Our Lady of Gietrzwałd: the Dietrichswalde apparitions in Warmia

In 1877, Gietrzwałd was a Warmian village called Dietrichswalde in German, within Prussia and the German Empire during Bismarck's Kulturkampf. A maple stood before the old Gothic parish church. Justyna Szafryńska, 13, lived in Nowy Młyn. Barbara Samulowska, 12, lived in Woryty. Both belonged to poor, Polish-speaking Catholic families and, by one account, were distant relatives and classmates.

27 June 1877. Justyna was walking home from her examination before First Communion. In the maple she saw a strange light. Then a figure dressed in white, seated upon "a gold, pearl-studded throne." She saw the glowing figure of an angel with golden wings, clad in white, descending from heaven.

Barbara soon joined her, on 28 June or 30 June depending on the source. "A golden circle appeared around the maple tree with a throne of gold, and two angels escorted the Blessed Mother to the throne." Two other angels brought the Child Jesus in a heavenly glow and placed Him on her left knee. Angels raised a crown above Mary. The maple was brightly illuminated.

The figure spoke Polish, in the local Warmian dialect. On 30 June: "I want you to pray the Rosary daily." On 1 July, asked who she was: "I am the Blessed Virgin Mary of the Immaculate Conception." Asked whether the Church would be freed, she answered that if people prayed fervently, the Church would not be persecuted.

On 8 September she blessed a spring. "Now, the sick people can take this water for their healing." On 16 September, at about five o'clock in the evening, she blessed her own figure in the small chapel. It was the last of some 160 apparitions.

The crowd watched the girls as it grew. On 8 September about 50,000 pilgrims came. Prussian officials and the German press called it Polish superstition and fanaticism, a political danger to the state. Pilgrims and priests were fined. The church's 16th-century image was ordered moved to a side altar.

Bishop Philipp Krementz of Warmia was sceptical. He appointed a commission of deans Augustyn Karau and Edward Stock on 18 August; its members arrived around 20 August. Fr. Franz Hipler arrived separately on 31 August. In early September, doctors noted slowed pulses, cooler extremities and fixed gazes; Dr Sonntag of Olsztyn used atropine, and they ruled out simulation. A favourable 47-page report followed, and in 1878 Krementz approved Hipler's study for publication.

The debate ran along political lines. To Prussian officials it was fraud and Polish nationalist agitation. Sympathetic and secular writers alike read the Polish-language message as resistance to Germanisation. A dozen or so Warmian women later claimed visions, among them Elżbieta Bilitewska and Katarzyna Wieczorkówna, but only the two children were accepted. Historians set the case beside Marpingen, another apparition case in Prussia under the Kulturkampf.

Barbara became Sister Stanisława of the Daughters of Charity and served as a missionary in Guatemala from 1895 to 1950, known as "the mother of the poor." Her cause for sainthood opened in 2005. Justyna joined the same congregation, left in 1897, married in Paris and stayed in France.

In 1967 Cardinals Wyszyński and Karol Wojtyła crowned the image. On 11 September 1977 Bishop Józef Drzazga approved the cult as "not contrary to Christian faith and morality." Forty years before Fátima, a Virgin speaking Polish had appeared in a maple tree. Today about one million pilgrims a year come to the shrine, and the Sejm has debated making 2027 the Year of the Gietrzwałd Apparitions.