Andrzej Piotrowski reflects on Fr Konstantin Budkiewicz, 100 years after his murder.
With his balding pate, pince-nez spectacles and boy-like face, Konstantin Budkiewicz may not look much like a hero, and even less a martyr who shed his blood for Christ. And yet 100 years ago this month he met his terrible fate at the hands of the Soviet authorities as part of their violent persecution of the Catholic Church in Russia. But such was the fortitude of his witness that his cause for canonisation was opened in 2003, in the closing years of the pontificate of his fellow Pole Pope John Paul II.
Ordained in 1893, after further studies Budkiewicz became an assistant priest and then parish priest of St Catherine’s parish on Nevsky Prospect in St Petersburg – the city’s main street. There he served the enormous Polish community that had settled there, and after the Bolsheviks seized power and eliminated Tsar Nicholas II and his immediate family, he worked to protect his parish children from the anti-Polish and anti-Catholic propaganda that they encountered in the new public school system.
Budkiewicz was a thorn in the side of the Communists, with their new Godless doctrine of the State, which he rejected. As one of his parishioners later recalled, he continued to preach that “God is love, and it is given to us to be his true children”. In all this he worked closely with Archbishop Jan Cieplak. After Lenin began to suffer a series of strokes (which would end with his death in 1924) the local Bolshevik leader, Grigory Zinoviev, determined to rid St Petersburg – Petrograd – of Catholics once and for all.
Along with the Byzantine exarch Leonid Feodorov, 14 priests and one layman, Cieplak and Budkiewicz were arrested and sent to Moscow. The show-trial that followed ran along the usual lines: the “judges” were not required to have any legal experience, but needed only revolutionary credentials. “The Catholic Church has always exploited the working classes,” cried the prosecutor. “All the Jesuitical duplicity with which you have defended yourself will not save you … No Pope in the Vatican can save you now!” Cieplak and Budkiewicz were both sentenced to death, while Feodorov and the others were sent to the gulag. The news caused consternation across Europe and in the United States: international representations were made to try to save the two men, not least by Pope Pius XI himself.
As a result Archbishop Cieplak’s sentence was commuted to 10 years in prison, although he was in fact released and deported to Poland in 1924; he died in New York two years later. There was no mercy for Budkiewicz.
At Mass at St Peter’s Basilica on Easter Sunday 1923, the pope prayed fervently for Budkiewicz’s release. But by then he was already dead, although the news did not arrive in Rome until a few days later. His final moments were first described in 1924 by Francis McCullagh in The Bolshevik Persecution of Christianity. More recently, in 2001, Fr Christopher Zugger, a Byzantine Catholic priest in the United States, published The Forgotten: Catholics in the Soviet Empire from Lenin through Stalin.
They have not quite been forgotten. Leonid Feodorov was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 2001, during his visit to Ukraine, and Jan Cieplak’s cause was opened in 1952. Konstantin Budkiewicz followed in 2003. Fr Zugger records the memories of his fellow inmate Fr Francis Rutkowski: “Some secular prisoners who were with us, Russians and non-Catholics … wondered with great admiration at him because he was so peaceful; they called him happy because he suffered and died for a good cause.”
The death of Mgr Budkiewicz
The Papal Mission had been all-owed to send packets of food to each of the prisoners. Next day the chocolate addressed to Mgr Budkiewicz was returned, broken as if by a hammer, and by another route came to a Russian friend a scribbled message: “Budkiewicz has been taken away from us.” On April 3 the Pravda published the following curt announcaement: “On March 31 the death sentence was carried out on Mgr Bud-kiewicz, who was sentenc-ed in connection with the trial of the Catholic counter-revolutionaries.
No details of the martyr’s last moments have so far been published. The Reds still refuse to give the hour and place of the murder, or to say where the corpse has been buried.
From a good source, however, I have obtained the following information: Mgr Budkiewicz was conveyed to No 11, Bolshoï Lubyanka on the night of Good Friday [in fact it was a day later, on Easter Eve] and was immediately made to descend into one of the cellars. The method by which the murder was carried out was deliberately arranged with the object of making the martyr die in as undignified manner as possible.
He was stripped naked and made to traverse a dark corridor leading to another cellar, where an experienced executioner was awaiting him. On reaching the end of this corridor, Mgr Budkiew-icz found himself in a room that was suddenly lit up by a powerful electric light that made the unfort-unate priest blink and stagger back awkwardly. Before he had recovered himself, the executioner had shot him through the back of the head; and the bullet, coming out in the centre of the face, had rendered it unrecognisable.
Having satisfied themselves that their victim was dead, the Bolsheviks wrapped the body in a cloth and carried it into a motor-lorry which was in waiting. This motor-lorry brought it to Sokolniki, a summer resort near Moscow, where it was buried with the bodies of nine bandits which had been awaiting internment.
About a week afterwards a Requiem Mass was said for the repose of Mgr Budkiewicz’s soul in the Church of Ss Peter and Paul at Moscow. The celebrant was the young vice-rector, the rector having been arrested during the course of the Cieplak trial. In the centre of the church a large black catafalque had been erected, and among the congregation was a member of the British Mission, representing Great Britain officially at this service in honour of a man whom the Soviet Government had executed as a criminal and a spy. Outside the church, during the service, stood the motor-car of the mission, flying the British flag.
Inside, before a statue of St Peter, hung another flag, whereon, in letters of gold which reflected the death-lights ranged around the empty coffin, was embroider-ed Christ’s tremendous prophecy: “Thou art Peter, and on this rock I will build my Church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” And in the mournful singing of the choir there was a note of triumph and of hope.
From The Bolshevik Persecution of Christianity by Francis McCullagh (1924).
This page is available to subscribers. Click here to sign in or get access.
Areas of Catholic Herald business are still recovering post-pandemic.
However, we are reaching out to the Catholic community and readership, that has been so loyal to the Catholic Herald. Please join us on our 135 year mission by supporting us.
We are raising £250,000 to safeguard the Herald as a world-leading voice in Catholic journalism and teaching.
We have been a bold and influential voice in the church since 1888, standing up for traditional Catholic culture and values. Please consider donating.