A wretched year came to a sorrowful end when Father Maciej Zieba, OP, died in his native Wroc?aw, Poland, on December 31. The birthplace of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Wroclaw was also the home of St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, who grew up there as Edith Stein when the city was known as Breslau. Unlike those great Christian witnesses, Maciej Zieba was not a martyr; but he, too, gave his life for Christ and the Church, and he bore more than his share of suffering in doing so.
His life was dramatically changed by John Paul II s first pilgrimage to Poland in June 1979. Hearing the pope s eloquent summons to Poles to reject the communist culture of the life by reclaiming the truth about themselves as a nation, the young university student of physics thought, We might have to live and die under communism. But I can live without being a liar. Opportunities to act on that determination multiplied when the Solidarity movement was born in the fall of 1980. Maciej Zieba quickly became involved