2. Blessed Honorat of Biała
Capuchin priest (1829-1916
Honoratus, born Wenceslaw
Kozminski, was born at Biala
Podlaska on 16thOctober
1829. He was the son of
Stefan Kozminski and
Aleksandra Kahlowa and at
baptism, was given the name
of Wenceslaus.
3. • At home he received a fine Christian
formation. After completing primary
school in his home town he attended
grammar school in Plock. In 1845 he
enrolled in the School of Fine Arts in
Warsaw. Influenced by Enlightenment
currents and an atheistic environment he
lost faith.
• In 1846, suspected of belonging to a
political organization, he was jailed in
Warsaw by the Tsarist police.
4. • Here he contracted typhus and lived
under the constant fear of capital
punishment until 27 March 1847 when,
against all odds, he was released.
• Finally he returned to the faith on the
Feast day of the Assumption (15 August
1846).
• After battling with himself for having to
leave his infirm mother, on 21
December 1848 he entered the
Capuchin novitiate at Lubartów.
5. • In 1846 he underwent a religious crisis and
emerged from it with the desire to join the
Capuchin Order in Warsaw.
6. • Finally he was ordained priest on 27
December 1852.
• He was a professor of sacred
eloquence and theology for the
Capuchin cleric students, penitentiary
of converted heretics, provincial
Definitor, guardian in the friary of
Warsaw for a year.
• For the twenty years between 1895
and 1916, he was general commissary
of the Capuchins under Russian
domination.
7. • He did so and was ordained a priest
on 27th December 1852.
• He devoted himself to an intense
pastoral activity, founding 26
Religious Institutes, 18 of which still
exist today.
8. • Above all he was a preacher and
gifted spiritual directed since the
early days of his priesthood when,
in the years 1854 to 1864 we find
him busy preaching continuously in
the churches of Warsaw.
• Given the task of the direction of
Franciscan tertiaries, he did not
limit himself only to promote their
devotional life, but sought to
involve them in energetic social and
charitable works.
9. • In 1855, he helped Blessed Mary
Angela Truszkowska establish the
Felician Sisters.
• He served as guardian in a Warsaw
friary where he dedicated his
energies to preaching, giving spiritual
direction, and to hearing confessions.
Honoratus worked tirelessly with the
Secular Franciscan Order.
10. • He went on and founded 26
male and female religious
congregations, whose
members took vows but wore
no religious habit and did not
live in the community..
11. • At this time he met Sofia
Truszkowska (Blessed Angela
Maria) was her spiritual guide and
took care of the so called “living
rosary.”
• Far from being satisfied with
forming groups of men and women
dedicated to the recitation of the
rosary, he enthused them to
undertake a vast charitable activity.
12. • After the insurrection against the Russians in
January 1863 and its disastrous outcome, and
with religious Orders condemned to
extinction, Bl. Honorat was first confined to
the friary of Zakroczym where he remained
until 1892. Then he went to the friary of
Nowe-Miasto.
• He sought to save the Catholic faith and
patriotic spirit of his people in the face of
Tsarist persecution that sought to separate
the Church in Poland from the Church in
Rome, and have it part of the Orthodox
Church.
13. • The means he chose to accomplish
this bold plan were devotion to Our
Lady and the Franciscan Third Order
where, with the permission of the
Minister General of the Capuchins,
he carried out radical reform.
• Civil law forbad apostolic work and
the reception of novices, thus
condemning religious to extinction.
14. • And so anyone who wished to become a
religious was obliged to leave the country to
do so. Br. Honorat always advised against
expatriation to those who asked his counsel.
Instead he proposed that they live the
evangelical counsels in the spirit of the
Franciscan Third Order, and so continue to
lead a hidden and ostensibly ordinary life,
without habit, friary or convent. In the
meantime the person prayed and studied the
gospel from which to draw spirit and so lead
a form of religious life.
15. • His model was the Holy Family of
Nazareth. Central is the hidden life
which he strove to foster in the world
and prescribe in precise terms in all the
constitutions and directories that he lay
down for the institutes that he founded.
