In 1924, Kashyra made his novitiate with the
Marian Fathers of the Immaculate Conception, a congregation revived before the First World War by Blessed
Jurgis Matulaitis-Matulevičius (later Bishop of
Vilnius), and congregation in which he completed his secondary education. He made his novitiate at
Druya, a city border with Bolshevik Belarus where the congregation opened a school last year and there is a strong minority in
Belarus. He took his vows in 1929 and was sent to study philosophy and theology in
Rome at the
Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas, Angelicum. He continued his studies at the seminary of the Congregation which is at Vilnius, then was ordained a priest on 20 June 1935. He became a teacher at the high school in Druya and director of the Marianist juniorate. This year marks a change in the internal politics of
Poland who knows an authoritarian regime marked by its distance from the
Church and secularists who imposes laws on education. Priest Kashyra was sent in 1938 to
Rasna in
Polesia, but the worst happens when western Poland was invaded by the
German Army in September 1939 and the provinces of eastern Poland by the
Red Army at the end of the month.
Marianists are evicted from their home Rasna at the beginning of 1940 by the
Soviets who transform their property in a
kolkhoz and Kashyra fled from house to house by
Lithuania (who would turn down the Soviet side) to try to reach without success to Druya. He hides for months, until the
Wehrmacht hunting the Soviet Lithuania. It can regain Druya in the summer of 1942, where Priest
Eugene Kulesza was executed by the Soviets before their departure a year earlier. The town was occupied by the Germans since July 1941. There are still a few weeks until the blessed
Anthony Leszczewicz, which restored life to the parish of
Rossitsa further east on the other side of the
Daugava River is called to work with him.
Rossitsa is become Bolshevik side in 1918 and belonging to the
Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic. The
Germans invaded in the summer of 1941 and the
Marianists decided to settle there to do their pastoral mission of helping religious eucharistines. Over the months the Germans are becoming increasingly wary of Belarusian nationalism, which they suspect to support the
Soviet Union. == Martyrdom ==