Feast day: June 17
St. Albert Chmielowski
A Polish painter and former insurgent, his leg lost in war, who abandoned art to live among the homeless of Kraków, founding the Albertine brothers and sisters to serve them.
Albert Chmielowski was born Adam Chmielowski in 1845 into the Polish gentry, in a Poland then partitioned and under foreign rule. As a young man of seventeen he joined the doomed Polish uprising of 1863 against Russia, was captured, and lost a leg — amputated without anaesthetic — wearing a crude prosthesis for the rest of his life.
After the rebellion he turned to art, becoming a gifted and well-known painter. But success left him restless and unsatisfied; drawn ever more deeply to God and to the poor, he eventually gave up his promising artistic career entirely, convinced that he was called to serve the most wretched of society.
Taking the religious name Brother Albert, he founded communities of brothers and sisters — the Albertines — to serve the homeless and the destitute of Kraków. He went to live among them in the squalid municipal shelters, sharing their poverty completely, and turned those grim refuges into houses of dignity and care, asking nothing for himself.
He died on Christmas Day, 1916. His life later inspired a play, 'Our God's Brother,' by the future Pope John Paul II, who canonized him in 1989. He is honoured as a patron of the homeless and a model of radical charity toward the poorest of the poor.
A celebrated painter who gave it all up for the poor, he became the hero of a play by the young Karol Wojtyła — later Pope John Paul II, who canonized him.
Image: Unknown authorUnknown author (Public domain), via Wikimedia Commons.
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