History Hangs Heavily in the ‘City of Saints’
National Catholic Register, 13 November 2026
The Nov. 7 shooting in Kraków hits close to home.
If circumstances permit a pilgrim to travel, there are three essential cities for Catholics: Jerusalem, where the history of salvation unfolded; Rome, where the history of the Church unfolded; and Kraków, where the history of our time unfolded.
Nov. 7’s mass shooting, leaving six random people dead and 16 wounded — the shooter himself died after exchanging gunfire with police — was another manifestation of how heavily history hangs in the City of Saints.
The shooting hit close to home for me and my colleagues in the Tertio Millennio Seminar on the Free Society, which has taken place in Kraków every summer since 1994. I was a student in the first Cracovian seminar, spending three marvelous weeks in one of the jewels in the crown of European royal capitals, and have returned as a member of the faculty most summers since 2009.
Stephen White, executive director of the Saint John Paul II National Shrine in Washington, D.C., and I live in the same university student residence when we are there, just down the block from where the murderous rampage ended on Saturday. We walk past that exact spot on our way to breakfast each morning, a place now marked, as Stephen has written, by horror and heroism.
In his book for Kraków’s World Youth Day in 2016, George Weigel, an original faculty member and leader of the seminar for more than 25 years, focused on the holy history of Kraków, hence the title “City of Saints.” But the book opens by noting the wider history, namely that Kraków is the “city where the twentieth century happened.” And, one might now add, the 21st century, too.
At the time that Weigel’s book came out, I traced some of that history. The 20th century opened with Kraków, city of Polish kings, belonging to the Habsburg Empire. Poland had been erased from the map of Europe at the end of the 18th century. St. John Paul the Great was named “Karol” after the last Habsburg emperor, Blessed Karl of Austria, in whose armed forces his father served. In his last beatification ceremony in 2004, John Paul beatified Karl, “my father’s emperor.”
The Polish nation, deprived of the instruments of sovereignty for more than a century, relied upon its spiritual and cultural heritage to sustain itself: the legacy of the kings buried in Wawel Cathedral of Kraków, and the relics of St. Stanislaus, the martyr-bishop, at Skałka, a short walk down from Wawel Hill. That challenge of sustaining a nationality without a nation-state — defining a nation by culture rather than political sovereignty — would give shape to much of 20th-century geopolitics and national liberation movements.
The greatest of those liberation movements, the peaceful defeat of communism, had its spiritual origins in Kraków, the city that both St. Faustina Kowalska and John Paul moved to in the 1930s. The Auschwitz martyrs, St. Maximilian Kolbe and St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, were killed in what was then the Kraków Archdiocese.
Two world wars, national independence, invasion by neighbors — first the Soviets (1920) and then the Nazis and the Soviets (1939) — and the Cold War; all of it took place in Kraków, which in turn provided the man of the century, Karol Józef Wojtyła.
The great questions after the defeat of the Soviet empire were taken up in Poland with particular intensity. On what basis should a free society be built? What kind of culture is required to sustain a free politics and a free economy? What did it mean for Poland to rejoin Europe, and how did Europe understand its own identity? To what extent did the great postwar European institutions — the European Union and NATO — provide for the peace and prosperity of its peoples?
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