Lenin and the saint who inspired a Pope

ONE question that didn't figure in the Christmas quizzes but perhaps should have done is: What modern saint died on Christmas Day?
A due is that he is reputed to have had discussions with Lenin about "the social question". Still not there? The clincher should be that Pope John Paul wrote a play about him called Our God's Brother.
The answer is Adam Chmiemelowlski (1845-1916), known in religious life as Br Albert. He died in Krakow on Christmas Day 1916, in the middle of the first World War and thousands followed his coffin through the rain-swept streets.
Pope John Paul beatified him in Krakow on June 22, 1983, when he visited a Poland still suffering under martial law; and he canonised him in Rome last November 12. No one outside Poland has paid him much attention.
I went in search of St Albert (plain Albert from now on last spring. In a suburb of Krakow is a new church built in traditional Polish country style with whitepainted walls and steeply pitched roofs.
This is the chapel of the mother-house of the Albertine sisters whom Albert founded in 1891. There are about 600 of them now who specialise in looking after geriatric patients and the mentally ill. They have a house in Argentina and another at Hammond, Indiana. There are also 100 brothers, but 1 didn't meet any.
Above the main altar stands Albert's most famous painting, Ecce Homo. Behold the Man. Christ's mock-royal robes are folded in the shape of a heart. The marks of scourging can be seen, the crown of thorns presses down, the eyes are closed giving it a shroud-like effect.
This haunting work was what turned Adam the artist into Br Albert the servant of the poorest. It was the instrument of his conversion. It was the furthest he could go in this medium. Through it he found what Gerard Manley Hopkins called "God's better beauty, grace".
Accomplished artist
BUT I am going too fast. Adam was born on September 20, 1845, in a village not far from Krakow. His father was a customs official on the border between the Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires.
At the age of 17 Adam joined in the 1863 uprising, was wounded, captured by the Russians, and somehow evaded exile in Siberia. His left leg was amputated below the knee. It caused him pain for life.
The one-legged student showed a talent for painting. But the Russians had closed down the Warsaw Academy in 1866 and he spent five years at the Munich Academy of Fine Art (1869-74). Back in Krakow, then the capital of Polish intellectual and artistic life, he then began a successful career as a painter.
He could have gone on like this, painting portraits of beautiful girls on horseback, delightful children in straw hats, sledging scenes, rocky landscapes in the Tatras mountains. He could have gone on looking forward to his next exhibition in Warsaw, enjoying Krakow cafesociety and leading an agreeably Bohemian existence. There's an ironical caricature of himself, with goatee beard and florid tie, "making a political speech".
Searching years
WHETHER some precise incident changed his life, we don't know. But the fact is that he became aware of the appalling poverty that existed in Krakow alongside the privileged life he led. But his first efforts to work among the down and outs and dossers were a failure. He was too bourgeois, and they didn't want to hear about God.
Still looking for his real vocation, he joined the Jesuit noviceship in 1880 at the age of 35. He survived just over six months, and retired with what sounds like a "nervous breakdown" brought on no doubt by "excessive straining". He needed more than a year to recover. As therapy he restored village churches.
But he had already started on Ecce Homo, and trundled it around with him everywhere. It began to reflect the faces he saw in the basements of Krakow. He became a Franciscan tertiary, and began to work more effectively with the poor through the St Vincent de Paul Society.
In the crypt of the Albertine chapel are photographs and relics evoking the vanished world of 19th century Krakow. Not only can you see Albert's penitential chain and discipline, and copy of St John of the Cross in French, but also his tobacco tin and cigar box. That was his only indulgence.
He finally completed Ecce Homo and hung it in his first refuge for homeless old men. There it is, captured in a photograph of the night-shelter, hardly more than a bare cellar with trestle tables.
By 1889 Albert had gathered enough helpers to found his "Brothers". He insisted that they were brothers because this was the title they shared in Christ with the most abandoned human beings.
The nun who guided me round the crypt said that Albert did not want to be a priest and did not want his Brothers to be priests. Why this insistance? "Because he was advised by a Carmelite friend", she explained, "that the dignity of the priesthood would cut them off from the poor".
Krakow today
THERE was a picture of a dingy courtyard with cracked walls, broken staircases and piles of rubbish. "Krakow in the time of Br Albert?" I asked. "No", she said, "Krakow today".
Later that afternoon I walked round the tenements that make up St Florian's parish where Karol Wojtyla was a young priest in the early 1950s. Many of the parishioners would have know Albert.
Fr Wojtyla must have felt very close to him as he walked these same streets, prayed in the same churches and saw the same decor of poverty. That was when he began writing the play that became Our God's Brother.
It is also evident from the play that he was drawn to Albert as another artist who found art alone insufficient. Yet in fact Fr Wojtyla did not renounce poetry and drama but he published, when he did, anonymously and was really only found out when be became Pope.
He wrote anonymously, Marek Skwarnicki, his Polish editor told me, because he wanted his works to be judged on their literary merit. He didn't want people to read them simply because he was a bishop or a priest.
Marxist debate
VLADIMIR Lenin lived in Krakow and its surroundings 1912-14. That he had a meeting with Albert is reasonably wellattested. They walked together in the mountains of Zakopane and discussed the comparitive claims of justice and charity. Lenin apparently thought that Roman Catholicism was a better preparation for communism than Russian Orthodoxy.
Lenin does not figure directly in Our God's Brother, but there is a long dialogue between Albert and a "Stranger" who is in Krakow as a Marxist agitator. They have both failed to transform the unjust situation, and neither has won any followers.
Much of their debate is about how to deal with anger. Adam/Albert accuses the Leninfigure of exploiting the anger of the poor, of using it as means to further his own ends.
But he does not deny a place for creative anger: "Anger has to erupt," he says in the final lines of the play, "especially if it is great . . . And it will last, because it is just. I know for certain, though, that I have chosen a greater freedom".
One can see a link between this and liberation theology. The key point of the play is that is that the poor having failed to follow Albert, he decides to "follow them". It is only when one is with the poor that one can truly serve them.