Raphael Kalinowski

Saint Raphael Kalinowski was a Polish military engineer, Siberian exile, and Discalced Carmelite priest whose life crossed the failed January Uprising of 1863 and the Carmelite revival in late-nineteenth-century Galicia. Born Jozef Kalinowski in 1835 in Vilnius, then under Russian rule, he was the son of a mathematics professor at the city's Noble Institute.

He trained at the Imperial Military Engineering Academy in Saint Petersburg, graduated in 1857, and worked on the design of the Kursk-Kiev-Odessa railway. In 1863, with the Polish national rising under way, he resigned his commission and accepted the post of war minister for the insurgent forces in Lithuania, knowing the cause was already lost. He was arrested in 1864, sentenced to death, then commuted to ten years of hard labour in the Siberian salt mines at Usolye-Sibirskoye and Irkutsk.

Released in 1874, he spent three years tutoring the tubercular Prince August Czartoryski in Paris, then in 1877 entered the Discalced Carmelite novitiate at Graz, taking the religious name Raphael of Saint Joseph. Ordained priest in 1882, he was sent to revive the abandoned Carmelite house at Czerna in Galicia and later founded a new monastery at Wadowice. He served twice as provincial of the order's Austrian-Polish province.

He died at Wadowice in 1907 and was buried at Czerna. Pope John Paul II, who had grown up in the town where Kalinowski founded the monastery, beatified him in 1983 and canonised him in 1991.

The name Raphael comes from the Hebrew Refael, meaning God has healed, the name of the archangel who in the Book of Tobit restores Tobit's sight. He took it as a religious name late, after a decade of Siberian forced labour, and lived its sense as a confessor to whom Galician Catholics travelled for hours.