Faith and Religion

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?

The Polish National Church was founded in 1897 in Pennsylvania by Reverend Francis Hodur. Father Hodur was born in Żarki in 1866, in the Austrian dominated sector of Poland. In 1893, he emigrated to the United States and was ordained into the priesthood at Holy Trinity Roman Catholic Parish in Scranton, PA. A political activist, Father Hodur undertook a mission to Rome to secure a greater voice for Poles in the American Church. Unrest among the Polish parishes was common during this period and rioting broke out in his parish in a dispute over the ownership of church property, use of the Polish language, and selection of local priests.

How old and never-ending is humanity's longing for immortality! Throughout history, we increasingly see philosophers looking for evidence for eternal life, creating various theories of proofs for eternal life, creating various theories about the existence of man in the afterlife. Ancient religions, also the teachings of Greek philosophers, tell us about the immortality of the human soul. The New Testament brings something more: it speaks of the immortality of the whole person, of the resurrection of the body. The immortality of soul and body, the resurrection confirms our special privilege in this world, created by God's hands. Christianity, the faith grew in the shadow of the cross of Christ, fulfills mankind's eternal dream of ceaslessness...

I was moved to write this short essay by a remark observing that one of our American political luminaries who is running for one of the highest offices of the land hates Catholics. To this a friend of mine responded that Catholics hate themselves.

In just a few short years, the south side congregations at St. Stanislaus and St. Hyacinth could not accommodate the growing number of Polish Catholics seeking to worship. Father Gulski decided to divide his St. Hyacinth parish and began efforts to organize a fourth Polish parish in Milwaukee.