The hidden life for him is not just a
contingent requisite imposed by the
socio-political conditions in Poland at
the time. Rather he recognised it as a
gospel principle.
16. • He wrote, “These congregations observe a
life hidden from the eyes of the world. This
mode of religious life is not suggested only by
motives of prudence or necessity, but from
the commitment to imitate the hidden life of
the Virgin Mary. This form of life is not
subject to happenings in external social and
political circumstances.
• Each person chooses it because it is desirable
in itself, since it allows greater glory for God,
as well easier spiritual progress and a surer
salvation.”
17. • Numerous institutes took shape within
his confessional at Zakroczym. Each of
these institutes had to reach a particular
group: intellectuals, the young, office
workers, factory workers, domestic
workers, children, the sick, artisans,
farmers; in places and with activities
that could benefit one’s neighbour and
influence a vast circle of people such as
in taverns, restaurants, bookshops,
libraries, schools, tailors or other shops.
18. To spread the influence of the
apostolate of his religious, he wanted
each congregation to be formed by
three different categories of members.
The first category was composed of
religious living in common and who had
the task of accepting and directing the
others. Religious in temporary vows
constituted the second category while
living with their families or in small
groups.
19. • They are the ‘units’ (units for men
and units for women). They were
the more dynamic element of each
congregation and had more
opportunity to influence others with
their active apostolate and example.
The third category, finally, included
tertiaries involved in a particular
way in apostolic collaboration.
20. • All these religious lived in secular dress
and their way of life was confirmed by
the Holy See with the Decree Ecclesia
catholica of 21 June 1889. Thanks both
to particular circumstances and the
insight that a great modern apostle had
into the signs of the times, a dozen or so
“secular” institutes rightfully and
actually found their place in the Church,
institutes for which Br. Honorat is
considered the forerunner.
21. • The experiment, however, was short
lived because as a consequence to
recriminations and accusations 1907
saw restrictions imposed the
“novelty” of the religious life begun
by Br. Honorat beyond the
traditional canonical categories.
These restrictions resulted in the
abolition of the ‘units.’
22. • The elderly founder did not fail to defend
the form of life and religious apostolate
that he had initiated so well and which
was necessitated by particular historical
and socio-political circumstances. He
wrote of the souls who came to him. He
wanted to make of them an “army of
confessors of the faith, who could
resolutely oppose scorn from the world,
while silent and hidden, giving a radical
and committed Christian witness
everywhere.”
23. • He had always enjoined on his religious to write
nothing but to surround their identities with
absolute silence. To them he gave this testimony
about their life:
• “These ardent souls generate around themselves
a charitable moral atmosphere not only among
their personal individual contacts but also in
groups and the masses. It is recognized that
wherever persons with a good spirit are found,
even if they do not do anything in particular,
they make their salutary presence felt.”
24. • In 1916, a few days before his death,
with dramatically prophetic words
he insisted on the necessity to
surround religious life with the
absolute reserve and to live it
clandestinely: “I beg you not to
want to show yourselves as religious
because the freedom we enjoy now
is temporary.
25. • Times of great difficulty will return
… Be constant in this kind of life
since you have been called to this.
Only with this will you acquire the
treasures of divine grace. Only with
this can you work so fruitfully for
the glory of God and the salvation
of souls.”
26. • When in 1905 he was no longer able to
receive people in the confessional
because of illness and deafness, Br.
Honorat applied himself to work at the
desk.
• He composed a substantial
correspondence with his spiritual
children. His hand-written letters,
almost four thousand of them, are
conserved in twelve volumes in the
Vice-postulation archive in Warsaw.
27. • Many of his sermons, about a thousand, are
also kept in the same archive, along with a
vast assortment of other works, mostly hand
written, that he had been composing since
his young days. These treat of such matters
as aesthetics, Mariology, hagiography,
history, homiletics, the Rule of the Third
Order of Saint Francis and the constitutions
of different congregations, Polish translations
and various other subjects. Worthy of
mention is his immense work Who is Mary.
