URBAN, JAN. - Polish Jesuit and writer, b. 23 Jan. 1874 at Brok, in the part of Poland then under Russian rule, d. 27 Sept. 1940 in Kraków.
U. followed the course of theology at the Seminary of Płock and was ordained a priest in 1899. In the same year he passed into Austrian Galicia and there entered the Society of Jesus. In 1902 and 1903 he went clandestinely into Russia to give spiritual aid to the Uniates of Podlachia persecuted by the tsarist government (v. RUTENI). When in 1905 the edict of toleration granted greater freedom to Catholics, U., furnished with special faculties from the Holy See, in the years 1907-10 went clandestinely to St. Petersburg. There he concerned himself with the organization of the first Russian Catholic groups of the Eastern rite and with the press, beginning with the prelate Okolo-Kulak the publication of the journal Faith and Life in the Russian, Polish and Latvian languages. Hunted by the tsarist police, he managed to escape into Austrian Galicia. There, and then in the re-established independent Poland, U. distinguished himself as a prolific writer and from 1917 to 1932 directed Przegląd Powszechny, one of the most influential Catholic periodicals in Poland. U. strove intensely to promote the interest of Polish Catholics in the union of the Eastern dissidents, and to this end in 1933 he founded the journal Oriens. His perspicacity in assessing events and his sharpness in polemic won U. great prestige. The moral and material sufferings caused by the German occupation of Poland led U. rapidly to his death in 1940.
Bibliography
Giuseppe Olär