Zbigniew Religa

Zbigniew Religa

Zbigniew Eugeniusz Religa (born December 16, 1938 in Miedniewice , Poland , † March 8, 2009 in Warsaw , Poland) was a Polish heart surgeon and politician. From October 2005 to November 2007 he was Minister of Health in the governments of Prime Ministers Marcinkiewicz and Kaczyński .

Life

Religa studied medicine at the Warsaw Medical Academy until 1963 . From 1968 to 1980 he was a doctor at the Wola Hospital and then at the Clinic of the Cardiological Institute in Warsaw . From 1984 he headed the cardiological clinic in Zabrze . In 1990 he became professor at the Silesian Medical Academy in Katowice ( Polish Śląska Akademia Medyczna w Katowicach ), and from 1997 to 1999 also its rector. 2001 Head of the Second Cardiac Surgery Clinic and Director of the Cardiological Institute in Warsaw. Zbigniew Religa was also the head of the team that was the first to perform a successful heart transplant in Poland .

Religa's grave in Warsaw

Religa, who represented conservative values ​​all his life and was close to the Christian-national parties, confessed to atheism only a few months before his death . After his death, however, a funeral mass was held for Religa in Zabrze, which, at his request, not only politicians and doctors, but also the population took part. On March 13, 2009, he was buried in the Warsaw Powązki Cemetery.

Zbigniew Religa was married to the doctor Anna Wajszczuk-Religa and had two children: daughter Małgorzata (sinologist at Warsaw University) and son Grzegorz, who also works as a cardiac surgeon.

In 2014, Religa's path to the first successful heart transplant was shown in the multi-award-winning biopic Bogowie . He was played by Tomasz Kot in it.

politics

From 1993 to 1997 and from 2001 to 2005 Religa was a senator in the Senate of the Republic of Poland , among other things for the Solidarność election campaign .

In April 2004 he founded the Center Party ( Polish Partia Centrum ) together with Senator Krzysztof Piesiewicz .

In spring 2005 Religa was considered one of the most promising candidates for the presidential elections in autumn 2005 due to its great popularity among the population . In the summer of 2005, however, the now non-party candidate had little chance of winning the election. Politicians like Włodzimierz Cimoszewicz and Donald Tusk had overtaken him, which is why he withdrew his candidacy on September 2, 2005 in favor of the latter.

After the parliamentary elections in 2005 he was appointed health minister in the government of Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz . He kept this office - apart from a few days during a government crisis in September 2007 - in the government of Jarosław Kaczyński .

In the parliamentary elections in Poland in 2007, he moved into parliament for the PiS as a member of the Gliwice constituency . Zbigniew Religa presided over the inaugural session of the Sejm on November 5, 2007 as senior president (Polish Marszałek Senior ).

At the request of the children, he received the international award as Cavalier of the Order of Smiles .

Web links

Commons : Zbigniew Religa  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• On the death of Zbigniew Religa in March 2009 on infoseite-polen.de

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Religa: utwierdzam się w przekonaniu, że Boga nie ma . In: wp.pl . October 31, 2008, accessed January 7, 2009 (Polish). 
2. ↑ Farewell to Zbigniew Religa on polskieradio.pl (German)
3. ^ Obituary of Gazeta Wyborcza (Polish), accessed June 23, 2013.
4. ↑ Unexpected often comes to e-politik.de ( memento from May 23, 2013 in the Internet Archive ).