Saint Michał Kozal

Michał Kozal (27 September 1893 – 26 January 1943) was a Polish Roman Catholic bishop. Kozal was noted for his intelligence and dedication to studies and studied to become a priest during World War I, which disrupted his studies but did not prevent his ordination in 1918; he gained fame for his abilities and rose to several positions that superiors endowed upon him all culminating in being named a Monsignor in 1932 and then appointed to the episcopate in 1939 just before World War II started. But his pastoral mission as a bishop did not last long since the Nazi forces arrested and tortured him and sent him to Dachau where he died after being injected with a lethal substance. His beatification was celebrated in Poland on 14 June 1987 after Pope John Paul II had made his apostolic visit to that nation. Kozal was born on 27 September 1893 in Congress Poland to the peasants Jan Kozal and Marianna Płaczek. His father married in 1888 to his mother, who was widowed with five children at the time; Kozal had six siblings, including brother Wojciech, who participated in the Greater Poland Uprising and the Polish-Bolshevik War, in which he was killed at Grodno in 1920. Kozal commenced his education on 27 April 1905 at Krotoszyn and at one stage participated in a student strike to take action against the forced Germanization and the forced teaching of the German language. He passed his examinations in 1914 and was offered further studies but rejected the offer to instead pursue a path to the priesthood first in Poznań and then in Gniezno for theological and philosophical studies. Kozal was ordained to the priesthood in the Gniezno Cathedral in 1918. On 1 June 1920 he was appointed as the administrator of the Saint Nicholas parish until 1923 and around this time collaborated with the Catholic Action movement and the Polish Red Cross. Cardinal Edmund Dalbor – in 1923 – moved him to Białośliwiu as a parish priest and that April served as a catechist and teacher as well.