April 28
In the Archdioceses of Kraków and Warszawa
BLESSED HANNA CHRZANOWSKA
Optional memorial
Hanna Chrzanowska was born on 7 October 1902 in Warszawa, but spent most of her life in Kraków. She was brought up in a religiously neutral environment that, however, was engaged in helping others. She became a nurse and lived this service out as a vocation. Taking care of the sick, she gradually discovered the religious dimension of life. She found a close relationship with God, which she never stopped deepening. In other people, especially the suffering, she could see Christ. She knew how to be demanding of herself and of others. She drafted an “examination of conscience of a nurse”, being an educator of nurses and a forerunner of domestic and parochial nursing. She died in the odor of sanctity in Kraków on 29 April 1973. She was beatified on 28 April 2018. Her relics are housed in Saint Nicholas Church in Kraków.
Common of Holy Women Who Practiced Works of Mercy.
OFFICE OF READINGS
SECOND READING
From “The Diary” of Blessed Hanna Chrzanowska
(Hanna Chrzanowska, Pamiętniki, listy, notatki, Kraków 2018, 28. 72-3. 99-101. 128. 137. 156-7)
Serving Christ alone
I grew up in a climate of helping others. And nowadays it is an important—the most important and fundamental matter. I had never heard—despite the fact that I was brought up in a climate of charity and goodness—that it could be done for the love of God and from the love of God. I had never been told that I was supposed to be good because of God and for God. My parents were atheists. My mother (according to her passport—Lutheran) was in the hands of atheistic pessimism for years. My father (by passport—Roman Catholic) was then a positivist liberal.
During summer holidays I was informed that in the fall the Warsaw School of Nursing would launch. I made up my mind at once, “I am going to the school of nursing.” I once took care of an elderly man. He would grill me about school and other students. In the end, he asked, “And why did you take up nursing?” I replied, “Why, because I like it.” “And what exactly do you like? The hospital or the sick?” Then I knew no answer to that. Yet that question has stayed with me ever since.
Domestic nursing brings us really close to a sick person as he is. This simple—yet at times really difficult—work is what gives me a sense of happiness, I guess. I must say that though in my school of old I was taught how to deny myself, how to make unreserved sacrifices, although one of the words written on the emblem of my school was service, I could not be further from the spirit of evangelical service, being so close to a person I served. It never occurred to me that I could be serving God. I had not the foggiest idea about the notion of living for God’s glory, for years and years.
Years passed. I walked along Krowoderska Street when suddenly it dawned on me, “We help Christ bear his cross.” I did not think of “Christ in the sick”—of Christ himself.
Our profession has so much dignity because we stand in front of a sick person till the end, till death and during death. I must confess that I am specifically grateful to God for this sheer fact. There are so acute sufferings that, luckily for the given person, one no longer feels their acuteness, just as one does not hear ultrasound. Who can see them, hear them and judge them is God alone on the path of his own justice that we are ignorant of—God, the Son who was the only one to drink all of the cup. It is certain that the suffering offered to him is not wasted, otherwise he would be contradicting himself. Purified suffering is nailed to the Cross, together with sins.
There are so many miserable people who can shout, “I have no one,” as did the sick man from Bethesda. But in fact there are plenty good people. And this misfortune that an illness triggers often gives rise to goodness. We do not only mean here a battle with evil. Perhaps evil is more disconcerting. We need to speak about it, or even shout. But should we not shout about goodness? The goodness born of misfortune, drawn from love, day after day?
What I have written is not garish, I guess. I can see it having the color of fire.
RESPONSORY Mt 25:35, 36, 40; 1 Jn 3:18
I was hungry and you gave me food, ill and you cared for me.
– Amen, I say to you, whatever you did for one of these least brothers of mine, you did for me.
Let us love not in word or speech but in deed and truth.
– Amen, I say to you, whatever you did for one of these least brothers of mine, you did for me.
CONCLUDING PRAYER
God,
you called Blessed Hanna to the service of the sick, poor and deserted,
grant that the one who answered wholeheartedly to your call may encourage us by her example to come to our neighbors’ assistance.
Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son,
who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, for ever and ever.
– Amen.
Congregatio de Cultu Divino et Disciplina Sacramentorum. Probatum seu confirmatum, die 17 aprilis 2018, Prot. N. 104/18.
[1] Translated by HosSPr (2022).
Polish Breviary 