The Servant of God Jan Tyranowski on the way to the altars

The following comes from the Salesian News Agency in Rome:
On November 19 the Postulator General of the Salesian Family, Fr Enrico dal Covolo was received by the Archbishop of Krakow, Cardinal Stanisław Dziwisz. Among matters dealt with in their cordial meeting were the causes beatification and canonisation of Jan Leopold Tyranowski, a lay man, and Fr Jan Swierc and companions.

The Postulator was accompanied by the Vice Provincial Fr Dariusz Bartocha, and the Vice Postulator of the cause of beatification and canonisation of Tyranowski, the Salesian Fr Adam Nyk.

In the troubled times of the Second World war Jan Tyranowski (1901-1947) was a valued co-worker in the “St Stanislaw Kostka” Salesian parish in Krakow. At that time because of the Nazi persecution the parish of Debniki, in Krakow was almost entirely without priests. In these same years the Servant of God played a fundamental role in the story of the vocation of Karol Wojtyla, the future John Paul II. He had founded the “Living Rosary” Group from among whose numbers many priestly and religious vocations emerged including that of the young Karol.

It was Jan who first introduced Karol Wojtyla to the writings of St. John of the Cross, the Spanish mystic who would be one of his great inspirations in life. It was from St. John he would learn that union with God requires a person to give up everything; everything they know as well as all that the own. Looking back he would feel that in Jan Tyranowski he had a living example of that quest for union with God before his very eyes:

He was one of those unknown saints, hidden amid the others like a marvellous light at the bottom of life, at a depth where night usually reigns. He disclosed to me the riches of his inner life, of his mystical life. In his words, in his spirituality and in the example of a life given to God alone, he represented a new world that I did not yet know. I saw the beauty of a soul opened up by grace.

In the course of the audience with the Archbishop the Postulator spoke, in addition to the cause of Tyranowski – since last year entrusted to the Salesian Postulator’s Office –, about the diocesan enquiry regarding Fr Jan Swierc and his companions in Krakow, martyred in 1942.