On 23 August 1939, Nazi Germany and the USSR concluded a non-aggression pact that, in reality, constituted a political and military alliance aimed at bringing Central and Eastern Europe under their joint control. The secret protocol attached to the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact provided for the partition of Poland and other countries in the region between the two powers. Lithuania was initially placed within the sphere of influence of brown totalitarianism, while Latvia, Estonia, Finland, and Romanian Bessarabia were assigned to the red sphere.
A few weeks later, on 28 September, the German–Soviet Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Demarcation was signed, revising these arrangements: Lithuania was assigned to the Soviet sphere of influence and remained under Moscow’s sway until 1990, apart from the several-year period of German occupation from 1941 to 1944.
For Western readers, it should be added that Central Lithuania, including Wilno, belonged to Poland from February 1922 until September 1939, whereas Belarus emerged as a fully independent and sovereign state only in 1991, following the collapse of the USSR.
Despite the turmoil of the war years (1939–1945), the ecclesiastical administration sought to minister to the faithful as it had before the war. Particularly noteworthy is the heroic priest Fr. Józef Grasewicz (1904–2000), whose life became closely intertwined with the history of the miraculous image of Divine Mercy and with that of the future Blessed, Fr. Michał Sopoćko (1888–1975).
The Church in the Wilno Region
In the second half of the 1930s, Fr. Grasewicz became the editor of the Wilno Archdiocese’s periodical, Tygodnik Katolicki (Catholic Weekly), and took up residence with Fr. Sopoćko. At the time, Fr. Sopoćko served as St. Faustina’s spiritual director and as confessor to the Sisters of Divine Mercy. A deep friendship developed between the two priests. Fr. Sopoćko showed him the image painted by Eugeniusz Kazimirowski in 1934. Years later, Fr. Grasewicz recalled: “I regard my stay with him as providential; it had a decisive influence on my life. […] I became acquainted with the devotion, at first only partially, but even then I recognized its great significance for the Church and the world.”
Almost a year after the German occupation of Lithuania began, a general campaign against the Polish clergy was launched. On 3 March 1942, the Gestapo and the collaborating Lithuanian police were actively searching for Fr. Sopoćko; fortunately, he was away from his residence at the time. In his memoirs, Fr. Sopoćko wrote that “avoiding arrest was not a matter of chance, but a clear sign of the care of the Most Merciful Saviour.” For the next two years, he remained in hiding under an assumed identity at a convent in Czarny Bór.
On the same day, fifteen faculty members of the Wilno Theological Seminary, including Fr. Grasewicz, together with the rector and eighty seminarians, were arrested. In addition, six members of the cathedral chapter and nine priest-professors of Stefan Batory University were imprisoned. Many parish priests and vicars serving in the parishes of Wilno were also arrested. In the following days, the operation was extended to rural areas. On 15 March, the Archbishop of Wilno, Romuald Jałbrzykowski, was arrested together with the chancellor of the curia, Fr. Adam Sawicki, after which they were interned in Marijampolė.
As a result of the persecution, 105 Polish priests lost their lives. Many others were imprisoned or sent to labour camps. Among those who survived was Fr. Józef Grasewicz, who regained his freedom following the arrival of the Red Army in 1944.
Some time later, Fr. Grasewicz was appointed parish priest in Nowa Ruda. He invited Fr. Sopoćko to visit him; unfortunately, this proved to be their last meeting in this life, although they kept in touch until Fr. Sopoćko’s death in 1975.
The Church in the Belarusian Region
On 2 November 1951, a dozen or so armed NKVD officers, accompanied by a former parishioner who had become an informer, burst into Fr. Grasewicz’s residence. As Sister Cecylia Obuchowska recalled, “The search lasted several hours. Everything was confiscated, including our prayer books. We were interrogated throughout the night and accused of various political offences.” The Sisters were forced to leave the house with nothing but the clothes they were wearing; they were not permitted to take any documents, clothing, or personal belongings. Yet they remained in Nowa Ruda, placing their trust in Divine Providence. After some time, the Sisters took up work in sanatoria in Druskininkai and Porzecze, where they cared for children.
