Blessed Stanisław Wiórek

Stanisław Wiórek or alternatively Stanisław Wiorek (12 December 1912 – 9 September 1939) was a Polish theologian and Catholic clergyman, member of the Congregation of the Mission, publicly murdered by the Nazis on the ninth day of the Second World War. He has in recent years been accorded the title of Servant of God and is in the process of being beatified by the Catholic Church. Wiórek was born on 12 December 1912 in Bottrop in the extreme south-west corner of the then Province of Westphalia on 12 December 1912, and joined the Lazarists at Kraków in Poland in 1930. He studied theology at Kraków and subsequently at the Angelicum in Rome, where he took holy orders in 1938, the year before his death. According to some sources, he was ordained at Kraków in 1938, during the period of his studies in Italy, which were briefly interrupted for the purpose. He returned from Rome to Poland in 1939, going directly to Bydgoszcz where he was supposed to take up ministry in the local church, in the Bielawki area of the city (see Bielawy). As after the Nazi invasion of Poland the Germans issued an ordinance requiring the registration of the population, Wiórek left the premises of his religious institute on Saturday, 9 September 1939, in company with another priest, Piotr Szarek (1908–1939), in order to complete the required formalities. While in a street outside, he was caught in a łapanka, a random rounding-up of Polish hostages in reprisal for what the Nazi prop­a­gan­da portrayed as anti-German events of the so-called Bloody Sunday of 3 September 1939, six days earlier. The randomly detained passers-by were brought to Bydgoszcz's historic Old Market Square (the Stary Rynek), a prominent central place where they were displayed and harassed before twenty-five of them were summarily executed in public by a firing squad at about 12 noon.