Every year on March 17th all the world dresses in sober colors, dies their beer a golden-yellowish, and recalls the great Polish saint and martyr Jan Sarkander.
Eternally overshadowed by St. Patrick, St. Jan has the great misfortune of sharing a feast day with an Irishman. (My people do have a habit of taking over a room.) And yet we shouldn’t forget this good and holy martyr, who died, at least in part, for a cause that continues to vex us: government encroachment on the seal of the confessional.
St. Jan (December 20, 1576 to March 17, 1620) was a Polish widower who was ordained a priest at a time of great national strife. His homeland, Silesia, was sometimes Bohemian, sometimes Czech, but is generally considered Polish in that way European borders tend to be drawn on maps with whiteboard markers.
He originally thought of following a brother into the priesthood, but decided to marry instead. When his wife died a year later, he took the hint and became a priest, studying in Moravia, Prague, and Austria as plague chased him from one location to another.
After ordination, he was sent to minister in areas now part of Czech Republic, but Catholic/anti-Catholic tensions were already at a simmer. He was supported by some Catholic nobles and opposed by some Protestant nobles, and by 1618 those tensions had boiled over into one of the deadliest conflicts in European history: The Thirty Years War.
St. Jan fled to Poland, seeking refuge first at the Shrine of Our Lady of Czestochowa, and later with the Order of Minims, eventually returning to Moravia. Relief troops sent by Catholic Poland were cutting a brutal swath through Protestant-controlled lands when St. Jan met their vanguard outside Holleschau, holding aloft the blessed sacrament. This turned aside the Polish forces, who spared the town, and led many non-Catholics to return to the church.
Things get a bit complicated here because of the many sides in the conflict, and the numerous people involved, but the short version is clear enough: Protestants accused the holy man of conspiring to turn the region Catholic during the revolt of the Bohemia Estates against the Hapsburgs. (This is a period which included one of the famous Prague Defenestrations.)
A Protestant nobleman named Wenceslas (neither a king, nor particularly good), seized St. Jan under the pretext that he was collaborating with the Catholic enemies. A commision made up entirely of Protestants was appointed to judge him, with Catholic judge Johan Scintilla forced to look on impotently. The priest was subjected to intense torture to divulge what he knew about troop movements, what he had done and seen in Poland, and what the enemy Lord Lobkowitz had said in confession.
He was put on the rack for hours on multiple occasions and burned with candles and torches, as well as with feathers soaked in pitch and set on fire while his body was covered in sulfur. He refused at all times to break the seal of the confessional.
Realizing they would get no information from him, they cast him into prison, where he lingered in agony for a month before dying from his wounds.
Devotions to him began immediately, with Catholics in the region calling for his canonization shortly after his murder in March of 1620. When his remains were exhumed in 1720, the were found to be incorrupt. The formal canonization process began under Pope Benedict XIV the following century, advanced under Pope Pius IX, and was completed in 1995 during Pope St. John Paul II’s visit to the Czech Republic
His shrine and relics are kept in Saint Wenceslas Cathedral in Olomouc in the Czech Republic, not far from the skull of Good King Wenceslas. A neo-Baroque chapel stands at the location of his torture, with the rack (allegedly the one used upon him, but possibly just one from the period) in the basement.
Government attempts to force priests to violate the seal of the confessional have never stopped.
