Alojzy Liguda - Misplaced Pages

Polish Roman Catholic priest and martyr

This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page. (Learn how and when to remove these messages)

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed.
Find sources: "Alojzy Liguda" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (November 2013) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

You can help expand this article with text translated from the corresponding article in Polish. (December 2023) Click for important translation instructions.

View a machine-translated version of the Polish article.
Machine translation, like DeepL or Google Translate, is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Misplaced Pages.
Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article.
You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary is Content in this edit is translated from the existing Polish Misplaced Pages article at ]; see its history for attribution.
You may also add the template {{Translated|pl|Alojzy Liguda}} to the talk page.
For more guidance, see Misplaced Pages:Translation.

(Learn how and when to remove this message)

Blessed Alojzy Liguda S.V.D.
Born	(1898-01-23)January 23, 1898 Winów, Poland
Died	December 8, 1942(1942-12-08) (aged 44) Dachau Concentration Camp
Venerated in	Roman Catholic Church
Beatified	13 June 1999, Poland by Pope John Paul II
Feast	June 12

Aloysius Liguda (January 23, 1898 – December 8, 1942), was a priest and is venerated as a blessed martyr of the Society Of The Divine Word Missionaries (SVD). Liguda was a chaplain, and teacher. He died at Dachau concentration camp in the course of medical experimentation.

Life

Alojzy Liguda was born in Winów near Opole, Poland in 1892, the youngest of seven children of Wojciech and Rozalia Przybyl Liguda. His father used to lead pilgrimages to the Basilica of the Visitation in Wambierzyce and to Mount St. Anne. Liguda was a good student; he became interested in the missions in China and Africa from reading magazines.

At the age of fifteen, Liguda entered the Divine Word minor seminary at Nysa. He was drafted in 1917 and sent to the French front as an artilleryman. After the war, he returned to the seminary to complete his studies. In 1920 he went to the Society of the Divine Word novitiate in Mödling, Austria. He was then sent for teacher training to Pieniezno, where he taught Latin and mathematics at the minor seminary. From there he returned to St. Gabriel's in Mödling for further studies in dogmatics and church history. At age 35, in 1927, he was ordained as a priest.

Liguda was assigned to the provincial house in Górna Grupa. After validating his secondary education certificate he was accepted to the Polish Philology Faculty at the University of Poznań. In Poznań he also served a chaplain and religious education teacher at the Ursuline Sisters school for girls. He returned to Grupa and taught at the minor seminary; he also served as chaplain to the garrison in Grupa on Sundays. In the summer of 1939 he became the rector of the monastery at Gorna Grupa.

In February 1940, the seminary was turned into a makeshift detention camp for the religious and seminarians. He was sent from one camp to another: Nowy Port in Gdańsk, Sachsenhausen, and Stutthof. By December he was in Dachau, and since he knew German, he was a translator for most of the internees. After the war, it turned out that he could successfully apply for release from the camp. The family had German citizenship, he himself was a war veteran, and two brothers died at the front. Liguda did not apply because he felt responsible for his Polish pupils. Always he tried to keep up morale with his calm demeanor and a ready joke.

Liguda had contracted tuberculosis but by December 1942 his health had much improved. Nonetheless, he was placed on the "disabled" list by a kapo in revenge for Liguda's criticism of the kapo's unfair distribution of food. Liguda and fellow inmates were transported by German soldiers to a nearby water reservoir where they all drowned. The Germans were conducting medical experiments to determine the effect of ice cold water on the human body, relative to the rescue of downed pilots. The family was advised, however, that the cause of death was tuberculosis.

His body was burnt in the Dachau crematorium; the coffin with ashes was handed over to relatives and buried in the family tomb. In 2016, some of the ashes, as well as those of other martyrs of the Dachau concentration camp were placed in the Church of the Holy Spirit in his hometown of Winów.

"In the Dachau prison camp near Munich in Germany, Blessed Louis Liguda, priest of the Society of the Divine Word and martyr, who, during the wartime invasion of Poland, was slain by the prison guards witness to Christ the Lord until death."(Roman Martyrology)

Works

Audi filia, - regarding Pope Pius XI’s encyclical "About the Christian Education"
Go forward and higher - conferences and sermons
Bread and Salt - Sunday homilies

References

Categories: