The Pope has for the first time approved the beatification of an entire family, including an unborn child, 79 years after they were summarily shot by the Gestapo for sheltering Jews in their Polish home.
“The Holy Father's decision means the way is open for beatifying Jozef and Wiktoria Ulma – and the honour will also be granted to their seven children, including the child who would have been born in spring 1944,” explained Fr Witold Burda, postulator for the family's cause.
“Their daily faithfulness and obedience to God was especially striking, and provided the foundation of their lives. They were beautiful, smart, mature people, for whom a pledged word held great value.”
The priest spoke in the wake of a pre-Christmas decree by Pope Francis, clearing the way for the nine-member Ulma family to be declared blessed as Catholic martyrs later this year.
He told Poland's Catholic Information Agency, KAI, that the Church viewed martyrdom as conferring the grace of baptism “in both both prenatal and postnatal stages”, and also celebrated a feast day on 28 December for unbaptised children, known as the Holy Innocents, murdered by order of King Herod after the birth of Christ.
The Ulmas, who ran a fruit orchard at Markowa in southeastern Poland, were shot with their children, aged eight and below, at night on 24 March 1944 for allowing eight Jews from the local Szall and Goldman families to hide in their home after escaping a German round-up.
Poland's National Remembrance Institute said a Gestapo team had raided the isolated farmhouse after a tip-off, shooting three Jews in the attic and four others outside, before turning their guns on the Ulmas and throwing their bodies in a nearby ditch.
It added that several village families had continued helping Jews even after the brutal killings, enabling 17 to survive the Nazi occupation of Poland, where all help for Jews was punishable by summary execution.
Meanwhile, the Institute's vice-president, Mateusz Szpytma, a relative of the family, said in a social media post that evidence suggested Wiktoria Ulma, who was heavily pregnant, had gone into childbirth at the time of her death, indicating that her baby's baptism had taken place “not with water, but with blood”.
A beatification process for the family, who were later reburied in Markowa's Catholic cemetery and awarded posthumous “Righteous among Nations” medals in 1995 by Israel's Yad Vashem Memorial Institute, was launched by Poland's Przemysl archdiocese in 2003.
A museum to over 6000 Poles honoured by Israel for saving Jews was opened at Markowa in 2016.
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