Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of GraphSearch.
Concept
Jan Cieplak
Summary
Jan Cieplak (17 August 1857 – 17 February 1926) was a Polish Roman Catholic priest and archbishop.
Jan Cieplak was born in Dąbrowa Górnicza, Congress Poland, in 1857 to an impoverished family of the Polish nobility. He attended the Saint Petersburg Roman Catholic Theological Academy during the 1880s. After several years as a seminary instructor, in 1908, he became the auxiliary bishop of the Metropolitan Archdiocese of Mohilev and titular bishop of Evaria. He remained in this position until his superior, Archbishop Edward von der Ropp, was deported after the October Revolution.
During the reign of Nicholas II of Russia, Cieplak was under surveillance by the Okhrana, which suspected him of Polish nationalism. On 29 March 1919, he was named the titular archbishop of Achrida. As the highest-ranking representative of Roman Catholic Church in the new Soviet Union he was often harassed and persecuted. The Archbishop was arrested twice by the CHEKA but was released amidst massive protests by the Catholics of Petrograd. At the same time, he was also instrumental in arranging for the relics of Saint Andrew Bobola to be permanently transferred from the Soviet Union to Rome. Otherwise, the Archbishop was certain that the remains of the Saint would have been subjected to desecration.
After Lenin's stroke in 1922, Petrograd CPSU boss Grigory Zinoviev was determined to rid his district of organized Catholicism. With the support of a majority of the Politburo, a political show trial was arranged, which was to be prosecuted by Deputy Commissar of Justice Nikolai Krylenko.
During the spring of 1923, Archbishop Cieplak, his Vicar General [Monsignor Konstanty] Budkiewicz, Byzantine Catholic Exarch Leonid Feodorov, fourteen other priests and one layman, were summoned to attend a trial in Moscow.
According to Christopher Lawrence Zugger,
The Bolsheviks had already orchestrated several 'show trials.' The Cheka had staged the 'Trial of the St. Petersburg Combat Organization'; its successor, the new GPU, the 'Trial of the Socialist Revolutionaries.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.