Our Lady of Licheń: the apparitions to Mikołaj Sikatka in the Grąblin Forest (1850)

Licheń, in Russian-ruled Congress Poland. About 2 km from the village, beside the Konin road, lies the Grąblin Forest. A painting of the Virgin hung there on a pine tree, a 1772 copy of the Rokitno icon. It was placed there by Tomasz Kłossowski, a soldier wounded at the Battle of Leipzig in 1813. He said the Virgin had appeared to him on the battlefield and told him to find her image back in Poland.

Mikołaj Sikatka, born in Grąblin in 1787, was a farmhand and shepherd. He was one of the few people who prayed regularly before the forest image. Miracle Hunter describes him as "honest, pious, prudent and a truthful man."

1850. Most sources agree the Virgin appeared to Sikatka three times that year. The first date is disputed, 13 May or 1 May, and the last came on 15 August, the Feast of the Assumption. She looked like the image he knew, with a royal crown, a dark red gown, a golden cloak with emblems of the Passion, a white eagle at her breast and sad eyes. Accounts published by the shrine speak of an extraordinary brightness over the forest.

She spoke. "Tell people that God's retribution for their sins is at hand. An infectious disease will trouble all the population." Thousands would die suddenly, she warned, in the fields and in their houses.

The answer was the rosary. In August she returned: "People have become very bad; they are offending God with grave sins."

At first Sikatka said nothing, afraid of ridicule and of being thought insane. When he spoke, he met contempt. The white eagle was a Polish national symbol, and the tsarist officials were alarmed. He was questioned by the wójt of Gosławice, handed to the authorities in Konin, tortured and imprisoned. He did not retract and was freed on a false medical certificate declaring him mentally ill.

In 1852, cholera struck Greater Poland. People gathered at the forest image to pray the rosary for the sick and dying, and many healings were reported. Fr. Florian Kosiński, the parish priest, took Sikatka's testimony under oath and reported to the consistory in Kalisz. Bishop Walenty Maciej Tomaszewski sent a commission. On 29 September 1852 the painting was moved out of the forest before a crowd that Wincenty Łaszewski puts at about 80,000.

Tomasz Potkaj, writing in Tygodnik Powszechny in 2004, says the commission concluded "there was no apparition at this place" and ordered the forest chapel torn down. Other accounts say it decided the image should find a worthy place in the church. The likeliest reading is that it accepted the painting, not the visions. They were never officially recognised. Potkaj notes that Gietrzwałd is the only Polish apparition with full ecclesiastical approval.

Ludwika Wykurz suggests the visions are "best understood as manifestations of Polish society's beliefs and longings under foreign rule." To believers, Mary was confirming her image. To sceptics, the image shaped the vision.

By 1939 about 3,000 acts of grace had been recorded. Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński crowned the image on 15 August 1967 before about 150,000 people. Since 2006 it has hung in Poland's largest church, the basilica built under Fr. Eugeniusz Makulski. Sikatka, who died in 1857, lies in a mausoleum unveiled in 1975. Every 1 May, prayers return to the Grąblin Forest.