Gietrzwald apparitions: heavenly help to a persecuted minority

Summary:

Gietrzwald, 1877. This village of 2,000 souls lay in the Warmia-Mazuria region in northeastern Poland, traditionally Catholic but annexed to Protestant Prussia almost a century earlier. The 1870-1880 decade was a time of systematic vexation and discrimination by Chancellor Bismarck against Polish Catholics, as part of his Kulturkampf ("fight for civilization") policy: incarceration of bishops and priests, expulsion of religious congregations, ban on the Polish language in schools and government offices since 1873, etc.

Nevertheless, the faith of the locals remained intact, and spiritual life continued undiminished. The families of the two Gietrzwald visionaries are fine examples: they were faithful to the Church, united, loving and sensitive to the suffering of others, including Protestants. Marian devotion had been strong there for centuries.

On June 27, 1877, 13-year-old Justyna Szafrinska, fatherless and employed on a poultry farm to help her impoverished family, with nothing to distinguish her from her playmates, returned from the church rectory where the village priest had received her and her mother as part of their preparation for communion. Just out of the building, Justyna and her mother started praying, as the Angelus bell had just sounded. They were a hundred yards from a maple tree. Justyna looked up towards the tree, and something unusual caught her eye: a "white light" that "grew" soon revealed a "human silhouette" in the middle: a stunningly beautiful woman accompanied by an "angel". Justynia wanted to shout but couldn't. She ran up to her mother, who kept going and hadn't seen anything. She told her: "There's a beautiful lady, she has long beautiful hair that falls over her shoulder; she's sitting on a golden throne."

Alerted by Justyna's cries, the priest joined them. But neither he nor her mother could see anything. The hypothesis of a collective hallucination must be rejected: only two girls (Barbara would become the second visionary the following day) would see the Virgin. The following day, June 28, Justyna recited the rosary with her classmates a few yards from the maple tree where the Lady had appeared the day before. Suddenly, the Virgin appeared again, in the same manner: first a white light, then a corporeal "materialization". This time, one of her friends, 12-year-old Barbara Samulowska, also saw her: surrounded by "angels" and wearing a "crown".

In just three months, there were no fewer than 160 apparitions. On July 3, the apparition told the girls: "I will be with you for another two months". The last apparition was on September 16, 1877.

The messages are few in number and perfectly in line with the Church's faith: they call for daily recitation of the rosary (June 30 message), prayer and conversion. No theological or liturgical novelties are mentioned. The apparition did not speak in German, nor in pure, academic Polish, but in the regional dialect, very different from other Polish dialects. 

As with other major Mariophanies, the identity of the apparition was not immediately known. It was not until July 1 that the Lady revealed her name: the "Most Holy Virgin Immaculate". This name obviously echoes the dogma of the Immaculate Conception proclaimed by the Church in 1854.

The apparition called on the local faithful to pray ever harder for an end to the Prussian persecution of Catholics. The extraordinary thing is this: despite the Prussians' intimidation (repeated hindrance of the pilgrimage, imprisonment of Gietrzwald's parish priest for five days, removal of the visionaries from the village, prohibitions on gathering at the apparition site, etc.), the flow of the faithful never stopped, and the two little girls never recounted anything different from their first account of June 28, 1877.

On July 6, the Virgin asked for "a stand under the tree [where she appeared], with a statue of the Immaculate Conception, with cloths placed at the foot of the stand", so that they could be blessed by her and distributed to the sick who requested them: in the following days, unexplained healings were reported; their number increased over the weeks. Medical reports attest to these miracles.

On August 6, 1877, the bishop of Warmie, Filip Krementz, ordered an investigation; several priests interrogated Justyna and Barbara, as well as local residents and the parish priest. Their 47-page conclusive report was forwarded to the bishop, who came in person to visit the site. He met the two seers and interviewed them together and separately. On his orders, three doctors(two Catholic and one Protestant) examined the girls and reported a fact that belied any possibility of fraud or deception: during the apparitions, the girls' physiognomy changed, as did several physiological indicators - acceleration of the pulse, cooling of the extremities of the body, total fixity of gaze... These characteristics immediately returned to normal when the visionary experience ceased.

The three investigating doctors judged the two girls to be "reserved, simple, unaffected and free of any form of duplicity". The girls' future life choices corroborated their judgment: they both became Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul. Justyna eventually left her congregation to marry a Frenchman in Paris in 1899, but she lived her entire life as a Catholic. Barbara remained a nun and was sent as a missionary to Guatemala, where she died in 1950 in the odor of sanctity. A cause for beatification was opened in 1950.

On September 8, some 50,000 people (including Lithuanians and Germans) flocked to the site, where the apparition pointed to a spring near the maple tree. Local doctors observed that people suffering from a variety of illnesses recovered their health after drawing a little water from the spring. At least 15,000 people came to the village on September 16, the day of the last apparition. Bismarck declared: "We cannot tolerate any Lourdes in the Empire." He failed to stop Gietrzwald as he had failed to stop Marpingen (Germany, Saarland) in July 1876, after the Virgin had appeared there.

Bishop Krementz allowed the devotion to develop, authorized pilgrimages and the distribution of the messages, without intervening or ruling on the supernatural origin of the apparitions, an attitude dictated by prudence in these times of persecution: the Prussians would inevitably have taken such recognition as an affront. 

Over the next century, the pilgrimage continued and grew in popularity, despite the agitated times Poland experienced. On September 10, 1967, while Poland was still under Communist rule, Cardinals Stefan Wyszynski (Primate of Poland) and Karol Wojtyla (Archbishop of Krakow, future Pope John Paul II) crowned the image of Our Lady of Gietrzwald. On July 2, 1970, Pope Paul VI elevated the Marian shrine founded on the site of the apparitions to the rank of basilica minor.

Finally, on September 11, 1977, as part of the celebrations of the centenary of the apparitions, presided over by Archbishop Karol Wojtyla and attended by Cardinal Wyszynski, the Bishop of Warmie, Jozef Drzazga, issued a decree declaring the apparitions of 1877 to be "authentic and worthy of belief".

In the 2000s, the village welcomed a million pilgrims a year. In 2017, the figure was the same.

Beyond reasons to believe:

Gietrzwald is a place of peace and prayerful silence that has never disappeared, even in the worst moments of Polish history. 

Going further:

Is This Marian Apparition a Bridge Between Lourdes and Fatima?  by Joseph Pronechen September 26, 2016

More information:

• Video The Incredible Approved Apparition You've Never Heard Of - Explaining the Faith
• M. Winovska, “Le Culte marial en Pologne”, in Maria, vol. 4, 1956, p. 699-700. 
• G. Rovira Tarazona, “Polémica anticatolica ante las apariciones”, Estudios marianos, vol. 52, 1987, p. 354-360.