Saint Stanislaus Kostka (1550-1568)

Stanislaus's biography fits into fewer than eighteen years, the last of which are marked by a rapid succession of trials and graces. The following chronology gives its outline.

A great family of the Mazovian nobility

Stanislaus Kostka is born on October 28, 1550 at the castle of Rostkowo, near Przasnysz, in the province of Mazovia at the heart of the Kingdom of Poland.^[27] His father, Jan Kostka, belongs to one of the most considerable families in the country: he is a senator of the kingdom and castellan of Zakroczym, that is, royal governor of a stronghold. His mother, Małgorzata Kryska (Margaret of Drobnin Kryska), is related by blood to the palatine dukes of Mazovia.^[28][29] Stanislaus is the second of seven children; his elder brother, Paweł (Paul), will share his education and play a painful role in his life.

The upbringing he receives at home is severe and deeply Christian, marked by the demands of piety, modesty and temperance.^[30] This atmosphere of Polish Catholic nobility, still sheltered from the religious troubles tearing apart the neighbouring Empire, forms in the child an early religious sensibility and a keen sense of purity.

A sensibility of extreme delicacy

Hagiographical tradition reports that young Stanislaus had a physical horror of evil and impurity: he is said to have sometimes fainted when he heard, in worldly conversation, coarse or licentious remarks.^[31][32] Far from being a sickly frailty, this trait bespeaks the transparency of a soul already wholly turned towards God. The Jesuit biographer Daniello Bartoli, in the 17th century, sees in this delicacy the sign of a vocation to holiness received from childhood, like an early grafting of grace onto a generous nature.^[33]

This pious child is nevertheless neither sad nor withdrawn: witnesses stress on the contrary his amiability and the cheerfulness of his face, which made him loved by his fellow pupils.^[34] Holiness, in him, is never a tenseness; it is the radiance of a youth happy to belong to God.

The Jesuit college and the Congregation of Saint Barbara

On July 25, 1564, Jan Kostka sends his two sons Paul and Stanislaus, accompanied by their tutor Jan Biliński, to study at the Jesuit college of Vienna, then one of the centres of the young Society in central Europe.^[35][36] Stanislaus pursues classical studies there for nearly three years — Latin, Greek, rhetoric — and attracts notice by his growing fervour. He enrols in the Congregation of Saint Barbara, a Marian and Eucharistic sodality run by the Jesuits, which structures his prayer life and places him under the patronage of the martyr saint.^[37] This detail, seemingly secondary, soon takes on decisive importance.

When, after a few months, the boarding school closes and the brothers must lodge in town with a Lutheran landlord named Kimberker, Stanislaus finds himself in an environment hostile to his faith — the first trial in a long struggle between his vocation and those around him.^[38]

Illness and the Communion of angels

Towards the end of 1566, Stanislaus falls gravely ill. Sensing the danger, he asks for viaticum — Communion for the dying. But his brother Paul does not believe the illness serious, and above all the Lutheran landlord refuses to let a Catholic priest enter his house.^[39][40] Deprived of the sacrament he desires above all else, the young man turns to the patroness of his congregation, Saint Barbara, to whom devotion attributes precisely the grace of not dying without Communion.

According to the account he himself later gave to a fellow novice, Saint Barbara appears to him, accompanied by two angels who bring him the Holy Eucharist.^[41][42] This account comes from the saint's own confidences, made to his tutor and then to a fellow novice in Rome; at the beatification process, his brother Paul testified to his total dedication to spiritual things, and the Holy See ratified the popular verdict by beatifying him in 1605.^[43] It is nothing isolated in the history of holiness: the miraculous Communion of dying persons deprived of a priest is a recurring motif of hagiography, and here it accords perfectly with Stanislaus's ardent Eucharistic devotion.

The Virgin and the call to the Society of Jesus

The vision of Saint Barbara is followed, in the same illness, by a still higher grace. The Virgin Mary, carrying the Christ Child, appears to him; she places the Child in his arms for a moment, restores his health, and makes her will known to him: that he enter the Society of Jesus.^[44][45] This word henceforth directs his whole life.