Fr. Grasewicz was taken to prison in Grodno, where he spent six months under investigation. He was accused of anti-Soviet activity within Catholic Action (Akcja Katolicka); of previously maintaining contacts with the terrorist organisation known as the Home Army (Armia Krajowa), specifically by hearing the confessions of partisans; and of educating the faithful in a spirit of hatred towards the socialist nation and its political system. The court-appointed defence lawyer stated that Fr. Grasewicz clearly deserved the death penalty, but requested that the sentence be commuted to twenty-five years of forced labour. Ultimately, the priest was sentenced to twenty-five years in labour camps beyond the Arctic Circle. Fr. Grasewicz was sent to Inta, where he served his sentence by working in a coal mine and in logging operations. It was there that he fell seriously ill. He secretly celebrated Mass at night. Released early, he returned to his parish in 1956.
Immediately after his return, he contacted Fr. Sopoćko, who had been living in Poland for several years and was deeply distressed because he did not know what had become of the image of Divine Mercy.
The Arrogance and Brutality of the Communist Authorities
In 1957, the communist authorities forced Fr. Grasewicz to leave the parish and closed the church in Nowa Ruda, although the parishioners retained access to the building. For thirteen years, deprived of a priest, the faithful gathered for communal prayer. They placed a chasuble on the altar and recited the prayers of the Mass, apart from the words of consecration. This was by no means an isolated occurrence in the territories of Soviet Russia, where the faithful expressed their profound faith and genuine hunger for God in this way. It stands in stark contrast to what is happening in Australia, America, and Canada today.
Cases are also known of Catholics who, deprived of a priest for decades, came to a church, knelt at the confessional, placed a large cross inside it, and confessed their sins.
To add insult to injury, in 1970 the authorities decided to convert the church building into a grain warehouse. According to eyewitnesses, on that day all the men had been summoned to work in the hayfields. The church was surrounded by soldiers and police officers. They began removing everything they could from the building and loading it onto trucks. Sister Cecylia recalled: “There was only one sick man left at home, a long-standing member of the church choir named Ludwik. Having learned what was happening, he went to the church. Seeing a vehicle loaded with church furnishings setting off, he desperately threw himself under its wheels. The women then did the same. They were immediately dragged away by force, and the whole incident was described as an ‘act of sabotage.’ Nevertheless, the faithful did not give up and made another attempt. At that point, the shaken driver got out and declared that he would not run people over with his vehicle. The army then intervened and treated those lying on the ground even more brutally. Ludwik was dragged face down along the ground and kicked, and was then left by the roadside, bleeding heavily. He was taken to hospital but died soon afterwards.”
A few weeks later, the soldiers and police returned to complete what they had begun. “As one of the soldiers struggled with the figure of Christ affixed to the altar, one of the parishioners, Stefania Gryń, broke through the armed cordon, made her way inside, rushed towards him, and cried out, ‘Jesus, do not let them take You.’ The frightened soldier fell from the altar and fled the church. Soon, others came running from throughout the village, armed with scythes and pitchforks and determined to defend their church. Seeing that the matter was no joke, the troops hastily withdrew.”
Tragically, the atheistic authorities usually succeeded in desecrating and destroying churches. In Plusach, near the border with Latvia, the school principal even turned the tabernacle into a doghouse.
Although Fr. Grasewicz served in other parishes, he returned from time to time to the church in Nowa Ruda together with the Sisters and prayed for mercy on the suffering peoples of the USSR.
Sister Cecylia described another incident: “During Lent, as part of a coordinated anti-religious campaign, all roadside crosses were removed in several villages and taken to a bakery [to be burned]. As parish priest, Fr. Grasewicz submitted a written protest to the authorities. The villagers did the same, enclosing photographs of the desecrated crosses. In response, the authorities halted the further removal of the crosses, but launched a campaign against the priest, accusing him of religious agitation and of inciting the people. At the same time, they prohibited the priest from carrying out any pastoral ministry in the area. Only after the intervention of the Vicar General was Fr. Grasewicz allowed to carry out his ministry, but in another parish, Kamionka, where he remained until his death in 2000.”
