This picture is of Father Bronislaw Gostomski who died in yesterday's appalling plane crash that took the lives of so many prominent Poles, including the President, Lech Kaczynski. It was drawn by my eight year old daughter who had known him literally all her young life.
We came home after a gloriously sunny day spent at the fair in our local park to find an OB van parked in our street and press camped outside the church opposite our house. We knew nothing of the plane crash or the fact that the priest who had been in charge of the church for the past eight years had perished in it. It was a BBC World Service reporter who told me the news and it felt like a punch to my gut.
I've learned from reading reports since that Father Gostomski was both a Canon and personal chaplain to the Polish President. We knew him simply as Father and as the man who brought order and unity to a sometimes disparate congregation. Polish accession into the EU brought hundreds of thousands of Poles to London, swelling the congregation at the church to often unmanageable proportions. This has had a profound impact on what is a narrow ...