Describing the history of the founding of the Congregation of Albertine Brothers we have to go back to 20 August 1845. It was then in Igołomi near Krakow that the then still unholy Adam Chmielowski was born. He was the eldest child of Wojciech and Józefa, and had three siblings. In 1853 his father died and at the age of fourteen his mother orphaned him.
Saint Brother Albert – who was he?
As an eighteen-year-old student at the Agricultural and Forestry School in Puławy, he took part in the January Uprising. In the lost battle of Mełchów he was wounded and as a result his leg was amputated. When he managed to escape from captivity, he went to Paris.
After the amnesty in 1865, he came to Warsaw, where he started to study painting, which he continued in Munich. He returned to Poland in 1874. As an artist he created works in which religious themes appeared more and more often. In the 1880s, he created his famous painting “Ecce Homo”, which became a symbol of the changes beginning in Adam. He decided to dedicate his life to the service of God. To this end, he decided to join the Jesuit Order. After six months, however, he left the novitiate and went to Podolia to his brother Stanislaus. There he joined the Tertiary Society of St Francis of Assisi and carried out apostolic work among the rural population.
In 1884 he returned to Krakow. Driven by love of God and neighbour, he devoted his life to serving the homeless and the abandoned. In 1887, with Cardinal Albin Dunajewski’s consent, he took the habit. A year later he took his vows in his hands, giving birth to a new religious family. Thus he founded the Congregation of Albertine Brothers (1888) and Albertine Sisters (1891). Both orders were based on the rules of St Francis of Assisi, which he himself tried to follow in his life.
Aims of the founder of the Albertine Congregation
The centre of activity of the Congregations founded by St. Brother Albert were the municipal heating centres for the homeless. He transformed these places into hospices through his apostolic work. Without any material resources, he collected monetary and material donations for the upkeep of the poor. As time went by and he devoted himself more fully to the service of the poor, he gradually gave up painting. However, this did not mean that he ceased to be an artist. On the contrary, while ceasing to be an artist in the strict sense of the word, he became an artist even more fully. He renewed the beauty of Christ’s defiled face in people on the margins of society and at the bottom of morality. He regarded service for the homeless and the destitute as a form of devotion to the Passion of Christ, thus it was an expression of his heroic love for God and neighbour.
St. Brother Albert also founded homes for orphans, cripples, the old and the terminally ill. He helped the unemployed by organising work for them. Brother Albert’s famous words are that everyone must be given food, a place to stay for the homeless and clothes for the naked; without a roof and a piece of bread, they can only steal or beg to survive.
He died on 25 December 1916 in Krakow. In his reputation for holiness he was described as “the most beautiful man of his generation“. Both the beatification (1983 in Krakow) and canonisation (1989 in Rome) of the founder of the Albertine Brothers’ Congregation were carried out by Pope John Paul II. The relics of St. Brother Albert are kept in the Ecce Homo Sanctuary of St. Brother Albert in Krakow at 10 Woronicza Street.
Founding of the Albertine Congregation
It was then that Adam Chmielowski donned the habit of the Third Order of St Francis of Assisi. He lived in the “heating plant”, a place of refuge for “the material and moral poverty of the homeless of Krakow, in order to learn about their needs through direct contact with them and to influence them positively by an example of honest life and diligence”. Through such an apostolate he transformed the “warming-place” into a “hug” for Christ, whom he tried to see in every human being – and he taught his brothers to do the same.
Equally a year later, on August 25th 1889, Brother Albert took his Tertiary vows and this date is considered the beginning of the Congregation of Albertine Brothers. After the death of the Founder, in 1928 the Albertine community received its own Constitutions and Rule of St. Francis of Assisi and aggregation to the Order of Conventual Franciscan Fathers. It was formed as the Third Order Regular of St. Francis, Brothers Serving the Poor.
In the period before the Second World War the Congregation of Albertine Brothers showed considerable dynamism. It had about 100 brothers in several religious houses, ran shelters for orphans and poor youth, printing houses and workshops. The Society of Friends of Brother Albert’s Work (Towarzystwo Przyjaciół Dzieła Brata Alberta) was established to provide various forms of help.
The war was a serious blow to the Congregation, with the scattering of houses, arrests of brothers, forced labour, deportations to concentration camps, which even cost the lives of many, including the elder brother of the Congregation.
After the war the Congregation could not heal its wounds, because new upheavals came. The houses in the eastern areas of pre-war Poland were liquidated, and the remaining shelters were converted into care homes for the chronically or mentally ill. This was work for which the Brothers were not prepared. Nevertheless, they undertook it, believing that God had given them these new objectives. It was not until the social changes after 1989 that new perspectives for the Congregation were opened up again. Outposts of service for the homeless, the poor, the spiritually and materially neglected were established.