Basilica of Our Lady of Licheń

Image: Wikimedia Commons

The story of Poland's largest church begins with a wounded soldier. Tomasz Kłossowski, fighting near Leipzig in 1813, promised the Virgin who appeared to him that if he lived he would find her image and honor it at home; years later he found the small painting he recognized, Our Lady of Sorrows with the white eagle of Poland on her breast, and hung it on a pine in the Grąblin forest. There, between 1850 and 1852, as cholera swept the region, the shepherd Mikołaj Sikatka reported apparitions of the sorrowful Queen of Poland calling her people to conversion and the Rosary; the little image was moved to the church in Licheń and crowned in 1967 by Cardinal Wyszyński. Then, between 1994 and 2004, the pilgrims themselves built her a basilica: designed by Barbara Bielecka and funded entirely by their offerings, with a golden dome rising 98 meters and a tower of 141.5, the tallest in Poland. John Paul II came to pray here in 1999. A tiny painting a soldier once carried home now draws a million pilgrims a year across the Polish plain.