A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE ARCHIVES

Eight months before his death, the founder of the community, Bogdan Jański, set out from Paris to his confreres in Rome. Despite weakness and illness, he took with him not only his personal Diary (which from then on he no longer continued), but also the notes pinned to it (and there were quite a few of them). He also took drafts of numerous letters and all kinds of notes. Sensing that the heart of the community would beat in Rome (and he was not mistaken) and that his life was drawing to a close, he asked his secretary, Edward Duński, to bring to the Eternal City all materials concerning the new community from Paris and from Aix-en-Provence (the last stop on his protracted journey, where he had left part of the archival holdings). So it happened. Two years later, in 1842, the Resurrectionists transferred all these collections from the house on Piazza Margana for a longer stay to the new monastery of St. Claudius on Piazza S. Silvestro, and finally—in 1886—located them on Via S. Sebastianello.

Records, legacies, material mementos, periodicals, and letters continued to arrive. Successive generations of Resurrectionists left their papers there: Kajsiewicz, Kaczanowski, Jełowicki, Semenenko, Kalinka, and those after them—men who labored in the Papal States (from 1870, Italy), Canada, Bulgaria, the USA, the Polish lands, later in Brazil, Bolivia, Germany, Austria, Ukraine, and, most recently, Tanzania. Several tens of thousands of letters found their final home in the black ACRR boxes—letters from confreres, from religious sisters, separately from former confreres, from bishops, clergy, and laity. Hence the linguistic diversity of the entire collection. Alongside Polish one encounters English, Bulgarian, French, Latin, Italian, German, Swahili, Russian, and Old Church Slavonic.

At the same time, the official activity of each Superior General, the General Curia, and various bodies of the Congregation developed in parallel. Thirty-three General Chapters have been held. Since 1948, three Provinces began their activity: the Chicago, Canadian, and Polish Provinces. Countless visitations were carried out. The Resurrectionists built new churches and rectories. And again, further piles of documents steadily made their way to Via S. Sebastianello.

At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, Fr. Paweł Smolikowski, CR, the author of the first substantial history of the Congregation, undertook with great care a successful initial ordering of the collection, gathering and arranging the documents chronologically. Later, only in the 1950s, as a result of the opening of the beatification causes of the Co-Founders, American Resurrectionists set about putting the archives in order (among them Fr. Jan Książek and Br. Lucjan Budziński).

But the title of the “father of the General Archives” belongs to Fr. John Iwicki, who died in 1992, the author of the three-volume history of the Congregation, who more than sixty years ago divided all correspondence holdings into eleven categories, purchased the distinctive black boxes, inventoried all documents then available, and transferred them into those boxes.

Polish users left their mark on the work and shape of the ACRR in this period: Fr. Jerzy Mrówczyński (author of the 1977 Introduction to the Sources of Resurrectionist History and Spirituality), Fr. Marian Traczyński (editor of part of Fr. Semenenko’s letters and the whole of Fr. Kajsiewicz’s), and Fr. Bolesław Micewski (an incisive scholar of Jański’s legacy). Some time after them, another archivist, Fr. Paweł Szymanowski, entered into cooperation with the General Directorate of State Archives, signing an agreement whereby the archives were implemented in the Integrated Archival Information System, thanks to which it will be possible (though the process is moving very slowly) to view online more and more notable items kept there. Through his efforts, conservation treatments were carried out (for example, on letters by A. Mickiewicz), and professional digitization of the Fathers’ legacies was begun (including those of P. Semenenko, W. Kalinka, and P. Smolikowski).

For more information about the archival holdings, please write to:
archiwumrzymskie@resurrectionist.eu