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MOUNT CARMEL
CLOISTERED CONVENT
ST. RAPHAEL KALINOWSKI
Little known outside his native Poland, Joseph Kalinowski was born in 1835 and became, by turns, an engineer, a military officer, a leader in the 1863 insurrection against Russian domination, an exile in Siberia, a tutor, and eventually a Discalced Carmelite priest. He died in 1907 at the Carmelite Monastery in Wadowice, the city where Karol Wojtyla- the future Pope John Paul II who would later beatify and canonize him- was born only 13 years later.
Joesph Kalinowski was born in Vilna, Poland on September 1, 1835, as a second child of Andrew Kalinowski and Josephine Polonska. He lost his mother when he was only two months old. His father later married his first wife's sister, and had three other children: two sons and a daughter. Unfortunately, Joseph's second mother died when he was scarcly nine years old. His father then married for the third time, and from that marriage four children were born. So Joseph had five brothers and three sisters. Joseph's third mother was a women of exceptional gifts of mind and heart. With remarkable tenderness she knew how to love all of Andrew Kalinowski's nine children. These parents succeeded in converting their home, even aid its sorrows and joys, into a center of happiness and give them a solid christian education.
He attended school at the Nobility Institute at Vilna, from the age of nine, where his own father was a professor of mathematics. His education at the Institute ended in 1850. His brilliant success in his studies led Joseph and his father to consider his going on for higher studies, but this was not easy to accomplish.
A soldier and an engineer
During his studies at Nobility Institute, Joseph's special inclination and talents for mathematics and geometry became evident. He wanted to pursue higher studies in this field but the political situation of his country was not favorable. Higher studies, in fact, were not permitted in Poland at that time. Andrew Kalinowski, after seriously considering the matter, proposed that his two older sons enroll in the recently created Higher Institute of Agronomy at Hory-Horki.
In fact, Joseph did not like the study of agronomy. His marked inclination toward mathematics and the related sciences urged him to go elsewhere for an education and eventually led him to the school of Military Engineering School of Roads and Bridges.
Crisis of faith
Studies at the Military Academy constitute the saddest period of Kalinowski's life, years marked by a crisis of faith and searching for the meaning of life. His faith, formed at home, began to crumble now. Religious indifference was deeply rooted in intellectual circles of the Russian capital of that time, and greatly influenced the young student, who was uprooted from his country's cultural and religious environment.
In his memoirs many years later he wrote, "I abandoned religious practices, but from time to time a craving for these things awakened in my soul. But I was not faithful to that interior voice." The sad period of his studies at the Military Academy ended in 1857. Joseph was awarded the rank of lieutenant and named professor of mathematics at the Academy. But he did not want to stay in that environment that had caused him so many interior crises.
He began to want to pursue road and bridge engineering as his vocation, so he accepted an offer to work on building the Kursk-Konontop railroad. Taking his final leave of the imperial capital, he went to Kursk. Only then, in the regions of his work, and reflected in solitude, did he discover interior peace. In a letter, describes his state of mind at the time. "In this solitude I succeeded in forming interior peace within myself, and I confess to you sincerely that this continual work with myself and on myself, far removed from people, produced a great change for the good. I could fully acknowledge the value of familiar religious ideas, and, finally, I turned toward them."
At this time a devotional book fortunately fell into his hands. It belonged to a Polish assistant, who had received it from his mother. Reading this book influenced his soul and it especially reawakened in him feelings of confidence in the intercession of the Most Holy Madonna."
Exile in Siberia
When the construction of the railroad was suspended Kalinowski then left the Railroad Company and was tranferred, to the Command of Engineers near the fortress at Brest-Litovsk in 1860. During his stay at Brest he was promoted to the rank of captain of the General Staff. Everything was going well, but he was become more and more convinced that a military career was not for him. He was witnessing the destruction of Catholics under the persecution of czarist powers. He then began to resigning his rank and commissions and seeking other employment. Kalinowski himself confesses that he "was no longer capable of wearing the Russian uniform while his heart was sick with the knowledge that the blood of his countrymen was being shed." He finally decided to to join the insurrectionists, even agreeing to become War Minister for the region of Vilna. At the beginning of June 1863 he found himself at Warsaw with the heads of the National Council of the insurrection. By the time he returned to Vilna, the insurrection had been brutally repressed.
After being spied on by the Russians for some time, Kalinowski was arrested on the nighty of March 24-25, 1864, and taken to a nearby Dominican monastery that had been transformed into a prison.He was the last of the leaders of the rebellion still at large. But his was very serious crime: An ex-captain of the Czar's army, he had become Minister of War against the Czar. Hence the sentece passed by the Military Tribunal on June 2 was the most serious possible: capital punishment. Innumerable pressures from his family and friends, not to mention the great esteem in which he was held by nearly evryone, persuaded the Russians to avoid the risk that he might come to be viewed as a martyr of the people; his death sentence was communed to ten years of forced labor in Siberia. On June 29, 1864, when Kalinowski and others departed for Siberia, he took a copy of the Gospels, The Imitation of Christ, and his crucifix.
