Blessed Michał Rapacz

Michał Rapacz was born on 14 September 1904 at Tenczyn near Kraków. He entered the seminary of Kraków in 1926 and was ordained on 1 February 1931. He was sent first to Płoki as assistant priest of the parish of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, then two years later to Rajcza, and returned to Płoki in 1937 as administrator of the parish. From 1939 the German occupation forced him to reduce his pastoral work, since the teaching of the Catholic religion, marriages between Poles and Germans and all afternoon parish activities were forbidden. With the end of the war Poland fell under Stalin's Soviet domination, and the communist regime installed there declared open war on religion and on the Church.

In that moment, shortly before midnight on 11 May 1946, a group of twenty armed men attacked the presbytery at Płoki, seized Don Michał in his cassock and took him to a nearby wood, where he was stunned and then killed with two pistol shots. His body was found the next morning by peasants driving cattle to pasture. The killers were never identified.