Originally published at National Catholic Register
SAINTS & ART: The spiritual influence of Kalinowski (1835-1907) was marked on Karol Wojtyła, the future St. John Paul II, who canonized him in 1991.
A 19th-century Pole whose influence on St. John Paul II was great (even though he died 13 years before the future pope was born), Rafał Kalinowski was born Józef in 1835 in Vilnius, now the capital of Lithuania.
He spent his early life and education in that triangle we now call Lithuania-Belarus-Russia. Because his father was a teacher there, he received a fine education at the School for Nobility in Vilnius, followed by two years of studies in agronomy and four at the St. Petersburg Academy of Military Engineering, where he earned a degree in engineering and appointment in the Russian Army as a lieutenant. (Poland had been erased from European maps from 1795-1918 by the Russians, Austrians and Prussians; education and professional advancement often had to take place under one of the occupiers.) He was then appointed lecturer in mathematics at the Academy and took part in designing the Kursk-Kyiv-Odessa Railroad (now all points in Russia’s war against Ukraine).
In 1863, Poles in the Russian Partition rose against their occupiers, and Kalinowski resigned