The trip lasted for almost ten months. Their destination was the salt mines of Usole near Lake Bajkal; they arrived there on April 15, 1865. Kalinowski was an angel of God for the fellow men. He knew not only how to bear his own sufferings and discomforts heroically, but also how to share with others the little bit he had. Here, in the midst of pain and labor he began to cultivate a profound interior life, nourished by frequent participation in the sacraments and personal prayer. Eventhough sacramental life was not easy, he profited from the little occasions come across. He wrote: "Outside prayer I have nothing to offer to my God. I can't fast, I have hardly any alms to give, I'm unable to work. The only thing remaining for me is to pray and to suffer. But never before have I ever had such great treasures and I desire nothing more."
A Tutor
Joseph Kalinowski returned from Siberian exile with a reputation as a man of profound faith and a good educator of the young. This lead him to the house of Prince Ladislaus Czartoryski, who was then residing in Paris. Before his arrest Kalinowski had the thought of a vocation, but in the exile his vocation to the religious life matured. Unfortunately in his land there were no possibility to become a religious. So he thought of the only possibility: migrating to the West.
Kalinowski agreed to assume the office of tutor for Czartoryski's son, Augustus. Carmel was catched Kalinowski's attention while reading the book The Lives of the Saints, he noted the rapid expansion of Carmelite order in the West and made him think that precisely this order should be able to bring the schismatics back to the Church.
Vocation
The aunt of Augustus, Kalinowski's pupil, the Princess of Grocholski Czartoryska, was a Discalced Carmelite nun living in the monastery at Cracow, the only remaining convent among all those suppressed by the occupying forces. She was so much involved in renewing Carmelite life in Poland, both among the nuns and the friars, and so she was looking for suitable men. In Kalinowski, who she met in the speakroom when he accompanied her nephew in August 1875, she discerned someone sent by divine providence, and though she did not dare say anything about he wishes to him then, she did find a way to lead him to Carmel. She began a crusade of prayer for Kalinowski's vocation to the Order, and then initiated a correspondence with him. She sent him the following poem of St. Teresa, which soon became Kalinowski's motto:
"LET NOTHING TROUBLE YOU,
LET NOTHING FRIGHTEN YOU,ALL IS FLEETING,
GOD ALONE IS UNCHANGING.
PATIENT ENDURANCE
OBTAINS EVERYTHING.
WHO POSSESSES GOD
WANTS NOTHING.
GOD ALONE SUFFICES."
These words, in the end, induced him to join the Teresian Carmelites. Joseph asked Augustus's father to release him from his teaching contract and his proposal was accepted. On November26, 1877, he went to Graz and was clothed in the habit of the Order, receiving at the same time his religious name: Raphael of Saint Joseph. One year later, he made his religious vows and went to Gyor in Hungary to continue his religious formation and to complete his philosophical and theological studies. There on November 27, 1881, he made his solemn profession in the hands of the Superior General of the Order, Father Jerome-Mary Gotti, and after that he was sent to Czerna. In Czerna, on January 15 of the following year, in the only Polish Discalced Camelite monastery remaining from the suppression, he was raised to the priesthood. Highly regarded by his superiors and his fellow religious, he was continually given the office of superior or orther areas of responsibility. He placed all his knowledge and his rich experience of life at the service of the church and the Order. He never forget that in a certain sense he owed his Carmelite vocation to the Carmelite nuns. He promoted the foundation of the Wadowice monastery with its "little college," still in existence, where young boys who manifest signs of a religious vocation are formed ad instructed. With great zeal he began researching the conventual archives that had scattered during the suppressions to restore the spirit of the Order and the heritage of the past. Convinced that the future of the Polish Carmel could be constructed only on the foundations of the past, he unquestionably accomplished this goal. He wished to make Carmel known, to propagate the spirituality of the Order to a wide audience, he transformed the conventual churches at Czerna and Wadowice into true and proper shrines where there were always long lines of people waiting to go into the confessionals to celebrate the Sacrament of Penance. The saint also organized communities of the Secular Order of Carmel and also confraternities of the Scapular of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. He strongly propagated devotion to the Carmelite scapular and was highly esteemed as a confessor and spiritual director of all kinds of people.
A Tutor
His earthly career came to a close in the fall of 1907 at Wadowice, while he was still prio of the monastery. He suffered greatly during the last months of his life, exhausted by sickness and work. He notes, in a letter to his friend, "Tomarrow is November 2, the day of the faithful departed. When I was still a boy, I dreamed I would die on All Souls Day. Whether I die on that day or not, no matter what happens, I still confess it is always good. Then I salute you cordially, and I ask you, come what may, to say a De Profundis for my soul."
Father Raphael did not actually die on November 2, though his dream did, in fact, come true. He died on November 15 (1907), the day when the Carmelite Order, following its own liturgical calender, remebers all the diceased brothers and sisters of the Order.
Pope John Paul II beatified Kalinowski in 1983 in Kraków, in front of a crowd of over two million people. On 17 November 1991, he was canonized when, in St. Peter's Basilica, Pope John Paul II declared his boyhood hero a saint. RaphaeÅ‚ was the first friar in the Order of the Discalced Carmelites to have been canonized since co-founder John of the Cross (1542–1591) became a saint in 1726.
Kalinowski's feast day is celebrated on 20 November (on 19 November in the Order of the Discalced Brothers of the Blessed Virgin Mary of Mount Carmel). He is considered a patron saint of soldiers and officers of Poland and also of Polish exiles in Siberia.
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