Feast Day: November 13 (Society of Jesus; also commemorated August 15, and September 18 in Poland)
Canonized: December 31, 1726 — Pope Benedict XIII
Beatified: October 8, 1605 — Pope Paul V
Order / Vocation: Society of Jesus (Jesuit novice)
Patron of: Youth · Students · Seminarians · Jesuit Novices · Poland
"Ad maiora natus sum." — "I was born for greater things." — attributed to Saint Stanislaus Kostka
Most people never get a long enough life to prove what they were made for. Stanislaus Kostka got seventeen years.
He died in Rome before his eighteenth birthday, ten months into the Jesuit novitiate he had walked hundreds of miles to enter. He never preached a sermon, founded a school, or wrote a book. He never took final vows. By the standards by which we usually measure a life, there is almost nothing to report.
And yet the Church canonized him, Poland made him a patron, and generations of Jesuit novices have prayed at his tomb. The reason is that in a very short time, he did the one thing that is hardest for any young person to do. He decided what he was for, he said so out loud, and he refused to be talked out of it by anyone with the power to stop him: his father, his brother, his tutor, and his own social class.
This is for anyone who has felt pulled in a direction their family did not choose. It is also for anyone whose life has been cut short, or who fears it might be, and who wants to know whether a brief life can still be a complete one.
A Castle in Masovia
Stanisław Kostka was born on October 28, 1550, at Rostkowo, in the Polish province of Masovia, in a family that had both wealth and standing. His father, John Kostka, was a senator of the Kingdom of Poland and castellan of Zakroczym. His mother, Małgorzata Kryska, came from one of the great families of the region. Her brother and her uncle were both voivodes of Masovia, and her nephew Feliks Kryski would become Chancellor of Poland. Stanislaus was the second of seven children. His older brother, Paul, was the one who would eventually become his tormentor.
This was the Poland of the mid-sixteenth century, a large, tolerant, and politically ambitious kingdom whose nobility ran the country. The Reformation had spread widely among Polish nobles, and a Catholic family of this rank took its faith seriously partly because it had to. A boy like Stanislaus was expected to become a senator, a soldier, or a landowner, to marry well, and to carry the family's name forward.
He received his first education at home from a private tutor, a man named John Bilinski. The plan was always that he would go on to the best schooling available.
The Lodger Who Prayed Too Much
In 1564, when Stanislaus was fourteen, the two brothers went to Vienna with their tutor. The Jesuit college there had been open for only four years. They arrived on July 25.
At school Stanislaus stood out, and not for the usual reasons. He was cheerful and easy to like. But he was also becoming serious about God in a way that made other boys uneasy. He joined the Sodality of Saint Barbara and Our Lady. His brother later testified that Stanislaus would sometimes lose consciousness while praying, particularly in the Jesuits' church in Vienna.
Paul could not stand it. He began to mistreat his younger brother, with harsh words and blows, over and over. The accounts that survive are consistent that Stanislaus took it with patience, until one night, after another beating, he told Paul that this treatment would end with him leaving and never coming back, and that Paul would have to explain it to their parents. Paul answered by swearing at him.
Around this time Stanislaus became seriously ill. According to what he later told a fellow Jesuit in Rome, he was lodging in a household that did not share his faith, and no priest could be called. In his fever he prayed to Saint Barbara, his patroness. He said she came to his bedside with two angels and gave him Holy Communion. His tutor, who was in the room, did not see anything, but he insisted that Stanislaus was clear-headed and not delirious. The tradition adds that the Blessed Virgin then restored him to health and told him to enter the Society of Jesus.
We cannot verify visions from the outside. What the Church holds up is the fruit. Stanislaus came out of that illness with a settled conviction that his life was meant for something other than the one planned for him.
Six Months of Silence, Then a Closed Door
He did not act at once. It was six months before he told the Jesuit superiors in Vienna what he wanted.
When he did, they hesitated. They knew his father. A senator's son entering the Society without his family's consent would bring down a storm, and the Jesuits had only just weathered one over other admissions. They would not accept him without his parents' permission, and Stanislaus knew his parents would never give it.
One of the Jesuits suggested another route. The provincial of the German province, Peter Canisius, was in Augsburg. Canisius was not in Vienna, not subject to the Austrian superiors' caution, and far enough from Poland to take the risk. It was several hundred miles away. Stanislaus would have to walk it, with no guide, no equipment, and no money.
He decided to go.
The Morning of August 10
On the morning of August 10, 1567, Stanislaus called his servant to him early and told him to let Paul and the tutor know that he would not be back for dinner that day. It was true as far as it went. Then he took off the clothes of a nobleman and put on the clothes of a beggar, which was the only way he could pass through the countryside without being stopped and questioned.
By nightfall Paul and the tutor understood that he was gone, and they were furious. They set off in pursuit, but he already had a day's lead. The accounts describe a chase that kept going wrong: exhausted horses that would not go farther, a broken wheel, a wrong turn. The tutor admitted frankly that they had left the city by the wrong road. They never caught him.
