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Cardinal Adam Kozlowiecki

Energetic missionary in Africa

Friday 26 October 2007 00:00 BST
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Adam Kozlowiecki, priest: born Huta Komorowska, Austria-Hungary 1 April 1911; ordained priest 1937; Apostolic Administrator of Lusaka 1950-55, Bishop 1955-59, Archbishop 1959-69; named a Cardinal 1998; died Lusaka 28 September 2007.

When the Gestapo arrested Fr Adam Kozlowiecki in Krakow in newly Nazi-occupied Poland in November 1939, little could he have believed that he would survive to become a pioneering missionary bishop in Africa and, eventually, at his death, the second oldest cardinal. He and the 24 Jesuit colleagues seized with him would become part of the early consignment of prisoners to arrive in June 1940 in the new concentration camp of Auschwitz, set up to crush the Polish élite. Kozlowiecki became prisoner number 1006.

In December 1940, a year and a half before the nearby death camp was built at Birkenau, Kozlowiecki was transferred from Auschwitz to the concentration camp at Dachau, near Munich, where many Catholic priests from across occupied Europe were already imprisoned. It was not until April 1945 that he and his surviving fellow prisoners were liberated by the Americans.

Despite his eagerness to return to his shattered homeland, Kozlowiecki was sent to the Jesuit college in the Bavarian town of Pullach. He was then asked to join fellow Polish Jesuits in the missions in Northern Rhodesia. He took his final vows as a Jesuit in Rome in August 1945 before leaving for Africa.

Kozlowiecki was born in 1911 in a small village near the half-Polish, half-Jewish town of Kolbuszowa towards the eastern fringes of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Only when he was 10 did he begin formal schooling at a Jesuit college, being sent to a Jesuit grammar school in distant Poznan when he was 15.

He entered the Jesuits in 1929 and served the early years of his novitiate in Krakow and Lublin, where he was ordained priest in 1937. Once in Africa, Kozlowiecki taught in Jesuit schools before being appointed Apostolic Administrator of Lusaka in 1950 as the Vatican began creating a local hierarchy. He was named bishop in 1955 and, in 1959, the first archbishop. He was an energetic bishop, continuously travelling round his diocese to visit the most remote mission stations.

Kozlowiecki was a leading member of the African hierarchy at the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), speaking especially on the liturgy and religious freedom. It was in 1964, while the council was still under way, that his adopted homeland became the independent Republic of Zambia.

Long an advocate of a local hierarchy, Kozlowiecki's repeated offer to resign to make way for a native successor was finally granted in 1969. In this case the Vatican probably regretted the appointment of Emmanuel Milingo, who would subsequently marry a Moonie and be excommunicated. Kozlowiecki returned to mission work.

John Paul II had a habit of making unexpected appointments to the cardinalate and Kozlowiecki's – in the February 1998 conclave – was one. Few had heard of the 86-year-old Polish missionary who was well above the age at which cardinals cease to be able to vote in a conclave and no longer even a diocesan leader.

In 1967 Kozlowiecki published in Krakow his memoirs of his imprisonment by the Nazis, which were censored by the Polish authorities. An uncensored edition was published in 1995.

Felix Corley

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