“People are full of expectations here, especially those who directly experienced his work,” said Archbishop Henryk Muszynski of Gniezno.

“He wasn’t a forceful speaker or political activist, but someone of deep conviction and integrity. His sanctity lay in an elementary righteousness that gave people hope even in the worst situations.”

The bound and gagged body of 37-year-old Popieluszko, who was well-known in Poland for sermons defending human rights, was dredged from a reservoir on the Vistula River near Wloclawek Oct. 30, 1984, just 11 days after he was kidnapped while returning from a night Mass in Bydgoszcz.

About 400,000 people attended his funeral, and his murder was widely credited with helping discredit and undermine communist rule.

The Warsaw archdiocese launched a canonization process in 1997 and sent its 1,157-page dossier to Rome in 2001. A decree recognizing Popieluszko as a martyr was issued by Pope Benedict XVI Dec. 19. His beatification is a major step toward sainthood.

In a May 17 interview with Catholic News Service, Muszynski said he had lived close to St. Stanislaw Kostka Church in Warsaw, where Popieluszko served in the early 1980s. The archbishop said he became convinced of the priest’s saintliness after reading his homilies when they were published after the 1989 return of democracy. He added that the priest was a “very simple, even shy person,” who had become a spiritual leader by virtue of his undaunted “faithfulness to Christ in the Gospel.”

“He was a normal person who knew what awaited him and was afraid, but nevertheless refused to betray this Gospel of truth,” the archbishop said.

“He stood on the side of people struggling for a free Poland, who had been unjustly accused of plotting to overthrow the communist state. This was why he had powerful opponents.”

Born into a poor, rural family at Okopy in northeastern Poland, Jerzy Popieluszko enrolled at Warsaw’s Catholic seminary in September 1965. He was ordained in May 1972 after having his health damaged by two years of military service.

After other pastoral jobs in the capital, he was sent to help at St. Stanislaw’s in May 1980 and served as a chaplain to the nearby Huta Warszawa steelworks when strikes in August 1980 led to the formation of the Solidarity union.

In February 1982, two months after Solidarity was crushed by martial law, Popieluszko celebrated his first of many Masses for the Homeland, soon copied by other priests around Poland. Several times detained and interrogated, he was formally charged in July 1984 with “abusing the function of a priest” and “anti-state propaganda,” although the charge was suspended a month later.

In a March pastoral letter, Archbishop Kazimierz Nycz of Warsaw predicted the priest would serve as an “advocate against relativism and lies” for “all those wielding power,” adding that his teaching had been received by contemporaries “as parched earth receives water,” making him a “living sign of hope for millions of Poles.”

Meanwhile, the priest’s postulator, Fr. Tomasz Kaczmarek, said the beatification process had faced delays because of the substantial documentation and complexities of the period, as well as concerns over “ways of remembering his work.” He added that the beatification, at the end of the Year for Priests, would remind clergy of “the way of authentic priestly service.”

In February 1985, four members of Poland’s Interior Ministry were convicted of killing Popieluszko, but they were released early after controversial sentence revisions. A former secret police general, Wladyslaw Ciaston, twice was acquitted of ordering the murder.

However, Solidarity supporters have repeatedly blamed senior communists for the death of the priest, whose grave at St. Stanislaw Kostka Church, modelled on a rosary given him by Pope John Paul II, has been visited by 18 million people.

Poland’s National Remembrance Institute, which runs a commission investigating communist-era crimes, has continued to collect material on the killing. In October, it helped bring charges against two other former secret police agents for seeking to frame Popieluszko by planting weapons and illegal leaflets in his Warsaw apartment.