At Białystok in Poland, Blessed Bolesława Maria Lament, virgin, who amid political upheavals founded the Congregation of the Missionary Sisters of the Holy Family for the fostering of Christian unity, the care of the abandoned, and the Christian education of girls.
Lifespan: 1862–1946
Beatified: 5 June 1991 by Pope John Paul II
Memoria liturgica: 29 January
Holy Father, keep them in your name, which you have given me, that they may be one, as we are one. (John 17:11)
Bolesława Maria Lament, the eldest of eight children of Marcin Lament and Lucia Cyganowska, was born on 3 July 1862 in Łowicz, Poland.
During her childhood she endured the grief of witnessing the deaths of her sisters Elena and Leocadia and of her little brother Marcin — this was an era when infant mortality decimated families, reducing the ranks of many large households. The young Bolesława was permanently marked by these painful experiences. After primary and secondary schooling, she went to Warsaw to attend a school of arts and trades, where she earned a dressmaking diploma; returning to Łowicz, she opened a dressmaking workshop together with her sister Stanisława, all the while living an interior life deeply rooted in spirituality.
At the age of twenty-two, in 1884, she decided to enter the Congregation of the Family of Mary, which was organizing itself clandestinely in Warsaw on account of tsarist persecution. She was a zealous sister, distinguished by the gift of prayer, recollection, seriousness, and the faithfulness with which she fulfilled her duties. After the novitiate and the profession of simple vows, she worked as a dressmaking teacher and educator in various houses of the Congregation scattered across the territory of the Russian Empire. But after nine years, before pronouncing solemn vows, she underwent a profound crisis that left her uncertain of her vocation within that congregation, and she left it, returning to her home in Łowicz with the intention of eventually entering an enclosed convent. On the advice of her confessor, she later chose works of assistance for the homeless — an activity she continued in Warsaw when her family moved there; to support herself, she opened a dressmaking workshop with her younger sister Maria.
Before long she was entrusted with the direction of a shelter for the homeless, where she labored to bring order to the ethical and religious lives of those in her care. She prepared them to receive the sacraments, visited the sick in their poor homes and refuges, and occupied herself with the children. In 1894 yet another cholera epidemic took her father from her, burdening her with additional family responsibilities; she took in her mother and her thirteen-year-old brother Stefano, who was attending secondary school in Warsaw and intended to become a priest.
She joined the Third Order of Saint Francis and then came into contact with the Capuchin friar Blessed Honorat Koźmiński (1829–1916), founder of several religious congregations that worked clandestinely owing to the political circumstances then affecting Poland.
Death struck her family once again in 1900, claiming the young Stefano; standing at his bier, Bolesława Lament promised to return to religious life. Two years later, Father Honorat introduced her to a woman who had come from Belarus seeking sisters to direct a Third Order house and an educational home at Mahilyow on the Dnieper.
Bolesława felt the urgency of building relationships and contacts so as to draw the Orthodox toward reunion with the Catholic Church, while at the same time assisting the Catholic population to remain faithful without yielding to the difficulties that had arisen under the tsarist regime. She therefore accepted, and in 1903 departed for Mahilyow in Belarus, a city of some forty thousand inhabitants.
At first she lodged with Leocadia Gorczyńska, who ran a weaving workshop to teach a trade to girls from poor families; then Bolesława Lament rented a wooden house and set about adapting it into a dressmaking workshop.
Struck by Bolesława’s industry, Leocadia Gorczyńska decided to come and live with her; Lucia Czechowska soon joined the two women. At this point, Bolesława began to think of founding a congregation — strictly religious in character and devoted to apostolate among the Orthodox. She was able to bring this about with the help of the Jesuit father Felix Wierczyński, who contributed directly to the foundation. In October 1905 the three women established the new congregation, known as the Society of the Holy Family, which later changed its name to the Missionary Sisters of the Holy Family; Bolesława became its first superior.
In the autumn of 1907, Bolesława and the six sisters then composing the community moved to St. Petersburg, where she developed a broad programme of instruction and education devoted above all to young people; by 1913 she was already able to extend her activity to Finland, opening a girls’ school at Vyborg. In St. Petersburg she carried out intensive catechetical, educational, and charitable work in the poorest districts, strove to create the conditions for genuine social ecumenism, and sought to deepen mutual understanding and goodwill among pupils and their families, who differed in nationality and religion. Within this ecumenical context, she began to consider establishing a separate branch of sisters of the Eastern rite within the Congregation.
The life of her institution was far from easy. She had to overcome the obstacles placed by tsarist religious policy, then those arising from the First World War and from the persecutions of the Bolshevik revolutionary movement, which seized power in Russia with the October Revolution of 1917. Accordingly, in 1921 she was compelled to leave Russia and return to Poland, intending to resume activities in St. Petersburg when circumstances allowed. All of this brought enormous material losses, together with the frustration of her aspirations; in Poland too she found a troubling situation. The Congregation lived in poverty, but Mother Bolesława Lament, with her great faith, committed herself wholly to the will of God, and little by little the complex of social and political circumstances and constraints was overcome.
For several months she directed the sisters’ work in Volhynia; in 1922 she founded a new house in Pomerania in the eastern territories of Poland, where the population was poor and predominantly Orthodox. From 1924 onward she began opening further houses in the archdiocese of Vilnius and the diocese of Pinsk; by 1935 these numbered thirty-three, scattered throughout Poland, with one in Rome as well.
In 1925, Mother Bolesława traveled to Rome to obtain pontifical approval of the Congregation of the Missionary Sisters of the Holy Family, but the process stalled for lack of clarity regarding the sisters’ duties, divided as they were between two branches: apostolate and teaching on the one hand, and the domestic management of the houses on the other.
In 1935 she decided, for serious reasons of health, to relinquish the office of Superior General, and in agreement with the new Superior she retired to Białystok, where, though elderly and gravely ill, she devoted herself to opening schools, nurseries, a shelter for single women, and a soup kitchen for the unemployed.
The Second World War brought new difficulties to the elderly Mother Bolesława, including the threat of Nazi persecution; she was compelled to change the forms of her activity, adapting them to the needs of the moment. In 1941 she was struck by paralysis and gave herself over to a more ascetic life, transmitting precious counsel to her fellow sisters.
She died a holy death at Białystok on 29 January 1946, at the age of eighty-four; her remains were taken to the convent at Ratowo and buried in the crypt beneath the Church of Saint Anthony.
The Congregation of the Missionary Sisters of the Holy Family spread widely in Poland, Russia, Zambia, Libya, the United States, and Rome. On 5 June 1991, Bolesława Maria Lament was proclaimed Blessed by Pope John Paul II at Białystok, during his apostolic journey to Poland.