Faith and Religion

The Catholic observance of All Saints' Day, celebrated on November 1, is one of the most popular holidays in Poland, gathering millions of Poles in cemeteries every year to honour the memory of their deceased loved ones. This practice holds firm, despite the custom of celebrating the so-called Halloween, which is encroaching from the West.

Easter is considered the greatest Christian holiday. At this time, the greatest sacrifice for our salvation is celebrated in the form of the crucified body of Jesus Christ. It has been a solemn holiday for a long time, and Poland is one of the countries where it is remembered in a special way.

In August 2021, a new Polish Studies Program was launched at the St. John Paul II Institute at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, Texas. The St. John Paul II Institute was founded in 2019 in order to facilitate the understanding of the life and work of St. John Paul II in the context of Polish history and culture.

A small wooden church was finally erected on the corner of Brady and Humboldt in 1871 at the cost of $11,000. The Milwaukee Sentinel at the time reported that these St. Hedwig families were among the poorest of the poor, with the men being engaged in sewer construction and public works.

Elizabeth Rosa Czacka is the best example of humanity and the best example of the implementation of Christian ideas in everyday social and individual life. She, like no one else, deserves the highest recognition among the living and the poor and to be distinguished by the Creator as God-blessed. We are proud that she lived among us - Poles.

Christianity and Catholicism are inseparably connected with the history of the Polish nation. The faith and Christian values ​​contained in the Decalogue accompanied Poles in their moments of glory and helped them through the most difficult moments of threat to their national existence. The Polish Church and its leaders played a great role in this. The group of great Polish clergymen is closed by two great figures of our times - the primate of the millennium - Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński and Pope John Paul II.

St. Cyril and Methodius, commonly known as the Polish Seminary, was founded in 1885 in Detroit, Michigan. In 1909, due to better housing conditions, it was moved to the nearby Orchard Lake, where it exists today. The creation of this seminary is connected with the mass economic emigration of Poles to the United States.

The history of the Church of St. Adalbert in Milwaukee is part of the history of the Polish American community. The life of many outstanding Poles, and of the simple but very patriotic Polish emigrants who support their activities, is connected with the community of this church. This story deserves to be saved from oblivion.

May 28, 2021 marks the 80th anniversary of Fr. Maksymilian Kolbe - the guardian of Niepokalanów, a Franciscan monastery and a large publishing house - having been imprisoned in the German concentration camp at Auschwitz. On this occasion, the Franciscan Publishing House «Fraternal Call» in Krakow will be publishing a volume of poetry by Kazimierz Braun entitled "Songs of Saint Maximilian and other poems".

The bankruptcy proceeding of the Buffalo Roman Catholic Diocese is overseen by Honorable Carl L. Bucki, the federal Chief bankruptcy Judge for Western New York. It involves tens of thousands of persons and reaches as far as Poland and the Vatican. The symbolism of a devout Polish American Catholic presiding over the legal consequences of decades-long sex scandal in the Buffalo Roman Catholic Church cannot be overestimated.

Single mothers in Haiti and the Dominican Republic in the 1980s and 1990s revived the cult of a Voodoo goddess Erzulie Dantor, the lwa of vengeance and rage. How is the iconic representation of Haitian Voodoo senior spirit originating in West Africa influenced by the patron saint of Poland, the Black Madonna of Częstochowa?