A friary of 762 runs Poland's largest printing works

NIEPOKALANÓW, Poland, September 1, 1939 AD — German forces crossed into Poland before dawn this morning. The first thing the war stopped here was a newspaper: the dispatch of Mały Dziennik (the Little Daily) was halted today.

The place is Niepokalanów, a Franciscan friary about forty kilometres west of Warsaw. Seven hundred and sixty-two people live on ground that was a field twelve years ago. It is the largest friary in the world, and it runs the largest printing works in Central Europe. Saint Maximilian Kolbe, a Conventual Franciscan of forty-five, founded the house in 1927 AD. He has been its superior since 1936 AD.

The ground was chosen for the printing: the middle of Poland, next to the capital, on the road from Warsaw and opposite the Szymanów station of the Kalisz railway. Prince Jan Drucki-Lubecki owned the estate at Teresin. He signed a deed on October 1, 1927 AD giving the friars five morgi (morgs), about two and three-quarter hectares of arable land, for their perpetual use. The prince enlarged the gift several times, to the present twenty-five hectares — as much ground as half the Vatican City State.

The friars set up a plaster statue of the Immaculate Virgin in the open field on August 6, 1927 AD. The parish priest of Pawłowice, whose name the record does not give, blessed it. There were three houses in the neighbourhood.

The printing machines came from the friary at Grodno in four railway wagons. The friars followed on November 20 and reached Teresin the next day, and people from the villages round about brought them a meal. St. Maximilian Kolbe had told them during the move that life in the new house would be very poor, in the spirit of St. Francis. He wrote down later what that first winter had been like: “In the first days boards laid on suitcases served as a table; the floor for chairs, and for beds straw scattered rather thinly over it. When the machines arrived from Grodno the future printworks still had neither doors nor windows. In spite of the freezing wind everyone turned out willingly to bring the place to a state in which the next number of the Knight could be sent out on time.”

Eighteen friars moved in that winter, and there were 658 by the end of 1936 AD. The field is now a working town. There are lanes, some of them cobbled, and a narrow-gauge railway from the friary garage to the station at Szymanów. There are nine wells, two ponds, an apiary, two sports fields, a power station, a small hospital, a burial ground, a novitiate and a small missionary seminary. The printing house has its own bindery, dispatch room and stores.

The presses are the reason for all of it. They print the monthly Rycerz Niepokalanej (the Knight of the Immaculata), which came to a million copies in December of last year. They print a version for young people, at 173,000 copies at the end of 1937 AD, and one for small children. They print a Latin edition for priests, begun last year at 5,000 copies. And since May 1935 AD they print the daily. It went out free until the sixth number. Its price, five groszy, is part of its title. Its weekday run is about 137,000 copies and its weekend edition about 220,000. Printing the whole list took more than 1,600 tonnes of paper and about 35 tonnes of ink in 1937 AD.

The brothers compose, print, bind and dispatch, and they also work the farm, the bakery and the fire brigade, whose men wear the rosary with the Franciscan habit. Five editorial departments and some seventy sections sit under St. Maximilian Kolbe’s own central editorship. There is no relaxation of the Franciscan Rule: a friar is at work, or at prayer, or eating and sleeping, and there is little of the last two.

Father Anzelm Kubit, a friar of the same Order, described the cells: “At first the brothers slept in the attic or on the floor, and afterward only on sacks of straw. […] The washbasin lies under the bed, so as not to take up space, and the brothers usually wash kneeling.” A small figure of the Immaculata stands in every cell and every workshop.

The oldest building here is the wooden chapel, the first thing the friars put up. The statue from the field stands at the entrance, where nobody arriving can miss it. Brother Zeno Żebrowski wired small bulbs and a battery into the shape of a halo above the head of the Blessed Virgin, and a woman who works at the railway station switches the light on each evening and off each morning.