Bl. Jan Franciszek Czartoryski

Jan Franciszek Czartoryski was born in 1897 into the Polish princely family of that name. He qualified as an engineer-architect. In 1926 he entered the diocesan seminary in Lviv, and on September 18, 1927 he joined the Dominicans in Kraków, taking the name Michał. As an architect he helped build the Dominican priory at Służew in Warsaw, and in the order he trained young friars as novice master.

When the Warsaw Uprising broke out on August 1, 1944, he happened to be in the Powiśle district for an eye-doctor's appointment. He offered himself as chaplain to the Home Army unit fighting there. When the district fell in early September, he was offered a chance to hide from the Germans dressed as a medical orderly. He refused, and stayed as the only member of the insurgent hospital's staff with a group of badly wounded fighters and civilians in a cellar at the corner of Tamka and Smulikowskiego streets.

On September 6, 1944, half an hour after the hospital staff left, German soldiers shot the wounded in the cellar, and Fr Michał with them. Their bodies were dragged out and burned on a nearby barricade. His remains were never identified. He was beatified in 1999 among the 108 Polish martyrs of the Second World War.

He stayed by choice. He could have left disguised as an orderly; he chose to remain with people who could not be moved and who had no one else to pray with them.

The Church has declared Jan Franciszek Czartoryski Blessed.

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