Blessed Jerzy Kaszyra

Jury Kashyra (Polish: Jerzy Kaszyra; Belarusian: Юрый Кашыра; 4 April 1904 – 18 February 1943) was a Polish Roman Catholic priest and a Belarusian apostle of the unity between Catholic and Orthodox Christians. He was murdered by the Nazi security forces and their collaborators in Operation Winterzauber, a punitive "bandit fighting" raid, together with his parishioners. Kashyra was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 1999 together with the 108 Blessed Polish Martyrs. Jury Kashyra was born in a village in the Russian Empire near Dzisna in a peasant Orthodox Belarusian family converted to Orthodoxy after the Unia, which they were derived, had been banned. His mother found the faith of his ancestors in 1907. He spent his childhood in Vilnius. Kashyra was baptized in an Eastern Orthodox church, but in 1922, at the age of 18, he converted to Catholicism. In 1924, Kashyra made his novitiate with the Marian Fathers of the Immaculate Conception, a congregation revived before the First World War by Blessed Jurgis Matulaitis-Matulevičius (later Bishop of Vilnius), and congregation in which he completed his secondary education. He made his novitiate at Druya, a city border with Bolshevik Belarus where the congregation opened a school last year and there is a strong minority in Belarus. He took his vows in 1929 and was sent to study philosophy and theology in Rome at the Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas, Angelicum. He continued his studies at the seminary of the Congregation which is at Vilnius, then was ordained a priest on 20 June 1935. He became a teacher at the high school in Druya and director of the Marianist juniorate. This year marks a change in the internal politics of Poland who knows an authoritarian regime marked by its distance from the Church and secularists who imposes laws on education.