Faith can move mountains, said Jesus of Nazareth twenty centuries ago. That faith among Catholics throughout two millennia has allowed the survival of His Church despite periods of obscurantism, corruption and all kinds of divisions and serious misconduct of the human beings who make it up. Indeed, faith in the existence of a Creator who reveals to us –through our conscience– a whole ethical system of human coexistence, is a fact, but it is not an exclusive gift of Catholics, not even of the Christians as a whole, but a spiritual truth that sustains the fabric of our society since human beings first realized their transcendency and the existence of inalienable natural rights that precede all human decisions. That faith and these convictions serve as guide to exemplary figures such as the Dalai Lama, Mahatma Gandhi or Nelson Mandela, among many others who have been beacons of light for humanity. In this particular report, we pay tribute to another exemplary personality who shed the light of his sacrifice, his faith and his convictions to guide and hold the Polish Catholic flock in their resistance to the malicious nazi hurricane and to lead them until it arose from the war ruins another exemplary personality, first known to the world as Karol Wojtyla, later Pope John Paul II:
Jan Tyranowski, a papal tutor of heroic virtue 
by George Weigel
On January 20, Pope Francis authorized the Congregation for the Causes of Saints to publish decrees acknowledging the “heroic virtues” of six men and one woman: two diocesan priests, three priests in religious orders, the foundress of an Italian religious community, and a Polish layman. It does no disservice to the holy memory of the other six men and women who now bear the title “Venerable” to suggest that the Polish layman, Jan Tyranowski, had the greatest impact on the Catholic Church throughout the world – and by orders of magnitude.
By the end of May 1941, the Gestapo had systematically stripped the parish of St. Stanislaus Kostka in Cracow’s Dębniki neighborhood of its clergy; 11 of the priests who once served there were eventually martyred. One of the remaining Salesian fathers asked a layman in the parish, a tailor who spent hours in contemplative prayer and meditation, to take responsibility for what we would call “youth ministry” with the parish’s young men. Since organized Catholic youth work was banned by the Nazi Occupation, the request was an invitation to risk deportation to Auschwitz – or worse. Jan Tyranowski, the tailor with an eighth-grade education, said “yes,” and began to organize the young men of the parish into what he called “Living Rosary” groups: 15 teenagers or young adults (for the 15 mysteries of the Rosary as then constituted), each group led by a more mature young man to whom Tyranowski gave spiritual direction.
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