Eugeniusz Baziak was born on March 8, 1890 in Tarnopol. Bhe was one of those great shepherds of the Polish Church, who by his example of life, fervent faith and deep patriotism, left behind a great gratitude in the hearts of people. When he consecrated Rev. Karol Wojtyla, later Pope John Paul II, as bishop, he said: "I am already old and I can't do much for the Church now, but I have finalized that the bishop will be the best of the candidates, so you can rest assured about the future." The Holy Father himself recalled years later: "I remember as vividly as today that the Archbishop took me by the hand and led me into the waiting room, where the priests were sitting, and said: Habemus papam. In light of later events, we can say that these were prophetic words."

On June 21, 1942, the later archbishop, "shepherd of the unbroken" Ignacy Tokarczuk, was ordained a priest in Lviv from the hands of Auxiliary Bishop of Lviv Eugeniusz Baziak. 

In 1932, Pope Pius XI appointed Baziak an infulturiate, and on September 15, 1933, he was appointed auxiliary bishop of Lvov by Archbishop Boleslaw Twardowski, with whom Fr. Baziak had known for a long time. It was to Rev. Archbishop Twardowski that the new bishop was consecrated on November 5, 1933, in the Archcathedral of Lvov.

Rev. Infl. Waclaw Szetelnicki, in his book titled. "Archbishop-Exile Eugeniusz Baziak, Metropolitan of Lviv" writes: "Despite the apparent successes and successes in life, the priestly life of Archbishop Eugeniusz Baziak was always hardworking and difficult, but it proved most difficult during World War II. The bishop's cross, which hung on his chest on the day of his consecration, became a symbol of the way of the cross he had to walk during those years of struggle and anguish." At the end of October 1939, the Soviets liquidated the Theological Faculty of Jan Kazimierz University in Lviv, and in December, the seminary. At that time, as well as throughout World War II, Msgr. Baziak led efforts to ensure the continuity of the seminary's work in the place of the very ailing Msgr. Twardowski, and also ordained priests.

The Lviv Church organized charitable aid campaigns both for the tens of thousands of Poles criminally deported to the depths of the Soviet Union and for the poor, starving local population. Already in 1941, when the German-Soviet war broke out, the second occupiers entered Lviv. Bishop Baziak then had to face another very harsh Lviv reality. "The place of the Red terror was taken by the Brown terror with methods and means of action similar in principle to that one. Mass persecution, imprisonment and deportation of people to concentration camps soon followed. The new occupiers used the same prisons as the previous Soviet occupiers, and a kind of 'novelty' in the extermination of patriots and activists of the Polish national-independence underground was only their execution in street executions. (...) The Germans also quite quickly applied to the Lviv church authorities and clergy the aforementioned repressive measures, surveillance, provocations, investigative inquiries and interrogations of the clergy of the Curia and Seminary and various other restrictions. (...) The Germans were zealously assisted by the Ukrainian nationalists of the OUN and Ukrainian Insurgent Army, who were closely allied with them and hated the Poles. This soon led to the Gehenna of the Polish inhabitants of Volhynia and Podolia, in which hundreds of thousands of bestially murdered people, including many Roman Catholic priests, lost their lives. Disregarding this, their clerical superiors from the Lviv Metropolitan Curia, headed by Archbishop Boleslaw Twardowski and Bishop Eugeniusz Baziak, sometimes risked their lives to make pastoral visits even to parishes very far from Lviv in order to get an idea of their current condition and the usually tragic passages," he writes. - Szolginia writes. At the end of July 1944, after the German army was driven out of the city, the Soviets retook Lviv. The second Soviet occupation of the city began. The old restrictions and persecution of the Church returned. The year 1944 is also the date of the death of Archbishop Boleslaw Twardowski. It was then that Archbishop Metropolitan Eugeniusz Baziak was chosen by the Holy Father to be the shepherd of the Lviv archdiocese, and he took over the reign of the archdiocese on November 22, 1944.

Beginning in 1945, Archbishop Eugeniusz Baziak was forcibly brought by Soviet authorities for all-night interrogations aimed at forcing him to leave Lviv forever. For a long time he did not give in to Soviet officials, but when the situation of the church in Lviv became hopeless, he made the painful decision to expatriate the seminary and the agencies of the metropolitan curia, along with its archives, to Poland within its new borders. He celebrated his last pontifical Mass in the Lviv archcathedral on Easter Sunday in 1946. At the end of April of that year, he left his beloved city with a painful heart. Witold Szolginia recalls in his book that this turning point in the life of Archbishop Baziak, "this very tragic, painful and full of shattering sorrow circumstance became the impetus for the creation of the poignant with its eloquence description of him as an archbishop - an exile...". In mid-August 1946, he moved to his new residence in Lubaczow. Here he received the painful news that the communist authorities in Poland at the time had liquidated the seminary, which had been moved from Lviv to Kalwaria Zebrzydowska. In 1951, there was another appointment of the archbishop as Cardinal Stefan Sapieha's coadjutor in Cracow, retaining his previous functions. The then Pope Pius XII, in the event of the death of the archbishop of Cracow, appointed him at the same time apostolic administrator of the Cracow archdiocese with the authority of resident bishop. When Cardinal Sapieha passed away to the Lord, Archbishop Baziak took up his new duties in the Cracow archdiocese. It was a very difficult time for him, as the communist state authorities waged an increasingly fierce struggle against the Polish Church. In December 1952, they interned him and then arrested and imprisoned him in one of Krakow's prisons. Due to poor health, he was released in 1953, but was forbidden to return to Krakow and Lubaczow. He did not return until 1956 as part of the so-called post-October thaw.

