Feast day: August 17
St. Hyacinth of Poland
A Polish nobleman received into the Dominicans by St. Dominic himself, who carried the order across central and eastern Europe, founding houses from Kraków to Kyiv.
Hyacinth was a Polish nobleman, born about 1185 in Silesia, who became the great Dominican missionary of eastern Europe, earning the title 'the Apostle of the North.' Educated at Cracow, Prague, and Bologna, he was a canon of Cracow when, on a visit to Rome, he met St. Dominic himself and was among the very first to receive the habit of the new Order of Preachers.
Sent back to his homeland, he carried the Dominican life and the Gospel across an immense sweep of territory. From bases at Cracow and elsewhere he travelled, mostly on foot, through Poland, Prussia, Pomerania, and Lithuania, and pressed on into the lands of the Rus' and, tradition says, as far as the shores of the Black Sea, founding convents and preaching to pagans and lapsed Christians alike.
His journeys became the stuff of legend, adorned with many miracles. The most famous tells how, fleeing a Tatar raid on Kiev, he carried away both the Blessed Sacrament and a heavy stone statue of the Virgin so that they would not be desecrated — and found the statue had become miraculously light in his arms.
After decades of tireless missionary travel he died at Cracow in 1257. Canonized in 1594, he is honoured as one of the great apostles of the Slavic and Baltic peoples.
Called the 'Apostle of the North,' he traveled thousands of miles preaching from Poland to the Baltic and the edge of Russia, founding convents as he went.
Image: Ludovico Carracci (Public domain), via Wikimedia Commons.
Source: newadvent.org/cathen/07591b.htm
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