The story of Saint Joseph of Kalisz:
One night in the early 1670s, an elderly gentleman named Stobienia, suffering from a serious illness that had paralyzed him, turned to St. Joseph to end his suffering and obtain for him the grace of a good death. The following night, the Virgin Mary’s Spouse appeared to him in a dream, promising him healing if he commissioned the creation of a painting of the Holy Family with the script “Go to Joseph” and offered it to the collegiate church in Kalisz.
Stobienia entrusted this work, with the details prescribed by St. Joseph, to an unknown Dutch painter of the school of Rubens. When he received the painting he commissioned, the old man kissed it in the most pious way and recovered the use of his legs.
Soon after the installation of the painting in Kalisz, graces began to abound, with the first to benefit from it being a certain Stanislaw Bartochowski, in 1673.
“Some 600 graces and miracles were recorded in the following years,” Father Jacek Plota, the shrine’s custodian, told the Register, showing a reprint of an 18th-century archive book. The abundance of reported miracles received through the intercession of St. Joseph in Kalisz has never waned, with the most recent one reported by the custodian last year.
The Miracle of Dachau:
One of the miracles associated with the image dates from World War II. A large number of priests (especially Polish ones) were in the Nazi concentration camp of Dachau. Of a total of 2,720 clergy recorded as imprisoned at Dachau, the overwhelming majority, some 2,579 (or 94.88%) were Catholic. It is estimated that of the 1,773 Polish priests and bishops imprisoned there during World War II, 868 were murdered by the Germans.
As World War II in Europe was drawing to a close in April 1945, it became obvious that the allies would soon overtake the camp. The head of the camp ordered that all the prisoners in the camp be killed and the camp set on fire. The priests of the camp, many of whom were from the regions around Kalisz, suspecting that might be the commandant’s plans , began a novena imploring the protection of St. Joseph with particular reference to this shrine.
The novena ended just a few days before the date on which the executions were to take place: April 29, 1945. The American army, which was gaining ground in Europe, planned to take control of the camp one day later, on April 30.
But as Providence would have it, without knowing the orders of the Nazi camp commander, a small group of soldiers was sent out to scout the camp a day earlier than planned, exactly three hours before the planned destruction of the camp
“The SS officers quickly surrendered when they saw the American soldiers because they thought it was a larger force from the U.S. Army,” Father Plota said. “After the camp was liberated, everyone was convinced it was St. Joseph of Kalisz who saved those people. The priests wrote a beautiful pledge in which they promised to spread the devotion to St. Joseph of Kalisz when they would come back home.”
“In a biblical way,” Father Plota added, “they discovered that St. Joseph could save them just as he saved Baby Jesus while running away from King Herod to Egypt.”
After the war, the Polish Bishops’ Conference proclaimed April 29 as the National Day of Martyrdom for Polish Clergy under the Nazi and communist regimes.
The hundreds of priests who survived Dachau continued to make pilgrimages to the shrine each year on this date to give thanks until their deaths. The last priest died in 2013, at the age of 100.
On the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the camp’s liberation, a chapel was founded in the shrine church’s basement, as a thanksgiving for this miracle and to honor the memory of the martyred Polish priests in Dachau. A small museum with archive documents, priests’ personal items and other memories from the concentration camp was installed in a nearby room.
The popularity of the Kalisz shrine has been growing ever since, and the shrine was consolidated in the late 1960s with the foundation of Centrum Józefologiczne, the first international study center on St. Joseph, which initiated the holding of a number of events and conferences about him.
In 1978, Pope Paul VI elevated the church to the rank of a minor basilica. A few years later, on June 4, 1997, the visit of Pope St. John Paul II brought some 200,000 faithful to the site, all coming to venerate the image and honor St. Joseph. After praying at length at the feet of the statue of St. Joseph, laying flowers and kissing the altar, the holy Polish Pope recalled in his homily that the shrine was “a special place in the history of the Church and of the nation.” He then entrusted to the Blessed Mary’s Spouse all families and the defense of life in Poland and in the rest of the world.
Today, about 500,000 pilgrims visit the shrine each year. About 20 pilgrimages are organized annually so that all categories of society and the countless causes defended by St. Joseph are represented. Each month, a particularly popular Mass dedicated to couples is celebrated at the shrine, attracting husbands and wives from across the country.
Click here for a video from EWTN Describing the shrine