Polish missionary Cardinal Adam Kozlowiecki, S.J.
Apr 13, 2005
Polish missionary Cardinal Adam Kozlowiecki, S.J. became the oldest cardinal of the new group elevated at the last Consistory of the millennium last year.
(Daily Catholic June 11-13, 1999) Cardinal Adam Kozlowiecki, S.J. is a Polish Missionary to Zambia who as served that region for 50 years after serving time in Auchwitz and Dachau during the war he was elevated to the cardinalate by Pope John Paul II in the most recent Consistory of February 21, 1998.
At 88, Cardinal Adam Kozlowiecki, S.J. is no spring chicken but, even though retired, is still a missionary at heart.
Born in Huta Komorowska in southern Poland on April 1. 1911 before World War I, he has experienced the horrors of numerous wars including two years after being ordained a Jesuit priest on June 24, 1937.
He, along with twenty-four of his fellow priests, quite possibly one of them being Saint Maximilian Kolbe, were arrested by the Nazi Gestapo in Krakow on November 10, 1939 after Hitler had invaded his homeland and sent to Auschwitz. There, through the grace of God, he escaped death and was transferred to Dachau a year later, another house of horrors operated by the infamous Third Reich where he remained until the end of the war when the prisoners were liberated.
Upon his release his Order sent him to Rhodesia as a missionary to teach. In 1950, Pope Pius XII made him Apostolic Administrator of the Prefecture of Lusaka. Five years later the Pope named him Bishop and Vicar Apostolic of Lusaka on September 11, 1955. Four years after that, his successor Pope John XXIII elevated him to Archibishop of Lusaka.
Ten years after assuming this post, he resigned in 1969 to allow a native African bishop to assume the bishopric or the sake of the people of Zambia. The following year Pope Paul VI appointed him to the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples.
A missionary for over 50 years in Zambia, Africa, Cardinal Kozlowieki was granted the greatest honor last year when fellow Polish prelate Karol Wojtoyla, now Pope John Paul II, named him in the Consistory of February 21, 1998 granting him the titular church of St. Andrew's on the Quirinal.
He became the oldest of the newest cardinals and, despite his age, expressed a yearning to return to his people in Africa where he resides today in Ridgeway, Zambia greatly loved by the faithful there.
Polish missionary Cardinal Adam Kozlowiecki, S.J.