He was born in Borzęczkowice, near Mysłowice, on the 5th of July, 1881. In 1893 he went to Turin, where he joined the Salesian Society. He took monastic vows in 1897; then he studied at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, receiving the doctoral degree in 1900. Five years later he was ordained priest and then served as a chaplain and tutor in the institutions of the Salesian Society in Kraków, Przemyśl, and Vienna. In 1919 he became the Society’s Provincial for Austria, Hungary, and Germany. Three years later he was appointed the Apostolic Administrator of Polish Upper Silesia, and in December 1925 he became the first Bishop of the newly established Diocese of Katowice. In the following year he assumed the office of Bishop of Poznań and Gniezno and became the Primate of Poland; in 1927 he received the cardinal’s hat. As the Primate, he supported Catholic centres of social education, assisted the development of Catholic press, and founded the Catholic Social School in Poznań in 1927, and the Supreme Institute for Catholic Action three years later. By virtue of an order of 1934, Hlond also formed a Social Council attached to the office of Primate of Poland. In his pastoral letters, collected in the volume called Z prymasowskiej stolicy. Listy pasterskie (1936), he urged a revival of the Polish nation in the spirit of the principles of Christian teaching, explicating his ideas in numerous articles and homilies (Daj mi dusze. Wybór pism i przemówień 1897-1948). In September 1939 he left Poland and, together with the Government, went to Romania; then he travelled to Rome and Lourdes, finally to take lodgings in Wiedebrück Monastery. Liberated by the American troops, he returned to Poland in July 1945 with papal letters of procuratory by virtue of which he established Church administration in the territories taken over from the Germans. In 1946, following the dissolution of the union of Dioceses of Poznań and Gniezno, Hlond became head of the Metropolitan Archdiocese of Warsaw. He died in Warsaw on the 22nd of October 1948.
