BILCZEWSKI JÓZEF Życie święte śmierć [Lviv1910].

Pastoral Letter of Archbishop J. Bilczewski to Priests and the Faithful, Lviv 1919, Catholic Printing House of Jozef Chęcinski, pp. 48, dimensions 11 x 18.5, publisher's booklet binding, cover soiling, light corner tear. Attached to the booklet is Archbishop Jozef Bilczewski's 'Call to Penitential Services', Lviv, September 30, 1918, dim. 23.5 x 30.

In January 1910, Lviv Metropolitan Archbishop Jozef Bilczewski (1860-1923) addressed a pastoral letter to priests and the faithful with the very telling title "Holy Life, Holy Death."

At the very beginning of his letter, Archbishop Bilczewski - a professor of theology at Lviv University - stressed: "If God is not our future, we have no future at all; if with our life we do not fall into God's life, we fall into death." The Lviv metropolitan then recalled the importance of the holy sacraments in human life. They are the way that leads to salvation. "...However, we receive the greatest amount of grace to sustain and intensify in us the life of God through the Holy Sacraments, especially through the Blessed Sacrament, which is the Christian's spiritual granary, his armory and treasury inexhaustible for war expenses in the daily struggle against the enemies of salvation. Through the Eucharistic communion man becomes strongly God himself; in it the two lives, human and divine, merge, in a way, into one life...."

"What is death? What should it be?" - asks in the second part of his letter, the Metropolitan of Lviv. And he answers: "...Each day of life, given in love for the glory of God, is like a silent mass. Death, on the other hand, undertaken in a spirit of repentance, with entire submission to God's will, with a feeling of satisfying it with justice, God's holiness - is and should be a great solemn sum. This summa, as beautifully said, has its Introit, its Confiteor, its Kyrie elejson with penitential prayers. It has its Gloria - praise, thanksgiving for all the graces of life.... Quite naturally, just as during that first great Summation on Calvary the sun eclipsed around God's sacrifice, so also around the sacrifice of human life falls darkness, mourning. But as there, so here too, the darkness soon creeps away, for it is dispersed by God's sun of faith, already casting its first rays on the forehead of the deceased - from beyond the darkness of Good Friday peeps out the joyful Sunday of the Resurrection...."