Subjects of Three Empires, Builders of One Nave

Hace unos meses se casó la hija de unos amigos acá en Cleveland. La madre es polaca de nacimiento, y la misa de esponsales se celebró en la iglesia de San Estanislao. Desde el momento que entré quedé embelesado con el estilo gótico de la misma. Más tarde, investigué un poco sobre la historia del edificio, y escribí este artículo (en inglés para mis amigos de acá), que comparto con Uds. por si les interesa. Los que no hablan el idioma de Shakespeare pueden usar el botón disponible para traducir artículos del Blog.

God writes straight with crooked lines.

That sentence was not coined for tidy lives. It was waiting for Warszawa: for men who left a country that was not on the map, bought a potato patch from Ashbel Morgan at Tod Street and Forman, and raised, under a pastor who would not last, a church that should not have been possible.

They did not leave Poland. There was no Poland. Since 1795 the old Commonwealth had been carved among Prussia, Russia, and Austria. The first wave that built St. Stanislaus came chiefly from the Prussian slice — Posen, West Prussia, the Kashubian and Silesian edges — with others from the Tsar’s Congress Kingdom. In the west, after German unification, Bismarck’s Kulturkampf put German into the schools and the state’s hand on the seminaries. The open struggle eased after 1878; the pressure did not. In 1886 the Settlement Commission began buying Polish land for German colonists. In 1885–86 the rugi pruskie drove some thirty thousand Poles without Prussian papers off Prussian soil. In the east, after the January Uprising of 1863, Russification did the same work in another language: Russian in the gymnasium, the Uniate Church broken, bishops watched, sons taken for the Tsar’s army. Galicia, under Vienna, had more Polish air after 1867 and less bread. Across all three partitions the parish was the last public room where a man could still hear his own tongue without asking a clerk for permission.

What they left behind was not liberty. It was a strip of field too small to divide again, a wooden church the state wanted to rename, a mother who would not see the grandchildren, and the knowledge that the manor and the Sejm were gone. They left as subjects — Prussian, Russian, Austrian — listed that way on the ship’s paper and, for years, on the American census.

What they found in Cleveland was the mill.

A few Poles were already in Berea’s quarries in the late 1860s. The city counted only some seventy-seven in 1870; many more were hidden as Germans or Russians. By 1880 there were still only about five hundred in Cleveland proper, almost all tied to the Cleveland Rolling Mills in Newburgh. After Irish and Welsh trouble, Amasa Stone recruited in Danzig and elsewhere: passage, a job, wages lower than the men they replaced. A large party came in 1882 as strikebreakers. They settled by the stacks. The neighborhood named itself Warszawa, as if saying the word could put a capital back on the earth.

The parish was organized in 1873. Until they had walls of their own they heard Mass at St. Mary’s on the Flats or at the German St. Joseph’s on Woodland. In 1881 they dedicated a wooden church-school on Morgan’s former potato patch: church above, school below, four thousand six hundred dollars, some two hundred families. Four years later there were six hundred families. Then came the pastor.

Rev. Anton Francis Kolaszewski was born 5 September 1851 in Russian Poland, raised in America, ordained in Cleveland in 1883, and sent to St. Stanislaus that July. He was their priest and, whether anyone had asked him, their tribune. He imagined a Gothic church of local red brick and dressed stone, two hundred feet long, eighty-five wide, ceilings at sixty-seven feet, twin spires two hundred and thirty-two feet into the industrial sky. William H. Dunn drew it. Ground was broken in August 1886. On a Sunday in November 1891 — the fifteenth, by the usual reckoning — administrator F. M. Boff dedicated it. Houck, from the diocesan books, said it cost nearly one hundred and fifty thousand dollars with altars, pews, and statuary. Other memories say two hundred and fifty thousand. After the pastor was gone the new man found more than one hundred thousand dollars of debt, much of it never authorized. A later historian called it the largest Gothic church Catholics had built in Ohio, second in that style in the country only to St. Patrick’s in New York. Whether the ranking is exact matters less than the intent: men paid by the shift put up towers higher than the mill.

The first crooked line is the man himself. Between 1886 and 1890 the charges accumulated. He had hidden the size of the debt. The graver accusations — drink, married women — official English histories would not print and Polish papers would not drop. In June 1892 Bishop Horstmann required his resignation. Benedict Rosinski inherited the books and the factions. Kolaszewski went to Syracuse, came back to start another congregation a few streets south, was excommunicated, was reconciled in 1908, and died on 2 December 1910. St. Stanislaus did not die with him.

The second crooked line is weather. On 21 April 1909 a tornado took the original spires and the roof. A boy, Arthur Neibralski, was killed by a falling brick. Seven died in the neighborhood. The parish rebuilt within the year. The city would not let the towers climb again to their first insolence; they stand now at one hundred and twenty-two feet. The oak pews, the glass, the painted vault survived. In 1906 the Franciscans had already taken the parish. In 1976 the church entered the National Register. It is a shrine now. The mill is gone. The language in the pews has thinned. The Gothic still holds.

No one who prays there is required to canonize the first builder. The Church has never asked the faithful to confuse a beautiful nave with a beautiful life. What the building declares is older than both. In Posen the schoolmaster was teaching German. In Łódź the Tsar’s policeman was at the door. In Newburgh the same people — subjects yesterday, mill hands this morning — put a Catholic roof higher than the stacks and named the streets after a capital that did not exist. The debt was real. The scandal was real. So is the silence at an early Mass, when the last light comes through the glass and a few old women and a few young fathers make the same signs their grandparents made when the spires were still new and the homeland was still a rumor.

They left a partitioned field. They found soot, boarders in the extra room, Irish and German bishops, and a chance to build what the partitioning empires would not have permitted. The line was crooked. The writing is straight. The church he overspent, and left in trouble, is still the place where people say Kyrie eleison and mean it — not because the pastor was worthy, but because the people who paid for the bricks had already learned, in three empires, that God does not wait for clean instruments.

por Alfonso Beccar Varela y Grok