Jerzy Popiełuszko was born to a small Polish farming family in the Białystok region of north-eastern Poland — son of peasant parents who had survived the German occupation and the Soviet incorporation of the borderlands. He was ordained priest in May 1972 at twenty-four for the Archdiocese of Warsaw and served briefly in suburban Warsaw parishes through the 1970s while in poor health (he had contracted a serious thyroid condition during compulsory anti-religious military service).
From August 1980 — the foundational moment of the Solidarność (Solidarity) free-trade-union movement at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk — Popiełuszko became chaplain of the steelworkers of the Warsaw Huta Warszawa steel mill. After the December 13, 1981 imposition of martial law by General Wojciech Jaruzelski — when Solidarity was banned and thousands of its leaders imprisoned — Popiełuszko began the famous monthly 'Masses for the Fatherland' at the Church of St. Stanislaus Kostka in the Żoliborz district of Warsaw. The monthly Masses — combining Catholic liturgy with prayers for the imprisoned, the murdered, and the families of Solidarity activists — drew tens of thousands of attendees from across Poland and became the principal continuing public expression of Solidarity-Catholic resistance through the martial-law years.
The Polish Security Service (SB) — particularly the section managed by Captain Grzegorz Piotrowski of the Anti-Religious Department — placed him under continuous surveillance from 1982 and conducted a sustained harassment campaign against him (the bombing of his apartment in December 1982, the planting of evidence to support a trumped-up criminal charge, the systematic searches of his church). On October 19, 1984, Piotrowski and two SB colleagues stopped Popiełuszko's car returning from a Mass at Bydgoszcz, beat him unconscious with cudgels, bound him hand and foot, weighted him with stones, and threw him into the Włocławek Reservoir of the Wisła River. His body was recovered eleven days later. The murder produced a major Polish national crisis. Jaruzelski, in an extraordinary public concession, ordered the four SB officers tried — and the resulting trial (the only such trial in the history of the Eastern Bloc) became one of the principal demoralizing events for the Communist regime, contributing materially to the 1989 collapse. Beatified June 6, 2010 at Warsaw.