September 28, 1958 went down in the history of the Polish Church for good. For it was then, in Wawel Cathedral, that the archbishop consecrated Father Karol Wojtyla as bishop. In the biography of Archbishop Eugeniusz Baziak, the already quoted infirmarian priest Waclaw Szetelnicki writes about this significant and memorable act: "None of those filling the Wawel Basilica and surrounding the confession of St. Stanislaus, bishop and martyr, during the consecration rites, in their wildest dreams, could have imagined that they were participating in the episcopal sacrament of the future pope, the first of the Polish nation, who would shine with the most magnificent splendor of glory on the Church in the world and on his homeland. Thus, the apostolic succession to the future pope was handed over by the imposition of the hands of the Metropolitan of Lviv. Archbishop Eugeniusz Baziak became an instrument of Divine Providence. John Paul II made the name of Poland famous throughout the world, and with him his consecrator went down in history." It must be admitted that the situation of Archbishop Eugeniusz Baziak was extremely complicated, because on the one hand he still remained the Metropolitan of Lviv and ruled over the patch of this diocese in Lubaczow through his plenipotentiary, and on the other hand he performed de facto duties as Ordinary in Cracow. It was not until 1962 that there were changes in this regard. It was then that the Krakow chapter, through Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski, asked John XXIII to replace Archbishop Baziak as Metropolitan of Krakow and thus unite the archbishoprics of Lviv and Krakow in a personal union. Father Szetelnicki describes it in his book as follows: "In March 1962, important decisions of the Holy See took place, which fundamentally changed the personal situation of the archbishop. Here are the priests - suffragans of Cracow, Karol Wojtyla and Julian Groblicki, as well as the canon priests of the Cracow Metropolitan Chapter, turned to the Holy See on February 2, 1962 with a request to appoint Archbishop Eugeniusz Baziak as archbishop - metropolitan in Cracow. In response, the Secretary of State of the Holy See, A.J. Cardinal Cicognani notified Primate Stefan Wyszynski that Father Archbishop Eugeniusz Baziak had been transferred to the archiepiscopal See of Cracow, becoming administrator of the archdiocese of Lviv, for the faithful of the Latin rite. The Holy Father's will was communicated by the Primate to Archbishop Eugene Baziak on March 14, 1962, who gave the Primate canonical approval to take over the Cracow capital. At the same time, however, Archbishop Baziak, through the hands of the Primate, made a request to the Holy Father that he be allowed to remain at the same time with the archiepiscopal capital in Lviv, due to the spiritual sensitivity of the faithful of the Lviv archdiocese, who asked for this. The Primate noted that during a conversation in Warsaw on June 13, 1962, 'Archbishop Baziak deeply experienced his separation from the Lviv Cathedral.' Unfortunately, there was no more time to solemnly announce his appointment, because two days after that conversation, Archbishop Baziak died of a heart attack. He was buried in the Wawel Cathedral in Cracow. His successor as archbishop of Cracow was Bishop Karol Wojtyla, later Pope John Paul II, who presided over the funeral ceremonies of the deceased priest. How great a blow the death of Archbishop Eugeniusz Baziak was to the Polish Episcopate, we can learn from the issue of L'Osservatore Romano, which appeared a few days after his funeral. We read there: "With the death of Archbishop Baziak, the Polish Episcopate loses one of its most illustrious representatives, the faithful under his care - a loving and firm father, and the Church - a vigilant and responsible shepherd to the point of heroism. (...) Archbishop Baziak was the victim of slander, deported and interned, he regained his freedom thanks to the faith of the Polish people, a faith that inhibits and weakens persecution more than in any other country, a faith that to the enemies themselves seemed the only force that could save an enslaved nation from a new tragedy. (...) His determined, albeit tacit, action aroused great admiration from those who were given the opportunity to judge its worth. (...) John XXIII received him with all the effulgence of his fatherly heart, appreciating in him an example of apostolic zeal, overcoming any obstacles. He died, leaving behind an instructive example of generous highs and inexhaustible apostolic energy."

Source: Piotr Czartoryski-Sziler, Nasz Dziennik

Archbishop Eugeniusz Baziak consecrates Father Karol Wojtyla as Bishop