Irena Popiel

Irena Maria "Ika" Popiel (22 June 1925 – 15 October 2010) was a Polish nun who served at the order of the Benedictine Nuns of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament, and was a prioress of the order's convent in Warsaw, as well as the initiator and co-founder of the Conference of Superiors of Female Confraternity Monasteries in Poland.

Biography She was born in Kraków in 1925 as the first child of Kazimierz Popiel (1898–1957) – a mining engineer; and Anna née Latinik (1902–1969) – the daughter of Franciszek Latinik and Helena née Stiasny-Strzelbicka, later a clerk at the Metropolitan Court in Kraków, who was awarded with the cross Pro Ecclesia et Pontifice. In 1936, Irena's younger brother Andrzej was born.

In the 1930s, Kazimierz and Anna Popiel lived first in Boryslav and then in Lviv, where Irena Popiel graduated from the elementary school and two classes of the Ursuline gymnasium.

In the face of the German army invasion of Poland, Kazimierz Popiel took part in the 1939 defensive war, and was captured and imprisoned as a war prisoner. In order to avoid deportation to the Soviet Union, Anna Popiel moved in 1940 with her children to her parents' house in Kraków.

In the years 1974–1994 she ran the Secretariat of the Subcommittee on Assistance to Cloistered Monasteries of the Episcopal Commission for Convents, under the direction of Father Michał Mroczkowski, then provincial superior of the Dominican Order.

In 1997 she was awarded the "Ecclesiae populoque servitium praestanti" Medal by the Primate of Poland Józef Glemp.

In the opinion of her companion nuns, "although she was the granddaughter of the famous general Franciszek Ksawery Latinik, and inherited from him energetic disposition and clarity of mind – she was characterized by great simplicity, directness, honesty and humility".

She died after a short illness on the night of 15 October 2010, in the convent of the Sisters of the Holy Sacrament in Warsaw. Funeral ceremonies took place on October 18, 2010, at the St. Kazimierz Church in Warsaw. The funeral Mass was headed by Father Gabriel Bartoszewski.