The Vatican beatified Sunday (September 10) nine members of a single family executed by the Nazis for harboring Jews into their household during the Second World War, including an unborn child.
Pope Francis approved the beatification of Jozef and Wiktoria Ulma and their seven children, the youngest of which is still in Wiktoria's womb. The papal declaration was read in Latin by Cardinal Marcello Semeraro, the pope's legate to the beatification Mass in the Polish town of Markowa, where the Ulmas lived and died.
After the declaration, a contemporary portrait of the family was revealed as a gesture of recognition. Relics of all the family members were also taken from their graves and into the altar in order to make reverence to them.
The beatification ceremony was attended by Polish President Andrzej Duda, Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, and Poland's chief rabbi, Michael Schudrich. Morawiecki's conservative party, Law and Justice, has been stressing family values and the heroism of the Poles during the Second World War, with the beatification of the Ulmas becoming a welcome addition to its intense political campaigning ahead of its October 15 general election.
This is the first time in the almost 2,000-year history of the Catholic Church that a cause for canonization of a whole family has been advanced to its highest level to date using its typical process.
Martyrs of Hospitality, Light in the Darkness of War
During his sermon, Semeraro noted that the family paid the highest and ultimate price of martyrdom for their gesture of hospitality, care, and mercy to the Jews they harbored, especially during the Holocaust, when Jews were exterminated by the thousands by Nazi Germany.
Semeraro, who was also the head of the Vatican's Dicastery for the Causes of Saints, has also clarified prior to his trip to Poland that, while the youngest child was not baptized in the Catholic rites after it was unexpectedly born by the time of its mother's death, the child was included in the family's beatification as it received a "baptism by blood" of its martyred mother.
Meanwhile, Francis, who remained in Rome after the historic first visit of any pope to Mongolia, addressed to the crowd gathered at St. Peter's Square for his regular Sunday noon Angelus address that the Ulmas represented a "ray of light in the darkness" of the Second World War and should be a model for all in doing good through acts of service.
The pope's address was also shown in Markowa.
Unprecedented Beatification of an Infant
The Rev. Robert Gahl, a professor of ethics at the Catholic University of America and Rome's Pontifical Holy Cross University told the Associated Press the Ulma family's beatification process posed several new theological concepts about the Catholic Church's ideas of holy men and women that would also have implications for the pro-life movement due to the beatification of the infant in Wiktoria Ulma's womb.
Gahl said that since the concept of beatifying a fetus could be weaponized by the pro-life movement, the Vatican apparently felt it necessary to state the child was born at the moment the mother was executed. By stating that the child was born, the Vatican also affirmed that the Nazis intended to kill the child in odium fidei (out of hatred for the faith), a requirement for a martyrdom and beatification declaration, the priest-theologian added.
Who Were the Beatified Ulmas?
Jozef and Wiktoria Ulma were 44 and 31, respectively, when they were killed in March 1944. Prior to the incident, the family was a simple Catholic farmstead household. The Nazis executed the family - including children Stanislawa (7), Barbara (6), Wladyslaw (5), Franciszek (3), Antoni (2), and Maria (18 months) - for hiding eight Jews in their home. According to several anecdotes, a seventh child was born after Wiktoria was executed.
Poland's Institute of National Remembrance, which meticulously documented the story of the Ulmas, said the order to execute the family and the Jews they harbored was given by a certain Lt. Eilert Dieken, head of the regional Nazi military police, who lived to see the end of the war and continued to serve as a police officer in Germany. Only one of his subordinates, Josef Kokott, was convicted in Poland over the killings, dying in prison in 1980.
The Nazis tracked the location of the Jews after a Nazi-controlled local police officer named Wlodzimierz Les betrayed them. Les was captured by Poland's wartime resistance and was executed in September 1944, six months after the Ulmas were killed.
Aside from being beatified by the Catholic Church, the second-highest level in its four-step process of declaring people saints, the Ulmas were also declared by Israel's Yad Vashem Institute with the title of Righteous Among the Nations in 1995, a recognition they share with Germany's Oskar Schindler, whose story was popularized in the 1993 Steven Spielberg film "Schindler's List", and Princess Alice of Battenberg, the paternal grandmother of British monarch King Charles III.
