Dying of cancer, severely ill and in a wheelchair in 2019, longtime Holy Cross organist and parishioner Janusz Zorawski told Samuel Backman he was too sick to play the Polish Christmas carols at the midnight Mass and asked, “Would you please play them?”

Backman, the current organist and director of sacred music and liturgical life at the northeast Minneapolis parish, agreed to do so. That night, however, wheeled up in his wheelchair, visibly in pain and not moving much, Zorawski, a Polish immigrant, found the strength whenever a Polish Christmas carol was to be sung to walk over, sit down and ask to play.

“And when he started playing these carols, he had the vitality of a 15-year-old boy,” Backman told Patrick Conley, host of the “Practicing Catholic” radio show, for a program debuting at 9 p.m. Jan. 5 on Relevant Radio 1330 AM. “It was just pure, unbridled excitement in his twilight years … I’ll never hear these melodies without thinking of him.”

Backman decided to dedicate an organ symphony he recently composed to Zorawski. The symphony pays tribute to Polish Christmas carols, and Backman will play it publicly for the first time at 7:30 p.m. Jan. 12 at Holy Cross, a parish with a rich Polish history that continues to celebrate a Polish Mass each Sunday. The concert is free and a reception will follow.

To hear Backman describe his creative process and details about his next project (a collaborative cycle of songs for soprano and organ based on the lives of seven martyrs) tune into “Practicing Catholic,” which also repeats at 1 p.m. Jan. 6 and 2 p.m. Jan. 7.

Produced by Relevant Radio and the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis, the latest show also includes a discussion with Nancy Schulte Palacheck and Maura Dobie about a summer mission opportunity known as Totus Tuus that invites college students to minister to young people, discern their own vocations and get paid, and a conversation with Father Tom Wilson, pastor of All Saints in Lakeville, about the importance of masculinity in the Church in a Practicing Catholic Classic.

Listen to interviews after they have aired at PracticingCatholicShow.com or choose a streaming platform at Spotify for Podcasters.