Jesuit tradition thus sums up the meaning of this word: Mary was calling him to enter the Society of Jesus.^[46]

The Marian command at once places the teenager before a formidable obstacle. In Vienna, the Jesuit provincial hesitates to admit him without his father's consent; yet Jan Kostka, who dreams for his son of a great career in the Polish nobility, will never tolerate his becoming a mere religious.^[47] Stanislaus's vocation thus becomes a struggle: not against God, but against the ambitions of the world embodied by his own family.

The domestic martyrdom: the harshness of his brother Paul

This tension explodes in daily life in the form of the ill-treatment inflicted on him by his elder brother. Paul, a worldly and hot-tempered spirit, ill bears Stanislaus's piety, which he judges excessive and humiliating to their rank; he bullies him, sometimes strikes him, covers him with mockery.^[48][49] Stanislaus long endures this domestic persecution with remarkable patience, until the day when, pushed to the limit, he warns his brother, in substance, that his brutalities would end by making him leave never to return.^[50]

What follows will prove this warning right. Many years later, Paul Kostka, grown into a mature man and repentant of his harshness towards a brother become a saint, will testify at the beatification process of 1605: yesterday's persecutor will become one of the artisans of his victim's posthumous glory.^[51]

Flight from Vienna, August 10, 1567

Understanding that neither his father nor the Vienna Jesuits, bound by prudence, will allow him to enter the Society on the spot, Stanislaus takes a decision of stunning boldness for a sixteen-year-old: to reach Rome on foot, where the superior general will be able to admit him freely. In the early morning of August 10, 1567, he secretly leaves Vienna, disguised as a pilgrim or a pauper, and takes the road westward to escape his brother's pursuit.^[52][53]

Tradition reports a famous episode: sent on his tracks, Paul is said to have crossed his brother on the road without recognising him under his miserable clothes, as if a mysterious protection covered the fugitive.^[54] The image well expresses the rupture: to follow the call received from the Virgin, Stanislaus accepts losing everything — rank, family, safety — and making himself God's beggar.

Peter Canisius at Dillingen

His march leads him first to Augsburg, then to Dillingen, in Bavaria, where Saint Peter Canisius resides, one of the greatest artisans of the Catholic Reformation in Germany and provincial of the Society for Upper Germany.^[55][56] Canisius, a fine discerner of souls, lets himself be neither dazzled nor softened: he tests the young man's vocation by having him perform, for a time, the humblest services in the Jesuit house of Dillingen.

Convinced of the authenticity of the call but judging Stanislaus still too close to Poland and the paternal threat, Canisius takes the decisive decision: he sends him to Rome, furnished with a letter of recommendation for the superior general.^[57][58] This relay between two future saints — Canisius a Doctor of the Church, Stanislaus patron of novices — is one of the finest links in the chain of holiness of the first Society.

Several hundred kilometres on foot

From Dillingen to Rome, Stanislaus crosses the Alps and Italy on foot — the 1912 Catholic Encyclopedia evaluates the whole journey from Vienna at "five hundred leagues" —, without retinue or guide, begging his bread along the road.^[59][60] He finally reaches Rome on October 25, 1567, exhausted by the journey.

Pope Francis magnificently summed up this crossing by raising it to the symbol of every Christian life:

"The course of his short life, which began in Rostkowo in Mazovia, passing through Vienna and on to Rome, can be compared to a great long-distance race towards the goal of every Christian's life, which is holiness." — Pope Francis, Message for the 450th anniversary of the death of Saint Stanislaus Kostka, August 15, 2018^[61]

Francis Borgia and entry into the Society

In Rome, Stanislaus presents himself to the superior general of the Society, Saint Francis Borgia, former Duke of Gandía become the third general of the order.^[62] Borgia, seeing the young traveller's exhaustion, waits a few days before admitting him. Then, on October 28, 1567, Stanislaus's seventeenth birthday, he receives him into the Society of Jesus at the novitiate of Sant'Andrea al Quirinale.^[63][64] The teenager's dream, against which his father, his brother and all the prudence of the world had combined, finally becomes reality. He has ten months left to live.