This part of the story deserves honesty. A sixteen-year-old boy, not a grown man, walked out on his family, lied by omission to his servant, and defied his father. A modern reader may find that troubling, and the Church has never presented the episode as a rule for how children should treat their parents. What the Church has recognized is a young man being asked by God to follow a call that his family refused to respect, who ran out of safe options, and who made the one move left to him. His own Jesuit superiors, who knew what it would cost them, eventually decided he was right.
A Month at Dillingen, Then Rome
Canisius did not simply welcome him. Stanislaus spent about a month at Dillingen, where Canisius tested the boy's vocation by putting him to work in the boarding school. He passed. Canisius sent him on to Rome with a letter of introduction to the Superior General, Francis Borgia, the former Duke of Gandía who had become the third head of the Society.
Stanislaus reached Rome on October 25, 1567, completely worn out from the journey. Borgia would not let him enter the novitiate of Saint Andrew on the Quirinal Hill for several days, until he had recovered. He was received as a novice around his seventeenth birthday.
For a boy who had walked across Europe dressed as a beggar, it was the end of the road and the beginning of the only life he had wanted.
Ten Months
The rest of his story is short, because the rest of his life was short.
The master of novices, Father Giulio Fazio, left testimony that Stanislaus was a model of what a religious should be. Fazio noted that despite his very delicate constitution, he did not spare himself in penance. The austerity of sixteenth-century religious life is not a pattern for us to copy, and the Church today would counsel more prudence. What stands out in the accounts of his novitiate is how ordinary it was. He did his chores, kept the rule, and did it with humility and cheerfulness. He had a burning fever in his chest that often forced him to press cold compresses to it, which is why artists sometimes show him beside a fountain with a wet cloth on his heart.
His devotion to the Blessed Virgin was the center of his inner life, along with the Eucharist. These were not decorations on a busy career. They were all he had time for.
He left no works and no institutions. His apostolate was to arrive at his vocation as quickly as possible and to be exactly what God had asked. He summed it up in a maxim: Ad maiora natus sum, "I was born for greater things." Pope Francis quoted that line in a letter marking the four hundred fiftieth anniversary of his death. It is a young man's sentence. It is also the sentence of a boy who had walked away from a castle to find out what it meant.
The Fever and the Feast of the Assumption
On the evening of August 10, 1568, the feast of Saint Lawrence, exactly a year after he had left Vienna, Stanislaus came down with a high fever. He saw clearly that this was the end. He wrote a letter to the Blessed Virgin, asking her to call him to heaven in time to celebrate her Assumption on August 15 with her.
Some of those around him did not take him seriously. On August 14 he told the infirmarian that he would die the next day. The remark was brushed off.
Around three or four o'clock in the morning on August 15, 1568, he told those with him that Mary was coming with angels to take him to heaven. Then, while he was praying, he died. He was seventeen. He had been a novice for about ten months.
Rome knew at once. Many people in the city proclaimed him a saint, and crowds came from all over to venerate his body and to try to obtain a relic.
Altar, Beatification, and the Patron of the Young
He was buried in the new Jesuit church of the novitiate, Sant'Andrea al Quirinale. His remains now rest beneath the altar dedicated to him there.
Pope Paul V beatified him on October 8, 1605, the first Jesuit to be beatified. His brother Paul, the one who had beaten him in Vienna and chased him across the empire, lived to attend the ceremony. The story does not say what he felt. It is hard not to wonder. On December 31, 1726, Pope Benedict XIII canonized Stanislaus in Saint Peter's Basilica.
The saint's influence did not stay in Rome. Poland took him as one of its own, and the Poles keep his feast on September 18. Polish immigrants carried his name across the world, and in the United States, the Chicago parish of Saint Stanislaus Kostka became in its day the largest parish in the country. In the twentieth century, a young Polish priest named Karol Wojtyła, studying for his doctorate in Rome, would stop at Stanislaus's tomb to pray. He later became Pope John Paul II. In the nineteenth century a young Carmelite in Normandy, Thérèse of Lisieux, wrote a play about Stanislaus for her community to perform. She recognized something in a young person who believed he might die with empty hands, and who wanted, more than anything, to do good after death.
Why These Patronages
Youth, students, and seminarians. He died as a schoolboy turned novice. The Church gave him to young people because he is one of them: a teenager who knew what he wanted, who took the long road to get it, and who found that holiness did not have to wait for adulthood.
Jesuit novices. He is the Society of Jesus's patron of novices because he never made it past the novitiate. Every Jesuit who enters has begun where he ended, and many Jesuit novitiates have taken his name.
Poland. He was born in the Kingdom of Poland, to one of its noble houses, and died young, far from home, carrying its name. For Poles, especially those far from their country, he became a companion in exile.
Among the popular devotions, he is also invoked in cases of heart palpitations and dangerous illness. That grows out of the burning fever in his chest and the cold cloth he pressed to it, and out of the manner of his death.
Prayer
O God, who called your servant Stanislaus to follow you while he was still a boy, and gave him the courage to leave everything behind and the grace to finish his race so quickly: grant to the young the courage to hear your call and to answer it. Give patience to those who are mistreated for their faith, and wisdom to those who must choose between their family and their vocation. May we, like him, find that no life is too short to be given entirely to you. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.
Saint Stanislaus Kostka, Pray for us.
