Blessed Seventh Child.
This unique title may be the only identification for the youngest person ever to be beatified by the Catholic Church.
Vatican Cardinal Marcello Semeraro will celebrate the beatification of the Polish Ulma family on Sunday, September 10. It will be the first known instance of an entire family being beatified, and most strikingly, it includes the child Wiktoria Niemczak Ulma, the mother of the family, was still carrying in utero at the time she was killed by Nazi police.
On March 24, 1944, the Nazi police stormed the Ulma family home in the village of Markowa in Poland. For two years, Wiktoria and her husband Józef Ulma had been hiding eight Jewish neighbors from the Nazis, but they had been found out.
The Nazi police killed everyone that day on site—the Jews, Wiktoria and Józef, and finally their six children. They then set the house on fire and went off to celebrate the murder with a drunken vodka fest. When neighbors went to rescue the bodies from the ashes the following week to give them a dignified burial, they also found the body of the child Wiktoria had been carrying in her womb. It is believed that she spontaneously delivered the baby when she was executed.
The Dicastery for the Causes of Saints issued a statement on September 5th, further elucidating the reasons for the beatification of the unnamed baby.
It said that “at the time of the massacre, Mrs. Wiktoria Ulma was in a state of advanced pregnancy with her seventh child” and noted that “this son was delivered at the time of his mother’s martyrdom” and was therefore included with the other children who were also martyred.
The dicastery simply calls the unborn baby “the seventh child” in the list of the holy couple’s children. The other youngsters are Stanisława, aged 7; Barbara, 6; Władysław, 5; Franciszek, 4; Antoni, 2; and Maria, 1.
While the baby’s brothers and sisters had received the sacrament of baptism and actively participated in the faith with their parents—including their heroism in hiding Jews and subsequent martyrdom—the dicastery explained in the most recent statement that the newborn baby received a baptism of blood.
“In fact, in the martyrdom of his parents, he received the baptism of blood,” the dicastery explained.
“The Church has always held the firm conviction that those who suffer death for the sake of the faith without having received Baptism are baptized by their death for and with Christ,” the Catechism of the Catholic Church explains, adding “this Baptism of blood, like the desire for Baptism, brings about the fruits of Baptism without being a sacrament.”
OSV News reports that the sainthood cause for Józef and Wiktoria was initially included in a collective canonization process for more than 100 Polish Catholics martyred during World War II. The Diocese of Pelplin, Poland, submitted the cause to the Vatican in 2011.
Archbishop Adam Szal of Przemysl, Poland, then asked the Congregation for the Causes of Saints to separate the Ulmas from the collective cause. It did, and in 2017, the Vatican office transferred the Ulmas’ cause to the Archdiocese of Przemysl, which includes the village of Markowa.
The Przemysl Archdiocese expanded the cause for sainthood to the entire family, with the pending question of whether it could include Józef and Wiktoria’s unborn, and therefore unbaptized, child.
The answer from the Vatican is a resounding yes.
