A REMARKABLE BEATIFICATION
The Story of the Ulma Family
An incredible story of sacrifice, courage and love.
The Ulma family’s story is a powerful testament to courage and sacrifice during World War II in Poland. They heroically hid eight Jews in their home, paying the ultimate price under Nazi occupation. Their beatification, including their miscarried child, opens a window into discussions about martyrdom, faith, and the challenges of modernity. Their tragic end on March 24, 1944, is not just a historical event but a narrative that resonates deeply with contemporary issues of morality and resistance. To truly appreciate the depth of their story and its relevance today, we encourage you to watch the videos below, which brings to life the inspiring and poignant journey of the Ulma family. Their legacy is a beacon of hope and a reminder of the enduring power of the human spirit.
Heroic Ulma Family: WWII Martyrs and Their Unborn Child Beatified
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The Ulma Family’s Ultimate Sacrifice: Righteous Among Nations
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Ulma Family Beatification: A Catholic Church First
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Markova’s Defiance: The Ulma Family and Polish Resistance
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Remembering the Ulmas: Martyrs for Life in WWII Poland
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Nate sine nomine, ora pro nobis!
The Ulma family were exemplary of the Polish fight against the holocaust, paying the ultimate price for hiding eight Jews in their home. Poland was the only nation where German occupiers enforced an automatic death penalty for helping Jews and Poland today is credited with more Righteous Among Nations than any country in Europe.
More beatifications and canonisations were proclaimed during the pontificate of John Paul II than in the previous five hundred years of the Church’s history. Yet this week’s beatification of an unborn child doesn’t quite fit the rubric of the Vatican’s 1983 reformed policy. Killed for sheltering Jews in their house, the entire Ulma family will join that curious gallery of the hallowed pantheon for which process has ceded to tradition.
On the night of March 24, 1944, Jozef and Wiktoria Ulma of Markowa, Poland, were shot along with their six children after the Gestapo discovered that they were sheltering two Jewish families in their home. Their case for beatification, moved in 2003, came to fruition with a papal envoy celebrating their beatification in Markowa on Sunday.
Online debate has started over whether Wiktoria’s unborn, seventh, child can really be called a martyr. The unbaptised may receive a ‘baptism of blood’ for dying a death in a Christian cause but, devoid of any agency or knowledge of their salvation, the only precedent for the beatification of the unborn Ulma child seems to be the Holy Innocents.
One would think that the slaughter of every child around Bethlehem under two would be a fairly significant historical event, yet The historian Josephus, who recorded contemporaneous events, makes no mention of Herod’s genocidal decree.
Of argument from silence, Peter Kreeft says, “When a speaker or writer is silent about x, we cannot conclude that he does not believe in x, or that there is no x.”
However, we cannot dismiss Josephus’ silence lightly, as he is the major source for much of the period’s Jewish history. Does he show form on comparable matters? One example may be his silence on the expulsion of the Jews from Rome by Emperor Claudius. That must have been a massive story to him, wouldn’t you think? Bethlehem, by comparison, was an obscure backwater to Josephus’ Roman readers, to whom infanticide was unremarkable in an age of high child mortality. From a population of maybe a thousand souls in and around Bethlehem, the death of a dozen or so infants could hardly have been worth a mention. The story offered no political or historical purpose to make it worth reporting – but this hasn’t prevented members of the Church raising the estimated scale of the slaughter into tens, even hundreds, of thousands.
If the nameless and unquantifiable victims of Herod, condemned in the name of Christ the King, can be immortalised in sacred tradition for their conceptual martyrdom then who are we – latter day scribes and pharisees – to question the intention or technicalities relating to the youngest Ulma child?
The road to beatification is paved by the intentions of prayer, but often also by PR.
Would you have read this far if you had known that? Would I still venerate St Bernadette of Lourdes if her path to sainthood hadn’t been moved by a 19th Century proclamation of the immaculate conception and a near cult of pilgrims seeking cures? And what of Blessed Carlo Acutis – keyboard crusader for the Church – displayed in his tracksuit and trainers for all the world like the effigy of a Mediaeval knight on his tomb. I suppose the challenge is to cleave from symbols to tradition. Scared dogma can’t just die as science explains away yesterday’s miracles and technology de-mystifies the hagiology.
The purpose of saints as interlocutor, bridging the gap between the temporal and celestial concerns of the places and times to which they lived,
And so, to the modern massacre of the innocents. That the seventh Ulma Child’s gruesome death nonetheless ended in official confirmation that he, or she, is at rest in Lord is a comfort to those of us who observe the massacre of the innocents, just as once my British ancestors observed the heretics burned for refusing the reformation.
Even in the twentieth century, as estimates vary wildy over how many Jews were murdered in occupied Europe and Hagiographers wrestle with finer details that history, archeology and technology bring to the office of Devil’s Advocate, those who venerate the Ulma family today must see through estimates of scale to perceive the Christian nature of rebellion against the lights of perverted science, eugenics and the selective facts with which propagandists evil enchantment of Europe.
But in any case, the seventh Ulma Child is a powerful witness of the Church to the greatest massacre of the twentieth century: that of the unborn.
Unborn Ulma Child, Pray For us.
This website is part of a project commemorating the Ulma family and is co-sponsored by PZU
