Bl. Eugene Bossilkov

Vincent Bossilkov was born in 1900 in Belene, Bulgaria, into a farming family of the small Latin-rite Catholic minority. At eleven he went to the Passionist fathers' school at Oresh. The Passionists are an order devoted to preaching the Passion of Christ. He studied for ten years in Belgium and the Netherlands, entered the order as Eugene, was ordained in Bulgaria and studied further in Rome. Back home he set aside senior diocesan posts to preach Christ crucified to country people in their own language.

After the Soviet army occupied Bulgaria in 1944, the country became a Stalinist people's republic, hostile to religion, and he became Bishop of Nikopol. He managed one last visit to Pius XII in Rome in 1948. Then came confiscations, expulsions and demands that Catholics join a "national Church" controlled by the regime and reject the Pope. He refused. He was arrested in July 1952, tortured, given a show trial and condemned to death. He was secretly shot in Sofia prison on November 11, 1952, and his body was thrown into a mass grave. In a letter from that time he wrote of the grain of wheat that must die in the earth: "It never weeps, aware of its power to grow and bear a hundredfold."

He said no when it would have been easy to bend, and he wrote about his likely death as a seed's burial, not a defeat.

Eugene Bossilkov was beatified in 1998.

Beatification allows public veneration, usually in a particular region or religious family. Canonization extends it to the whole Church.