The model novice

Entrusted to the novice master Giulio Fazio, Stanislaus leads for ten months a novitiate life of exemplary fervour, "a model and mirror of religious perfection" in the words of his biographers.^[65][66] Witnesses agree on the radiance of his joy, the purity of his conduct and his spirit of service, which struck his companions as much as his superiors.^[67] He accomplishes nothing extraordinary in the eyes of the world: he prays, he obeys, he serves; but he does so with an intensity of love that would make the Church say that one can become a great saint in very little time, provided one loves perfectly.

Ad maiora natus sum: born for greater things

The maxim tradition attaches to the name of Stanislaus Kostka sums up his whole spirit: « Ad maiora natus sum », "I was born for greater things".^[68] The formula is not a cry of worldly ambition; it is exactly the reverse. For the son of the senator of Mazovia, the greater things are neither rank, nor career, nor the honour his family intended for him, but God alone and eternal beatitude. Everything the world calls great, Stanislaus held too small.

Pope Francis made this motto the heart of his 2018 message to young people, seeing in it a lesson in freedom:

"Freedom is not a blind race, but the capacity to discern the goal and to seek the best paths to reach it. Saint Stanislaus teaches you not to be afraid of risk and to dream of true happiness, whose source and guarantee is Jesus Christ." — Pope Francis, Message for the 450th anniversary, August 15, 2018^[69]

The fire of love

Several testimonies report in the young novice a mystical phenomenon known in the annals of holiness as incendium amoris, the fire of love: an inner heat so intense that Stanislaus had, it is said, to apply cold cloths to his chest to bear it.^[70][71] One witness tells of seeing him go down to the garden on a freezing winter day and hearing him say, in substance, that he was burning.^[72]

This ardour had but one object: God, and the Virgin to whom he owed his vocation. His desire for Heaven had become so keen, the same sources note, that life on earth had become as it were hateful to him — not from contempt for the world, but from impatience of love.^[73]

The letter to the Virgin

At the beginning of August 1568, Stanislaus confides to his companions a presentiment: he will not see the end of the month. His Marian devotion then inspires in him a gesture of filial boldness: he writes a letter to the Virgin Mary, begging her to come and fetch him for the feast of her Assumption, on August 15, and keeps this note about him.^[74][75] The daring of the request bespeaks the confidence of a son sure of his Mother's love.

On August 10, feast of Saint Lawrence, to whom he was particularly devoted, Stanislaus is seized by a violent fever.^[76] Far from being alarmed, he sees in it the answer to his prayer.

The night of the Assumption

In the night of August 14 to 15, 1568, surrounded by his Jesuit brothers, Stanislaus peacefully passes away, "uttering pious words to God, to the saints and to the Virgin Mary", at about four o'clock in the morning, at the very hour the Church celebrates the Assumption he had asked for.^[77][78] He was seventeen years old and had entered religion only ten months earlier. Witnesses report that his face, after death, "shone with the most serene light".^[79]

The coincidence between the date he had asked for and that of his death at once struck people's minds and founded his reputation for holiness. The Virgin, to whom he owed his vocation, seemed to have granted his prayer to the very day.

Love of the Virgin Mary

Stanislaus's whole spiritual life is marked by the seal of Marian devotion. It is the Virgin who showed him his vocation; it is to her that he entrusts the moment of his death. Tradition attributes to him a prayer of offering to Mary, which he is said to have carried about him and by which he offered to Mary his work, his sufferings, his mind and his heart.^[80]

This filial tenderness towards the Mother of God connects Stanislaus to a whole line of saints of youth who found in Mary the shortest path to God. It already announces, two centuries in advance, the spiritual "little way" of childhood that would flourish in other young saints.

