St Stan Illustrated Story

81 W e are not sure of the year in which Fr. Papczynski experi- enced this mystical phenomenon. In all probability it was in 1675, the year in which, as he himself reveals, God endowed him with “profound devotion to the souls in purgatory.” The fact is that the following year, 1676, the Saint made it one of the principal aims of his new Congregation of Marian Fathers to aid, “with the utmost diligence, devotion, and zeal,” the suffering souls in purgatory, especially the souls of soldiers who had died in battle and of the victims of pestilence. To understand and appreciate the need for this work of mercy, one has but to recall the frequent wars which ravaged Poland, especially from the middle of the 17 th century, and the pestilence and disease that normally followed in the wake of such wars. Thousands upon thousands met with sudden death, and God alone knows how many of them were taken without even a moment in which to prepare themselves. This thought gave Fr. Papczynski no peace. As he saw the cemeter- ies so swiftly filling with graves, he felt himself impelled to more prayer, mortification, and self-denial. S hortly after, the Turks had been driven away from the eastern frontiers of Poland by the Polish army under Sobieski’s com- mand. In order to get some rest, the army set up camp in the fields of the Ukraine. “Saint Stanislaus was also present in the camp, accompa- nying the king. As was his custom, he went outside the camp to the common graves of the soldiers that had been killed in the previous wars with the Turks, and there every day until the camp broke up he prayed with the utmost devotion for the dead soldiers. “One day in the midst of these graves, he had a vision of many of the souls, who begged him groaningly and with much insistence that he never cease to render them such help,” because they suffer intolerable pains in purgatory. Therefore, upon his return to his confreres, Fr. Papczynski “imposed upon them the obligation to remember in their prayers for the dead par- ticularly the souls of soldiers and of the victims of pestilence” (S. Wyszynski, Life of the Ven. Servant of God Fr. Stanislaus of Jesus and Mary, sec. 50 ). We do not have any historical documents for the confirmation of the above episode. Nonetheless, it is quite probable: there is in fact, nothing that would forbid us to accept that Fr. Papczynski really was a chaplain in the Polish army that set out in October 1674 against the in- vading Turks. Consequently, the episode would have occurred in the year 1675, the year then, in which Fr. Stanislaus “conceived a tremen- dous devotion towards the souls in purgatory.”