Polish nurse Hanna Chrzanowska is to be beatified on Saturday at the Sanctuary of Divine Mercy in the Łagiewniki district of Kraków, southern Poland.

Cardinal Angelo Amato, the Prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, will officiate at the ceremony as the pope’s delegate.

Born in 1902, Hanna Chrzanowska devoted most of her life to providing care and assistance to the disabled, chronically ill, lonely and abandoned. She also worked in nursing schools in Poland, serving as an instructor in community nursing.

During World War II, she worked, often risking her life, to help the homeless in Kraków, and took special care of orphans, including Jewish children, finding foster families and safe shelters for them.

She worked closely with Cardinal Karol Wojtyła, the future Pope John Paul II, in organising parish nursing in the Kraków archdiocese. She died of cancer on 29 April 1973. Her funeral mass and burial ceremony was conducted by Cardinal Wojtyła.

Last year Pope Francis declared that a miracle attributed to Hanna Chrzanowska had prepared the way for her beatification, which in the Roman Catholic Church is a step towards canonization, or being declared a saint.

(mk/pk)</s>A look at the holy life of an upcoming beata.

Hanna Chrzanowska, a Polish nurse who will be beatified April 28, was devoted to her vocation attending to the sick and suffering.

Like St. Francis of Assisi, Chrzanowska came from a privileged aristocratic family but decided to devote her life to the suffering souls in her midst. Her father, Ignacy, was a professor of Polish literature at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, while her mother founded a children’s hospital and was the director of the Warsaw School of Nursing.

Her parents were known for their charitable work, as Pawel Zuchniewicz’s Polish-language biography Siostra naszego Boga (“Our God’s Sister”) relates. The prominent Catholic journalist’s memoir details a life of Christian charity.

Chrzanowska decided to become a nurse in 1920 during the Polish-Bolshevik War, when she helped war invalids and attended a nursing course offered by the American Red Cross. In 1939, Poland was invaded by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Along with other professors from the Jagiellonian University, Ignacy Chrzanowski was deported to the Sachsenhausen Nazi concentration camp. Meanwhile, Hanna’s brother Bogdan was among the Polish reserve officers shot by the Soviets in Katyn.

After the invasion of Poland, Archbishop Adam Stefan Sapieha of Krakow formed the Civic Committee for Social Aid. Undeterred by her family’s losses, Hanna became an active member, according to the World Federation of the Catholic Medical Associations, helping to organize hiding places for Jewish orphans fleeing the Krakow Ghetto and secure new homes for Polish refugees coming from Warsaw after the city’s nearly complete destruction in 1944. After the war, Chrzanowska went to New York on a one-year stipend to study nursing. Upon returning, she published books and articles on family nursing and taught in nursing schools. She also started to organize annual retreats for health care professionals to the Marian Shrine of Jasna Gora in Czestochowa, much to the chagrin of Poland’s postwar communist government.

By the 1950s, Chrzanowska had settled in Krakow. Although before the war the Catholic Church in Poland played a leading role in charitable work (as it does today), under communism the atheistic regime sought to curb that role. Yet she defied the authorities and established a system of “parish nursing” in Krakow. Later, her friend Teresa Strzembosz would develop a similar system in Warsaw. By the 1970s, most parishes in Krakow participated in this system.

Parish nursing was a response to the fact that there were many sick, suffering people within a parish’s borders requiring medical attention, but their plight was invisible to most. Chrzanowska’s collaborators would come to the homes of these people and not only attend to their medical needs, but also clean their homes (many such patients were greatly neglected) and offer them company and friendship.

Initially, Chrzanowska worked alone. Eventually, nuns would help her, and, later, she succeeded in encouraging a growing army of university students from the student ministry at St. Anne’s Collegiate Church to volunteer and come to sick parishioners’ homes.

Chrzanowska stressed that volunteers would be obliged to form a close bond with those under their care and see them regularly. Her work and Christian charity has been detailed in Tygodnik Powszechny, a Polish Roman Catholic weekly magazine, by Father Adam Boniecki, who cooperated with her when he was in charge of the student ministry at St. Anne’s Collegiate Church.

