The Polish Episcopal Conference He announced the beatification of German Archbishop Jesuit Eduard Profittlich, who refused to leave Estonia where he evangelized and died martyr in a Soviet prison in 1942.
Beatification will be held on Saturday, September 6 at the Plaza de la Libertad in Tallin (Estonia) at 11:00 (local time) and will be chaired by Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, sent by Pope Leo XIV.
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“The beatification of our martyr, Archbishop Eduard Profittlich, is a message of hope and optimism for the whole Society Estonia,” said the bishop of Tallin, Mons. Philippe Jourdan.
The Polish Episcopate’s note states that after the Mass, all victims of Soviet deportations will be remembered, with an ecumenical prayer to which representatives of other Christian churches will join.
Mass can be seen live in www.profittlich.eu
This beatification of the Profittlich archbishop will be given on the eve of the canonization of the Blessed Carlo Acutis and Pier Giorgio Frassati, who will be declared Santos by Pope León on Sunday, September 7 in the Plaza de San Pedro, in the Vatican.
Who was the martyr Eduard Profittlich?
Eduard Profittlich was a Jesuit German archbishop who was born on September 11, 1890 in the town of Birresdorf, in Rhine (Germany). He was baptized that same day.
According to the website Of the Jesuits, in 1912 he entered the Seminary of Trveris, but after two semesters he left in 1913 to enter the novitiate of the Society of Jesus in the Netherlands, following in the footsteps of his older brother Pedro, a Jesuit missionary who died in Brazil.
He was ordained a priest in 1922, and then served in Germany and Poland. In 1930 he made his last votes as a Jesuit and was sent to Estonia, where he was Apostolic Administrator and then Archbishop.
When the Soviet Union occupied Estonia in 1940, religious freedom was seriously restricted and persecution against the clergy of the Catholic Church intensified.
Although he had the opportunity to return to Germany, he decided to stay in Estonia, following the advice of Pope Pius XII and “faithful to himself and God, he decided to share the common destiny of so many stages after the Soviet occupation,” says the note of the Polish Episcopate.
He was arrested in June 1941 and forced him to travel about 2,000 kilometers to the Kirov prison. He was sentenced to death on November 21 of that year, after being tried “by a court that started from charges invented from making counterrevolutionary propaganda and antisovietic agitation, and of not informing of ‘counterrevolutionary activities’,” the Jesuits indicate.
Its appeal is already rejected from the harsh conditions of the prison, Archbishop Profittlich dies on February 22, 1942.
Pope Francis approved the decree which recognizes the martyrdom of the German archbishop on December 18, 2024.
Walter Sánchez Silva
I am husband since 2008. With my wife we have three children here and one who went to heaven in 2023, before birth. Since I joined ACI Press in 2005, I have had the opportunity to cover various events of the Catholic Church. Among them, the World Youth Days in Colonia, Madrid and Rio de Janeiro and the apostolic trips of Pope Benedict XVI to Mexico and Pope Francis to South Korea. I have been sent to the Vatican to cover the family’s synods, in 2015; of the Amazon, in 2019 and that of Sinodality, in 2023. I follow the situation of the Catholic Church in Nicaragua, which suffers the persecution of the dictatorship of Daniel Ortega, as well as the ecclesial news in the region.