Stanislaw Malkowski

Stanisław Olaf Małkowski, shown on this page as Stanislaw Malkowski, was a Polish Roman Catholic priest, sociologist, and publicist who became one of the best-known chaplains of Solidarity. He died in the night of 7 September 2026 at the age of 82. This profile is that priest. It is not a page for his paternal grandfather, Professor Stanisław Małkowski, the petrographer and mineralogist who lived from 1889 to 1962.

The Archdiocese of Warsaw published the death notice on 8 September 2026 and said funeral details would be given later. No cause of death was stated. Polsat News, the same day, described the death as the night of 7 to 8 September and noted that the archdiocese had not given a cause. No clock time is recorded here. Place of death and resting place were not made public in that notice.

He was born on 29 July 1944 at Wola Korytnicka, near Węgrów, on an estate that had belonged to his great-grandparents. His father, Zdzisław Małkowski, was a physicist. His mother, Krystyna, of the Malski family, was an ethnographer. His maternal grandfather was Senator Władysław Malski. In December 1945 the family moved to Warsaw. A brother was born in 1946. Published biographical summaries do not give that brother's name.

He finished the Tadeusz Reytan VI Secondary School in Warsaw in 1961 and began philosophy at the University of Warsaw. In 1964 he broke off those studies for the Benedictine novitiate at Tyniec. He left before taking the habit and returned to university. In 1969 he took a master's degree in sociology at the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Warsaw. His supervisor was Professor Adam Podgórecki. During the March 1968 student strikes he was removed from the Faculty of Philosophy.

In 1970 he entered the Higher Metropolitan Seminary in Warsaw. As a seminarian he published sociological work on youth subcultures and on young people held in reformatories and prisons. On 22 December 1974 he was ordained by Zbigniew Kraszewski, auxiliary bishop of Warsaw. He served as a vicar at St Josaphat in Warsaw in 1974 and 1975, then as a resident at Corpus Christi in Kamionek, and briefly in Skierniewice, Ząbki, Prudnik, and Poznań. He led retreats for the Light-Life Movement. In 1976 and 1977 he tried religious life again as a Dominican novice, then returned to diocesan ministry.

From the 1960s he worked with the democratic opposition. He cooperated with the Movement for the Defence of Human and Civic Rights and with the Workers' Defence Committee. He signed the Letter of 59, the 1975 protest against writing the leading role of the communist party and a lasting alliance with the Soviet Union into the constitution. He joined hunger strikes at St Martin's and Holy Cross in Warsaw and worked with Andrzej Czuma, Leszek Moczulski, Wojciech Ziembiński, and Jacek Kuroń, later breaking with Kuroń over political differences. From 1977 he worked with the Peasant Self-Defence Committee of the Grójec Land, and from 1979 with the Committee of Understanding for the Self-Determination of the Nation. The Warsaw curia repeatedly warned him about sermons that quoted Catholic teaching on human rights. In 1977 he lost a regular parish assignment and was employed by individual parish priests. In August 1980, as a delegate of the Grójec peasant committee, he took part in the strike at the Gdańsk Shipyard.

At the seminary he met Jerzy Popiełuszko. They became friends and collaborators. Małkowski helped with pastoral work at St Anne's and at Res Sacra Miser on Krakowskie Przedmieście. From 1982 they celebrated the crowded Masses for the Homeland at St Stanislaus Kostka in Żoliborz. He also helped organise Katyń Masses and gatherings at the Traugutt Park cross and the monument at Olszynka Grochowska. The Security Service detained, interrogated, and searched him many times. On 13 December 1981, the day martial law was declared, he was the only Catholic priest from Warsaw detained by the Security Service. He was not interned. In the early 1980s his name stood first, ahead of Popiełuszko, on a list of inconvenient priests prepared for Colonel Adam Pietruszka of Department IV of the Interior Ministry, priests the services considered for secret killing.

In 1983 the Warsaw curia removed him from ordinary pastoral work and made him chaplain at the Northern Communal Cemetery at Wólka Węglowa. He kept preaching when invited, and he published under pseudonyms in the underground and independent press, including Biuletyn Informacyjny, Krytyka, Spotkania, Tygodnik Powszechny, Tygodnik Wojenny, Więź, and Znak. Print names recorded for him include Tadeusz Baczan, Jan Malski, Stanisław Bernalewski, Ksiądz, and Socjolog. After 1989 the curia's bans were lifted. He served as a vicar at Our Lady Queen of the World in Ochota, then in 1990 helped at Divine Mercy and St Faustina in Muranów. From 1992 he again had no permanent assignment. He volunteered in prison ministry, celebrated funerals at the Northern Cemetery, and until 2002 lived as a resident at Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Saska Kępa. From 1991 to 2002 he served at the remand prison in Białołęka.

