Piotr Skarga, Polish Jesuit Preacher Gets an Asteroid Named After Him!

“Fr. Piotr Skarga, S.J. was a Polish Jesuit, preacher, hagiographer, polemicist, and leading figure of the Counter-Reformation in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. Due to his oratorical gifts, he has been called “the Polish Bossuet“.

Skarga is remembered by Poles as a vigorous early advocate of reforms to the Polish–Lithuanian polity, and as a critic of the Commonwealth’s governing classes, as well as of its religious tolerance policies. He advocated strengthening the monarch’s power at the expense of parliament (the Sejm) and of the nobility (the szlachta).

He was a professor at the Kraków Academy and in 1579 he became the first rector of the Wilno Academy. Later, he served in the Jesuit College at Kraków. He was also a prolific writer, and his The Lives of the Saints (Żywoty świętych, 1579) was for several centuries one of the most popular books in the Polish language. His other important work was the Sejm Sermons (Kazania Sejmowe, 1597), a political treatise, which became popular in the second half of the 19th century, when he was seen as the “patriotic seer” who predicted the partitions of Poland.” – Wikipedia

“In 1606, he published a catechism for soldiers: Żołnierskie nabożeństwo (The soldier’s piety), a book which is commonly said to have been inspired by a catechism by another Jesuit, Antonio Possevino’s Il soldato christiano (1569). The aim of this article is to compare the two books and to address the following questions: to what extent and in what way was Possevino’s view of soldiers adaptable to Polish-Lithuanian realities? Can we identify a common discourse on soldiers and war in both texts, although they were not written at the same time nor in the same cultural and social context? Or did the strategy of accommodation lead to major differences between the texts, making it difficult to speak of a common Jesuit view on soldiers and war?” – Jesuit Online Bibliography

---

In 1936, on the 400th anniversary of Skarga’s birth, with the endorsement of Poland’s President Ignacy Mościcki and the Polish government, the Polish writer Zofia Kossak-Szczucka proposed that Skarga be beatified. Nearly eight decades later, Skarga’s cause for beatification was inaugurated on 12 June 2013.

In 2012, on the 400th anniversary of his death, the Polish Sejm declared that year the “Year of the Reverend Piotr Skarga”. The decision caused considerable controversy: a Calvinist polemicist Kazimierz Bem called it in the newspaper Rzeczpospolita “an example of deep disdain Poland holds for any of its minorities.” The newspaper carried a rejoinder. The Lutheran Church in Poland called the decision to commemorate Skarga “disturbing” and not understandable in the realm of separation of church and state” – Wikipedia

Dr. Justas Zdanavičius

is a senior researcher at the Institute of Theoretical Physics and Astronomy (ITPA). He studies galactic open clusters; Interstellar reddening and extinction, Interstellar clouds; Stellar classification; Black holes: Galactic structure and evolution; Search and positional observations of comets, asteroids and near-Earth objects.