He was a teacher, engineer, prisoner of war, royal tutor, and priest, who founded many Carmelite convents around Poland after their suppression by the Russians.

His father then married Josephine's sister (a practice that was not uncommon in that time), Sophie Połońska, and had three more children: Charles, Emily, and Gabriel.

He consequently resigned from the Imperial Russian Army in 1863 to serve as minister of war for the January Uprising, an insurrection by Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth loyalists, in the Vilnius region.

His family intervened, and the Russians, fearing that their Polish subjects would revere him as a political martyr, commuted the sentence to 10 years[2] in katorga, the Siberian labor camp system.

[1] Very few survived the forced march to slave labour in Siberia, but Raphael was sustained by his faith and became a spiritual leader to the prisoners.

[1] Kalinowski was a major influence on the young man (known as "Gucio"), who later became a priest and was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 2004.

Later Kalinowski decided to travel to the city of Brest where he began a Sunday school at the fortress in Brest-Litovsk where he was a captain, he became increasingly aware of the state persecution of the church, and of his native Poles.

[6] Theologians approved Kalinowski's spiritual writings on 4 April 1943, and his cause was opened on 2 March 1952, granting him the title of Servant of God.

On 17 November 1991, he was canonized when, in St. Peter's Basilica, Pope John Paul II declared his boyhood hero a saint.