28. • In fifty two tomes and seventy six volumes it
is an authentic Marian encyclopaedia. Only
the first volume was ever published, in two
different editions. His Spiritual Diary is also
interesting for a knowledge of Br. Honorat’s
spiritual life and apostolic commitment. In it
we read, “Since the first moment when I
entered the Order I have followed this
project: to make known to people the love of
God.” Of his nearly one hundred works, forty
one still have not been published.
29. • Considered a holy man Br. Honorat
died on 16 December 1916 at eighty
seven years of age. He was buried in
the crypt of the friary at Nowe-
Miasto.
• After their identification his remains
were transferred to the church
above the crypt on 10 December
1975. Finally John Paul II proclaimed
him blessed on 16 October 1988.
30. • All the Saints followed the Way of
the Cross
• No saint ever went to heaven on a
bed of roses, laughing and cheerful
and crowned with earthly joy. All of
them followed a “Via Crucis”, with a
crown of thorns on their heads,
working and toiling amid a
thousand afflictions.
31. • Certainly they were happy, because they
had been touched by divine grace and
enjoyed moments of celestial joy,
sensing the presence of Christ crucified
at their side, feeling Him bearing the
weight of the cross with them, warming
them with the warmth of His heart and,
through the mist, they caught a glimpse
of the glory and the blessedness, the joy
unconfined that lay ahead.
32. • Good fortune was not the lot that they
enjoyed on earth, in fact they kept their
distance from it, they scorned it, and
fled from it when it pursued them. They
trembled before it far more than before
the cross, towards which they stretched
out their hands as to a safe harbour.
• Once they had chosen the way of the
cross, they never wished to abandon it.
33. • And God was generous in assigning
crosses for them to bear, since He
knows full well the value of suffering.
When our divine Saviour once spoke to
the disciples about the shameful death
awaiting Him, Saint Peter, in an
outpouring of love and with sorrow in
his heart, rejected the very thought that
the Master should suffer and protested:
“Lord, this must never happen to you”.
But the Lord turned to Peter and said:
34. • “Get behind me, Satan! You are an
obstacle in my path, because the way
you think is not God’s way, but man’s”
(Mt 16: 22‐23). A person who thinks in
God’s way does not refuse the cross or
complain about it, knowing that it is the
only hope, the only way to reach
heaven, the sole means to holiness, the
source of every grace, the way to
acquire the highest degree of heavenly
glory.
35. • Satan deludes his victims with worldly
happiness, offers them a poisoned
chalice of fleeting pleasures. God on the
other hand offers the cross, which is the
storehouse of unnumbered treasures
and joys of the spirit and everlasting
bliss. This is why the saints were happy
to embrace it and never wished to be
separated from It. They lived with the
cross, they died with the cross, indeed
they lived and died on it.
36. • Pains and battles, temptations and moments of
spiritual dryness, persecutions, hunger, and
want and every kind of adversity were their
daily bread. Through desert sands, under the
scorching sun, across rocks and crags, ambushed
by the enemy, and braving a thousand other
dangers they were ever intent upon God, ever
persevering and faithful, never stopping, never
falling back, without complaining to God when
the abundance of temporal consolations was
withdrawn; never regretting their chosen way,
always serene, trusting, courageous and
fearless.
37. • The saints, who bore these afflictions before
us, are now rejoicing. God has wiped away
their tears and relieved their sufferings, He
has invested them with the martyr’s palm
and the crown of glory. He has now shown
himself to them, face to face; all those tears
are now so many jewels on their royal robes,
on their crowns of beauty. And why? Because
they persevered. The Lord Jesus said: “You
are the ones who have stood by me faithfully
in my trials, and now I confer a kingdom on
you”.
38. • Perseverance is the grace among
graces, it is everything, it is the most
important value. Without it, all
those holy deeds would have led to
nothing; without it, every effort is in
vain. In order to persevere, two
things are necessary above all else:
a robust and lively faith, and the
capacity to act as faith dictates.
