help purify our Church, to make her in her priests “a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless” (Ephesians 5:27).