After the deadly attack on Jarosław abbey, a wounded priest preaches forgiveness

On 24 September 2026, a man entered the kitchen of the Benedictine abbey of Jarosław, in southeastern Poland, a few kilometres from the Ukrainian border. He seized a knife and struck five people. Father Stanisław Zbójniewicz died of his wounds in hospital; Father Marek Pieńkowski remains in grave condition, still hospitalised. Police arrested a thirty-one-year-old Ukrainian man, whom prosecutors identify as «Ihor M.» and have charged with murder, attempted murder, and grievous bodily harm; the investigation continues. The suspect, himself under treatment, has been assigned a court-appointed lawyer and a translator.

Two days later, on 26 September, in the same abbey where blood had been spilled, Father Adrian Mantykiewicz, his head still bandaged after being wounded in the attack, gave his evening homily. «Whatever happened,» he said, «we must overcome with good, love and forgiveness the evil that occurred here, in our abbey.» He asked that the crime not be laid to the charge of an entire people: «the evil was committed by a particular person, a person who has a name, a life, and who answers for his actions. The others did not do this. It was one man.» The abbey, in this small border town, has supported many who fled the war between Russia and Ukraine.

The priest himself gave the reason for these words: «I am a disciple of Jesus Christ, a disciple of my Master, a disciple of my Lord, and Christ teaches me to love.» And again: «A love that let itself be crucified. A love that gave its life for its enemies. Such is my Lord and Master. And I am his servant.»

What the Church has always taught

These words are not a private sentiment: they are the commandment of Christ. «But I say to you, Love your enemies: do good to them that hate you: and pray for them that persecute and calumniate you» (St Matthew, V, 44). And from the Cross, struck down by his executioners, the Lord prayed: «Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do» (St Luke, XXIII, 34).

The Catechism of the Council of Trent makes this the very mark of the children of God: «one of the best proofs that we are truly the children of God is that we pardon injuries easily, and that we love our enemies from the bottom of the heart», for this love «makes shine in us a particular resemblance to God our Father», who reconciled himself with men, his relentless enemies, by the death of his own Son.

The same tradition never confuses forgiveness with the abolition of justice. The Catechism, on the fifth commandment, teaches the gravity of homicide and the right of public authority to punish the guilty; Christian forgiveness abolishes neither the crime nor the penalty owed, it refuses only the hatred and vengeance of the heart. And it holds another truth, of natural law: guilt is personal. It attaches to the one who has sinned, not to his family, his nation, or his people.

The measure

Measured by this rule, the priest's act is upright, and it must be said as plainly as one would point out a failing. To preach forgiveness on the very place of the murder, his head still bandaged, is not weakness or forgetfulness: it is to obey word for word the commandment of Christ and to imitate him even in his agony. To refuse to accuse a whole people for the crime of one is to hold to justice against the temptation of collective resentment. On both points the homily meets the perennial doctrine, and we receive it with gratitude.

The forgiveness offered is not the acquittal that is sought. The priest has forgiven; the courts will judge, and that is their office. The charity that loves the enemy and the justice that punishes the crime do not contradict each other: they stand together, as the Church has always taught.

For the faithful, the lesson is simple and demanding. We pray for the repose of Father Stanisław Zbójniewicz and the healing of the wounded, and we ask, as this priest did, for the grace to overcome evil with good. To love one's enemies is not an exceptional piety reserved for the saints: it is the very condition we recite each day, «forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive them that trespass against us».

Sources. Gospel according to St Matthew, V, 44, and St Luke, XXIII, 34 (Douay-Rheims, Sixto-Clementine Vulgate); Catechism of the Council of Trent (1566), fifth petition of the Lord's Prayer («forgive us our trespasses»), on the love of enemies as the mark of the children of God, and the chapter on the fifth commandment («Thou shalt not kill»), on the gravity of homicide and the punishment of the guilty by public authority.