Chrzanowska responded to all with love, even in the most difficult cases, according to the Polish version of the Aleteia website. Once, for example, she was called to attend to a paralyzed 93-year-old woman with a hole in her forehead, which was the result of cancer.

In developing parish nursing in Krakow, Chrzanowska was motivated, above all, by her faith. She was particularly drawn to the Benedictine charism of work and prayer, becoming a Benedictine oblate.

Reading the Vatican II document Lumen Gentium, which speaks of the role of the laity in the Church, greatly inspired Chrzanowska in engaging laypeople to actively seek out the sick and suffering.

She found a kindred spirit in Cardinal Karol Wojtyła, the future Pope John Paul II, who was then the archbishop of Krakow, who asked her to give a speech on the role of the laity in the Church during the synod he held to implement the Council’s teaching in his archdiocese.

With Chrzanowska’s help, Cardinal Wojtyła would visit dozens of sick Cracovians, preferably those in the most desperate conditions, in their homes each year.

Chrzanowska reached out to all the sick, Catholic and non-Catholic alike, exhibiting charity to all while not proselytizing. However, the loving Christian witness of Chrzanowska and her helpers led to many conversions.

For example, Sister Serafina, a nun who closely worked with her, attended to an atheist mathematics professor suffering from rheumatism, according to Zuchniewicz’s book.

“When will you start converting me?” he would ask sarcastically.

Over time, however, he became so impressed with her love and kindness that he had a conversion and asked to confess to a priest before his death. “There’s Kant’s philosophy, and there’s the philosophy of the Gospel,” he proclaimed.

Eventually, the nurse’s helpers and the sick they attended to formed a community. An annual retreat was held for the sick in Trzebinia; its participants looked forward to it all year.

When Hanna Chrzanowska died in 1973, the Carmelite basilica was crowded with mourners for her funeral Mass. The church was filled with wheelchairs with the many sick people to whom Chrzanowska gave hope, as well as the students and nuns who cared for them.

The funeral Mass was celebrated by Cardinal Wojtyła, who also gave the homily. In it, the future pope said: “Thank you, Hanna, for being with us. You are the embodiment of the Sermon on the Mount, especially the blessing that says: ‘Blessed are the merciful.’”

Although when most Catholics hear the word “vocation” they think of priests and members of religious orders, Hanna Chrzanowska shows that laypeople also have a vocation and that it can be no less heroic or saintly.</s>Like his predecessors, Pope Francis is devoted to the interests of the institution he leads.

The institution in question is, of course, quite old, popular, rich, with subsidiaries and 1.2 billion followers across the globe.

The institution's rules, that the followers must unquestionably abide by, are set out in dogmatic texts, commandments and edicts, including the doctrine that the pope, "acting as supreme teacher … cannot err when he teaches in matters of faith or morals."

Like his predecessors, Pope Francis knew when he was chosen in a secret conclave by his fellow cardinals in March 2013, that the title was his for life and, that, fortuitously, as "supreme teacher," he "cannot err" while he manages the Church, comfortably ensconced at its Vatican headquarters.

Pope Francis also knows that, in exchange for such coveted job security and singular infallibility, his main job is to promote and protect the institution's parochial interests at home and abroad.

Apparently, Pope Francis, the Roman Catholic Church's "supreme teacher," has calculated that it's not in its interests that he travel to Canada to personally apologise to indigenous peoples for the crimes committed by priests and nuns over more than 150 years against thousands of indigenous children at as many as 80 forced-conversion gulags, euphemistically known as "residential schools."

The crimes perpetrated at those largely Catholic-run "residential schools" have been documented by a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), which describes in exhaustive detail how indigenous child after child after child was kidnapped, stuffed into a tiny suit or dress and paraded like a play doll, beaten, fondled, raped, tortured in homemade electric chairs, discarded, abandoned, killed and, ultimately, buried often in unmarked, mass graves.

