Both meanings and forms of religious imagery have always been influenced by the political and ideological agendas of their time. The article is an exploration in contemporary Catholic imagery in Poland, focusing on its involvement with different expressions of the national. Using the example of the Katyń Chapel Mausoleum in Warsaw military basilica the article questions the relationship between the image and the relic both in Catholic Christianity, and in the secular modern cult of the nation. It also follows the development of religious iconography related to the Katyń massacre with a special focus on images of the Madonna, describing in detail two of them, functioning with the same name of Our Lady of Katyń. Following the fate of both images, as well as the way they have been contextualized before and after 1989, the text attempts to trace the changes and modifications of different concepts of the recent Polish past and different politics of history. Comparing the Pietà type image of Katyń Madonna that evolved among Polish Catholics in times of People’s Republic of Poland with the secular Pieta-inspired images of partisans used by the People’s Republic’s regime, it points at differences in their emotional content, relating the differences to the political agendas of the two symbolic languages. Finally, it also juxtaposes total absence of triumphalism in the grassroot Katyń-related imagery and the nationalistic triumphalism of glorification of the Katyń victims in the Katyń Chapel Mausoleum, where the pierced skull of the major Szymański faces the most modest Katyń Madonna carved by an inmate of Kozelsk on a wooden board from a camp plank bed.