A Contribution to the Biography of the Last Apostolic Administrator of the Kamieniec Diocese, Rev. Jan Świderski (1888-1959)

Abstract

In the article that is based mainly on archive materials that were unknown until now a biography of Rev. Prelate Jan Świderski (1888-1959) is presented. In the 1920s and in the early 1930s he was a leading figure in the Catholic Church in the Soviet Podolia. At that time he had to manage the Kamieniec Diocese that in its borders comprised the former territory of the Podolia Province. Rev. Świderski, as one of the few Podolia priests who left Podolia in fear of Bolsheviks returned to his diocese at the end of 1920. He worked in the parishes of Zieńkowce, Wońkowce and Bar, where most Catholics were of Polish origin, and he carried out the duties first of the vicar-general, and from 1926 of the apostolic administrator of the Kamieniec Diocese. Like many other Polish Catholic priests in the USSR he experienced all kinds of insults, persecutions and repressions from the Communist regime. At the beginning of 1930 he was arrested and in the famous trial of a group of Roman-Catholic priests in the Soviet Ukraine he was sentenced to death, which was then converted to 10 years in camp. After he returned to Poland in 1932 as one of the political prisoners exchanged by the USSR and Poland he started work in the Łuck Diocese in Volhynia. The outbreak of the Second World War forced him to leave the area again. After the war was ended he finally settled in the Włocławek Diocese, where he worked until his death.