In December 2015, the TRC tabled its findings. One of the report's 94 "calls to action" was a plea to the pope to visit Canada promptly and apologise for the degradations and depravity visited upon so many children, for so many years by so many Catholic "teachers" who faithfully served the "supreme teacher".

The pope's response to "call to action" number 58: silence. During an audience with the pope last year, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, another teacher, implored the supreme teacher to "consider the gesture". The pope's response: silence.

Predictably, the supreme teacher who cannot err left it to his surrogates at the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops (CCCB) to respond finally by letter in late March to indigenous survivors who also believe the pope should apologise.

Stripped of the polite embroidery, the CCCB's reply was: Look, he's read the report. He takes it "seriously". But he's not going to apologise to any of you and he isn't obliged to explain why he won't apologise.

Since they delivered their missive, the bishops have been reminded by politicians, reporters and scripture-quoting columnists that popes have apologised many times, albeit belatedly and grudgingly, for the Church's many "errors" - to put it charitably.

Records show Pope John Paul II apologised more than 100 times. He apologised for, among other egregious trespasses, the Church's role in the persecution of Galileo, a devout Catholic, the African slave trade, various burnings at the stake, religious wars, as well as the "church's sins against Jews, heretics, Gypsies, native peoples and women".

Pope Benedict XVI followed suit, although he attached big asterisks to his apologies by insisting that the mea culpas were intended only to atone for the lamentable actions of individual Christians, not the Church's institutional culpability. Still, in 2010, he apologised to the countless Irish victims of countless sexual predators in clerical clothing.

And while on a pilgrimage to South America in July 2015, none other than Pope Francis himself apologised for crimes the Catholic Church committed against indigenous peoples during the colonisation of the Americas.

At a gathering of indigenous activists in Bolivia, attended by the country's first indigenous president, Evo Morales, Pope Francis also "humbly" begged for forgiveness for the "pain and suffering" that the Church has caused in the past.

Despite this recent history of contrition, Pope Francis and his ardent Canadian subordinates remain adamant: There will be no formal apology to the indigenous children who endured, suffered and perished inside the Catholic Church's conversion-gulags in Canada.

Earlier this month, The New Democratic Party (NDP) attempted to introduce a motion in the House of Commons to try to get Pope Francis to change his obstinate mind and apologise.

The governing Liberal party said it would support the NDP's motion. The motion, however, required unanimous consent before it could be debated and voted on. One Conservative Member of Parliament objected, temporarily derailing the motion.

Canada's bishops helped stall consideration of the motion by, in part, rewriting history in an official letter, claiming that the "Catholic Church as a whole in Canada was not associated with the residential schools."

Not done desecrating the past, Archbishop Richard Gagnon lectured survivors at an Ottawa press conference about the "difference" between the German pontiff's Irish apology and the Argentinian pontiff's apology they're pining for.

"The Holy Father wrote a letter to the Irish," Archbishop Gagnon said. "Number 58 specifies the pope comes to Canada within a certain period of time, a very narrow period of time, and give an apology. So, there's a difference between the two."

The archbishop's remarks prompted the indigenous NDP MP who co-sponsored the motion, Romeo Saganash, to say he was disgusted. "I wanted to go throw up," Saganash said. He wasn't alone.

Undeterred, Saganash, a survivor, successfully re-introduced his motion on Thursday. By his side, was another survivor, Kind Hearted Eagle Women.

"I'm here, begging the Holy Father, the pope, to walk with us to healing," she said. "I ask him to walk [with] and have sympathy [for] all indigenous people."

Pope Francis will, I suspect, rebuff Kind Hearted Eagle Women's request even though decency and the historical record demand it. In doing so, the Pope will confirm that he is devoted, above all, to the institution he leads.

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial stance.
Cardinal Angelo Amato, acting on behalf of Pope Francis, beatifies Hanna Chrzanowska in Kraków, Poland. Chrzanowska dedicated her life to helping the sick and homeless and had worked with Cardinal Karol Wojtyła, who led her funeral services before he became Pope John Paul II.