He is widely regarded as having been a true spiritual father to the priests of the Diocese of Grodno and an inspiration to many priestly and religious vocations, both hidden and public, in the Church as it began to revive in Belarus. It was largely through his efforts that devotion to Divine Mercy began to flourish in these territories.
The History of the Miraculous Image of Divine Mercy
On 22 February 1931, our Lord Jesus Christ appeared to St. Faustina in a Vision:
“In the evening, when I was in my cell, I saw the Lord Jesus clothed in a white garment. One hand [was] raised in the gesture of blessing, the other was touching the garment at the breast. From beneath the garment, slightly drawn aside at the breast, there were emanating two large rays, one red, the other pale. In silence I kept my gaze fixed on the Lord; my soul was struck with awe, but also with great joy. After a while, Jesus said to me,
“Paint an image according to the pattern you see, with the signature: Jesus, I trust in You. I promise that the soul that will venerate this image will not perish. I also promise victory over [its] enemies already here on earth, especially at the hour of death. I Myself will defend it as My own glory.” (Diary, 47, 48)
Wishing to help St. Faustina fulfil the Lord Jesus’ request, Fr. Sopoćko commissioned Eugeniusz Kazimirowski to paint the image. The painting was first publicly displayed at the Gate of Dawn (Ostra Brama) in Wilno in 1935. Following the deaths of St. Faustina in 1938 and of the artist himself in 1939, Fr. Sopoćko remained the principal source with first-hand knowledge of the precise content of the Lord Jesus’ revelations; he had also been a direct witness to the creation of the image.
In August 1947, the borders were redrawn. Many religious and diocesan priests who faced the threat of arrest left for Poland. There were also those, though few, who chose to risk interrogation, imprisonment, and even deportation to a labour camp—which most often meant certain death—rather than abandon their faithful.
Wilno, renamed Vilnius, was henceforth to remain permanently within the USSR, together with St. Michael’s Church, where the miraculous image of Divine Mercy was venerated.
Churches began to be closed on a large scale and converted into warehouses, stables, dance halls, or museums. There was a very real danger that the image itself would be destroyed or removed to an unknown location. Initially, Fr. Sopoćko intended to take it to Poland, but after prayer he came to understand that it was God’s will that the image should remain in the city where it had been created. Threatened with arrest, he was forced to leave his beloved Wilno for good and settled permanently in Białystok.
Years passed. In the summer of 1951, Janina Rodziewicz, one of the most devoted Polish apostles of the Divine Mercy devotion, happened to pass by St. Michael’s Church with Bronisława Miniotaite, a Lithuanian, and noticed that its door was slightly ajar. Intrigued, they looked inside. The church was completely empty: there were no pews, altars, or paintings, with the exception of one. Feeling personally responsible for its fate, they spoke with a worker there and, after collecting the necessary sum of money, obtained the unframed canvas and carried it to Janina Rodziewicz’s apartment. Some time later, fearing that Janina might be arrested—which, tragically, happened soon afterwards—the canvas was hidden in the attic of acquaintances of Bronisława Miniotaite.
Upon her return from Siberia in 1954, Janina found the canvas severely damaged and in urgent need of restoration. The restoration was carried out clandestinely by the art conservator Helena Szmigielska in 1955–1956. It may well be attributed to Divine Providence that a state commission inspecting Helena’s studio did not notice the image of Jesus of Divine Mercy among the other works of art there.
Janina Rodziewicz left for Poland in November 1956. Before her departure, however, she entrusted the image to Fr. Jan Ellert, who was her confessor. He was interested neither in keeping the image nor in displaying it, so he hid it in the storage area at the back of the Church of the Holy Spirit in Vilnius.