Heaven as homeland

The most striking trait of his spirituality is the intensity of his desire for Heaven. For Stanislaus, the present life is not an end but a threshold; his motto « Ad maiora natus sum » means first of all this: man is made for God, and nothing on earth can fill a heart created for eternity. This tension has nothing morbid about it: it is the expression of a love which, having tasted its object, can no longer bear delay. It is in this sense that the saints could speak of him in terms of incendium amoris, that fire of love which literally made him "burn".

A holiness of youth

Stanislaus Kostka demonstrates, by his very existence, a truth dear to the Church: holiness does not wait for the number of years. Dead at seventeen, after ten months of religious life, he is canonized at the same rank as the great doctors and founders of his time. He thus opens a gallery of young Jesuit saints — Saint Aloysius Gonzaga, dead at twenty-three while nursing plague victims, then, much later, Blessed John Berchmans — who made ordinary perfection, lived with extraordinary love, their sole programme.

The first Jesuit raised to the altars (1605)

Stanislaus's reputation for holiness was immediate and never ceased to grow. As early as 1605, Pope Paul V beatified him — making him, with his junior in holiness, the first member of the Society of Jesus raised to the honour of the altars, even before its founder Ignatius of Loyola, canonized only in 1622.^[81][82] At the beatification process, the testimony of his brother Paul Kostka, repentant, carried particular weight.

The canonization of 1726

More than a century later, on December 31, 1726, Pope Benedict XIII inscribed Stanislaus Kostka in the catalogue of saints, on the same day as Saint Aloysius Gonzaga.^[83][84] The two young Jesuits, models of purity and fervour, were henceforth associated in worship and proposed together as patrons of student youth and novices.

Relics, iconography and patronage

The body of Saint Stanislaus rests in Rome in the church of Sant'Andrea al Quirinale, on the very site of his novitiate. The room where he died was turned into a chapel, and the French sculptor Pierre Le Gros the Younger made there, around 1702-1703, a striking polychrome marble statue representing him lying on his deathbed — one of the most famous and moving images of Roman Baroque.^[85] Iconography usually shows him as a beardless young Jesuit holding the Christ Child whom the Virgin placed in his arms, or a lily, symbol of his purity.

Saint Stanislaus Kostka is today the patron of Jesuit novices, students and young people, as well as one of the patron saints of Poland, where his memory remains very much alive.^[86] Popular piety traditionally invokes him against palpitations and serious illnesses, in memory of the fever that carried him off.^[87] His feast is celebrated on November 13 in the Society's calendar, and on August 15, the day of his death, in the Roman Martyrology.^[88]

Four and a half centuries after his death, Stanislaus Kostka remains a figure of astonishing timeliness. The 450th anniversary of his death, in 2018, was marked in Poland by a great jubilee year and by Pope Francis's message to youth, which made him the patron of a generation invited to "run towards holiness" without fear of risk.^[89][90]

His lesson is simple and radical: one can be young, noble, promised the finest careers in the world, and hold all that as little beside the one thing necessary. « Ad maiora natus sum » — I was born for greater things — is not the motto of an ambitious man, but that of a saint who understood, at seventeen, that the only lasting greatness is that of the love of God. In this, the little novice of Mazovia joins the greatest masters of the spirituality of the Catholic Reformation, from Saint Ignatius of Loyola to Saint Teresa of Avila: holiness is not a matter of duration, but of intensity.

• On the order that formed him and its founder: Saint Ignatius of Loyola and The founding of the Society of Jesus.
• On the master who tested him at Dillingen: Saint Peter Canisius, Doctor of the Church.
• On the superior general who admitted him in Rome: Saint Francis Borgia.
• On his brother in holiness and canonization: Saint Aloysius Gonzaga.
• On the other great Jesuit missionary of his generation: Saint Francis Xavier.
• On the spiritual context of his century: The Catholic Counter-Reformation and the Council of Trent.