The Renewal of the Order redone 2018

INTRODUCTION We offer the readers a volume of documents, most of them trans- lated from Latin, concerning the rebirth of the Congregation of Marian Fathers from 1909 to 1910. The Order was established in the seventeenth century, and it had written a beautiful page in the history of the Church. However, political persecutions in the nineteenth cen- tury almost brought it to complete extinction. Owing to the reform carried out by Blessed Jerzy Matulewicz in collaboration with General of the Order Wincenty Sekowski under the guidance of the Holy See, the Order was brought back to life and started to fulfill its mission again. To help understand what happened during those two years, we have selected documents reflecting the decline and struggle for survival of the Order after 1864 and then, after the Renewal, its steady growth until 1930. In addition to official documents, there is also a selection of corre- spondence on this subject between Rev. Matulewicz, General Fr. Wincenty Sekowski, and Rev. Franciszek Buczys. All these letters were conspiratorial, as they dealt with matters forbidden under czarist law. This is why their language is sometimes terse and hard to under- stand for the uninitiated. The documents and the letters constitute a complete record and complement each other. Therefore, we present them in chronological order. In documents written in Roman script, we have retained the spelling of names as in the source materials. [In English, special Polish characters are represented without their diacritical marks and all names are in the nominative case. The few Russian names are transliterated into English spelling. Spelling of geographical names follows the Polish edition, with the exception of well-known places such as Rome which do have their accepted English names. - Translator's note.]