Public conflict with church authorities returned after 1989. On 24 January 2007, after an interview for Jerzy Zalewski's programme Pod Prąd on TV Puls and comments on public television about the Church and the appointment and resignation of Archbishop Stanisław Wielgus, he was recalled from the cemetery chaplaincy. He also lost work at St Patrick's in Gocław. The Warsaw-Praga curia withdrew his right to preach and to hear confessions, limiting him to concelebrated Masses in Saska Kępa. After an intervention by auxiliary bishop Marian Duś he was restored to funeral ministry at Wólka Węglowa.

In the summer of 2009 he supported a protest against a Madonna concert in Warsaw. After the Smolensk air disaster he led evening prayers before the Presidential Palace and, on 3 August 2010, blessed the so-called Smolensk cross that scouts had placed in April 2010 before the monument to Prince Józef Poniatowski. On 13 September 2010 the Warsaw curia warned him and threatened suspension. He remained a supporter of the Civic Initiative of the Defenders of the Cross and blessed a new cross for it. In November 2010, at the curia's wish, he stopped serving at the Res Sacra Miser hospice. In 2011 he joined the council of the Solidarni 2010 association and the honorary committee of the Independence March. He wrote for Nasza Polska and Warszawska Gazeta. He treated the Smolensk crash as an assassination, a claim he stated in interviews and that remains disputed. He also campaigned for the enthronement of Jesus Christ as King of Poland and for the defence of conceived life. In 1979, with Fathers Jacek Salij OP and Stanisław Ługowski, he had co-founded the Gaudium Vitae movement for the defence of conceived children.

No spouse and no children are named in the archdiocesan notice, the Polish Wikipedia biography, or the Polsat obituary used here. He was a diocesan priest of the Archdiocese of Warsaw. Private interests beyond those documented ministries are not made public. In 2012 he said that under communism he had had greater freedom to speak on so-called controversial topics than he had in the Poland of that later date. He described love of the Fatherland as the fulfilment of the Fourth Commandment.

State honours arrived late and in a row. On 23 September 2006 President Lech Kaczyński awarded him the Commander's Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta for service to independence and democratic change. A Badge of Meritorious Cultural Activist is also listed, without a year in the biographical summary used here. In 2007 his name was placed on a plaque to Solidarity chaplains at St Catherine's in Służew. Warszawska Gazeta named him Man of the Year 2010. In January 2011 he received the Gregory I the Great prize from Niezależna Gazeta Polska Nowe Państwo. On 5 October 2013 he was photographed as a laureate of the Piotr Skarga prize in Niepołomice. In 2018 he received the Pro Bono Poloniae Medal, and in 2019 the Cross of Freedom and Solidarity. On 11 November 2021 President Andrzej Duda awarded him the Order of the White Eagle, Poland's highest state decoration, in recognition of outstanding merits in pastoral work, and for the heroic attitude of a Solidarity chaplain who supported in word and deed the struggle for an independent and just Poland, standing on the side of good and truth in defence of inalienable human rights.

He appeared as himself in a brief role in the 2008 biographical film Popiełuszko. Wolność jest w nas. In 2010 Witold Dębicki played him as a supporting character in the Television Theatre play Wierność. The 2016 documentary Ksiądz, directed by Maria Dłużewska and based on Institute of National Remembrance and Interior Ministry archive material, presents him as a close friend of Popiełuszko and one of the last priests in contact with him before the kidnapping. Books about him include Tomasz Sommer and Rafał Pazio, X. Małkowski (Warsaw, 2012), and a biographical chapter in Jan Skórzyński, ed., Opozycja w PRL, volume II (Warsaw, 2002).

He retired in 2022. From July 2022 he lived as a pensioner in the family home in the Diocese of Warsaw-Praga. The archdiocese, announcing his death, remembered him as an opposition activist, a Solidarity chaplain, a sociologist, and a publicist, and as Popiełuszko's friend. Funeral arrangements were not yet public when the notice appeared on 8 September 2026.