God’s Stopgap: Cardinal Adam Kozłowiecki, S.J.

Abstract

Adam Kozłowiecki (1911–2007) was a Polish Jesuit, who spent sixty-one years in missionary service in Zambia. He arrived there in 1946, just a few months after having been liberated from the concentration camp of Dachau, where he spent the biggest part of his time during wwii (earlier he was one of the first prisoners of the camp in Auschwitz). The vicissitudes made of him a witness of tragedy of the years 1939–45 and a protagonist of the missionary endeavor in Africa—the continent that was then looking for and finding its independence from colonialism. At the same time, Kozłowiecki was both witness and protagonist of the changes in the Catholic Church brought by the Second Vatican Council—the event in which he took an active part as the first archbishop metropolitan of Lusaka. The article, based on the existing literature and archival material from Rome, recalls the life of this extraordinary figure, pointing out the surprises and unexpected changes he had to face several times.

Jesuits and the Church in Light of the Society’s Roman Archives

“…In 1955, he became the first bishop of that city, then its first archbishop in 1959, and eventually, in 1998, cardinal. 57 More than two hundred of his extant letters in ARSI offer a wide panorama of the complex aspects of missionary work in the context of decolonization and the development of the African church that he so remarkably served.…”