It was not until 1956, when Fr. Grasewicz, a friend of Fr. Sopoćko, returned to Vilnius after being released from a Soviet labour camp, that he undertook to find the painting. He contacted Fr. Sopoćko, who was agonising over the lack of information about the image of the Merciful Jesus.
At that time, the most popular image of Divine Mercy in Poland was the version painted by another Kraków artist, Adolf Hyła.
Once Fr. Grasewicz had received permission to resume his priestly ministry in Nowa Ruda, he met with Fr. Ellert and brought the image there.
For more than thirty years thereafter, the parish church in Nowa Ruda, near Grodno, Belarus, was its new home. There, the faithful began to recite the Chaplet and the Novena to Divine Mercy, both well known in the region.
From the 1970s onwards, the church in Nowa Ruda stood stripped by the communist authorities of its liturgical furnishings, pews, altars, and images of the saints, with the sole exception of this one image. It hung high above the floor, and the ladder used to remove the other objects was not long enough to reach it.
Fearing that the building might be set on fire by so-called “unknown perpetrators”—such incidents had occurred in other parishes—Fr. Grasewicz asked the Grodno painter Maria Szocik to make two faithful copies. The plan was to remove the original without arousing suspicion either among the local inhabitants, who had grown deeply attached to it, or among the local authorities. Under cover of darkness, in the autumn of 1986, Sister Cecylia and Sister Teresa surreptitiously removed the canvas from the stretcher, rolled it up, and that same night took it first to Grodno and then to the Church of the Holy Spirit in Vilnius.
All the priests in Belarus were too afraid to host the painting. The only parish priest at the time, Fr. Aleksander Kaszkiewicz, agreed to receive it. For some time, it remained rolled up in the sacristy, after which it was placed on a side altar. Further unnecessary alterations were made: the face of Jesus was overpainted, and the inscription “Jesus, I trust in You!” was added. The painting remained there from 1986 until 2005.
On 5 September 1993, during his pilgrimage to Vilnius, the Holy Father, John Paul II, said:
“…in a special way I wish to entrust Sister Faustina, Blessed Sister Faustina Kowalska, to you. It was given to me to beatify her several months ago in Rome, in the presence of the Cardinal Primate of Poland and the Archbishop of Vilnius. For many years, Sister Faustina was ‘one of you.’ In this church, moreover, the sacred image of the Merciful Jesus, whose devotion she spread, is preserved with great veneration.”
Thanks to the generosity of the faithful and the efforts of the Sisters of the Congregation of the Sisters of the Merciful Jesus, the painting underwent further conservation work to restore its original appearance.
All overpainting and stains caused by moisture were removed. The professional restoration carried out in 2003 returned the image to the form in which Eugeniusz Kazimirowski had originally painted it.
Since September 2005, the image has been housed in the Shrine of Divine Mercy, established in the Church of the Holy Trinity at 12 Dominikonų Street in Vilnius.
Epilogue
The October Revolution of 1917, which was intended to improve the lot of the people, instead became an instrument of oppression and suffering, as with everything human beings undertake while turning away from the Creator. Above all, it affected people of Christian faith, including Catholic and Orthodox clergy.
Only the clear intervention of God, together with the courage of Polish soldiers, prevented the “Red plague” from spreading throughout Europe in 1920. Twenty years later, Catholic Poland found itself surrounded by two belligerent powers, while people had lost the faith needed to place greater trust in God than in the power of arms. The consequences proved catastrophic.
Priests such as Fr. Józef Grasewicz and faithful such as those of the parish of Nowa Ruda in Belarus, who were prepared to sacrifice almost everything in order to worship the One Creator and Lord, have become increasingly rare.
We have grown accustomed to comfort, luxury, and material prosperity. We take these things for granted, as though they were our due and would last forever. Yet the Merciful God can, at any moment, overturn everything in our lives that is displeasing to Him, for He gave His only-begotten Son to die on the Cross for the sake of our immortal souls.
May the heroism of these real people—not fictional figures created by algorithms—become for us all a source of inspiration and hope.
“and the gates of the netherworld shall not prevail against it.” (Matthew 16:18).