On June 21st 2016, the diocesan part of Piotr Skarga’s beatification process ended in the Krakow’s St. Peter and Paul’s church. A solemn session of the beatification comission was held with participation of Stanislaw cardinal Dziwisz, the archbishop of Krakow and father Jakub Kołacz, the provincial father of Southern Province of the Society of Jesus.
The next stage of Piotr Skarga’s, SJ, beatification will proceed in Vatican when the diocesan stage documents will be received.
Piotr Skarga (February 1536 – 27 September 1612) was a Polish Jesuit, preacher, hagiographer, polemicist, and leading figure of the Counter-Reformation in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Due to his oratorical gifts, he has been called „the Polish Bossuet”.
Skarga is remembered by Poles as a vigorous early advocate of reforms to the Polish-Lithuanian polity, and as a critic of the Commonwealth’s governing classes, as well as of its religious tolerance policies. He advocated strengthening the monarch’s power at the expense of parliament (the Sejm) and of the nobility (the szlachta).
He was a professor at the Kraków Academy and in 1579 he became the first rector of the Wilno Academy. Later, he served in the Jesuit College at Kraków. He was also a prolific writer, and his Lives of the Saints (Żywoty świętych, 1579) was for several centuries one of the most popular books in the Polish language. His other important work was the Sejm Sermons (Kazania Sejmowe, 1597), a political treatise, which became popular in the second half of the 19th century, when he was seen as the „patriotic seer” who predicted the partitions of Poland.
