Cardinal Dominik Duka O.P. has been asked by Pope Leo to stand as Papal envoy for the centenary of the Archdiocese of Gdańsk, north Poland. The ceremony will take place on 14 October 2025 in the diocesean Cathedral of Oliwa

The anniversary recalls a turbulent century. The archdiocese was created by Pius XI in 1925, after Versailles redrew borders and Gdańsk became a free city. It endured war, Nazism, and decades of communist repression before John Paul II’s papacy and the rise of Solidarity turned the Baltic port into a symbol of Catholic resistance. The 14 October liturgy will remember that history.

The choice of envoy is telling, as Cardinal Duka knows persecution firsthand. Born in 1943, he became a professed Dominican in 1969, the year after the Prague Spring, a brief period of liberalisation in communist Czechoslovakia, which was crushed by a Soviet-led invasion and followed by years of harsher censorship and repression. He was ordained in 1970, and ministered in secret under the communist regime. In 1981, he was imprisoned for running clandestine Masses and publishing samizdat books, sharing a cell with Václav Havel. After the Velvet Revolution, he took on various leadership positions in the Dominican order and then became bishop of Hradec Králové (1998), archbishop of Prague (2010), and a cardinal (2012).

However this choice is surprising to some as the Papal Envoy position holds symbolic weight and controversially on 13 July 2023, Cardinal Duka writing on behalf of the Czech Bishops’ Conference,  submitted ten dubia to the Vatican’s Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF), seeking clarification on access to the Eucharist for divorced and civilly remarried Catholics