Saint Raphael Kalinowski: An Introduction To His Life And Spirituality by Szczepan T Praśkiewicz OCD

Booklet: Little known outside his native Poland, Joseph Kalinowski (Raphael of St. Joseph, OCD) was born in 1835 and became, by turns, an engineer, a military officer, a leader in the 1863 insurrection against Russian domination, an exile in Siberia, a tutor, and eventually a Discalced Carmelite priest. He died in 1907 at the Carmelite monastery he had founded in Wadowice, the city where Karol Wojtyla - the future Pope John Paul II who would later beatify and canonize him - was born only 13 years later. 

Today Raphael Kalinowski is remembered especially as a man of boundless charity in the Siberian prison camps, a restorer of Carmel in Poland, a skilled confessor and spiritual director, and a tireless promoter of Marian devotion and of unity between the Eastern and Western Churches. 

In 1991, he became the first Discalced Carmelite friar canonized since St John of the Cross. 

This booklet offers a concise introduction to one of the pope's favourite saints, and includes a brief biography of Saint Raphael Kalinowski, a synthesis of his spiritual message, 12 photos, and for the first time in English, selections from his writings.

Saint Raphael Kalinowski: An Introduction To His Life And Spirituality (1998, 2016) is translated from the Italian by Thomas Coonan and Michael Griffin OCD; and from the Polish-to-Italian by Lawrence Sullivan OCD.

About the author: Szczepan T Praśkiewicz OCD was born in Chmielnik, Poland, in 1958. He attended the Carmelite Minor Seminary in Wadowice, founded by Raphael Kalinowski, and made his religious profession as a Discalced Carmelite in 1978. Ordained in 1983, he earned a diploma in Mariology and in 1988, completed his doctorate in theological anthropology at the Teresianum in Rome. From 1983 to 1990, he served as Prefect of the Order's International College in Rome. He assisted the OCD Postulator General in the final phase of the canonization process for Raphael Kalinowski and has published numerous studies on the Saint, including a Kalinowski bibliography and his own Italian translation of Raphael Kalinowski's Memoirs. He now serves as secretary of the missions for the Order at the Discalced Carmelite Generalate in Rome, Italy.