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A Pole in the E.U.

From the NY Times: For Poland, a Milestone in Choice for European Post

The job brings no real power and no extra pay. But the election Tuesday of a new president of the European Parliament was a significant moment for the 27-nation European Union, and certainly for Poland.

Jerzy Buzek, a former center-right prime minister of Poland, was elected president of the assembly with 555 votes out of 713 votes cast, becoming the first politician from an Eastern European country to hold one of the bloc’s high-profile posts.

—Once upon a time,— Mr. Buzek told the Parliament on Tuesday, —I hoped to be a part of the Polish Parliament in a free Poland. Today I have become the president of the European Parliament —” something I could never have dreamed of.—

Never mind that the position is largely ceremonial. It carries prestige, a few perks and a lot of symbolism, and Warsaw wanted it badly.

The vote Tuesday was the culmination of months of lobbying by the Polish government, which wants to silence those who argue that the former Communist nations are underrepresented in Europe’s decision making.

Before the vote, Eugeniusz Smolar, senior fellow of the Center for International Relations, a research institute in Warsaw, said that the election of Mr. Buzek would —be symbolic to many people in Central and Eastern Europe of an evenhanded approach —” and that the old-boy network ceases to be in place.—

Poland’s minister for Europe, Mikolaj Dowgielewicz, said, —The fact that Buzek can become the president of the European Parliament is proof that enlargement of the E.U. has been a resounding success.—

Even some political opponents agree, and before voting, deputies from the Green Party had promised to back Mr. Buzek, not because they agreed with his center-right politics, but to send an upbeat political signal as part of the Parliament, which has grown in power even as turnout for elections has declined. Only 43 percent of eligible voters participated in elections to the assembly last month.

As president, Mr. Buzek will serve as chairman of parliamentary sessions. The job also involves representing the Parliament at summit meetings of European Union leaders and international events. All official travel is paid, and the president has the V.I.P. trappings of an international leader. The president also has a cabinet, which totals 39 members, including support staff and advisers.

…

Mr. Buzek, 69, is expected to bring to the post a new focus on Europe’s eastern neighbors, including Russia. Certainly his career contrasts sharply with that of his predecessor, Hans Gert Pí¶ttering of Germany, who has been a member of the European Parliament since 1979 —” a time when Mr. Buzek, then an academic and chemical engineer in Communist Poland, was about to join Solidarity, the movement that helped overthrow the government.

Born in the border region of Silesia, which at the time was a German-occupied part of Czechoslovak territory, he is a Protestant in a country where Roman Catholicism is the dominant religion.

After coming to power in 1997, Mr. Buzek became Poland’s first post-Communist prime minister to serve a full four-year term of office, enacting a series of domestic reforms.

Mr. Dowgielewicz, a political ally, said Mr. Buzek has a good domestic profile: —He is seen in Poland as someone who worked humbly in the European Parliament even though he is a former prime minister. Instead of searching out the TV cameras he was working hard within the Parliament.—…

Current Events, , , , ,

A generation defined

From the Buffalo News (an older story): France honors WWII hero: Veteran took part in Normandy battle which is an ode to the sons and daughters of immigrants. Men like Mr. Pawlik were part of a great generation, not in the marketing sense of the term, but in the way that service, honor, and sacrifice were part of their very being. It came from family, neighborhood, and Church.

Blood shed during World War II never is far from Joseph E. Pawlik’s mind.

In addition to scrapbook photos, medals and recordings of the war stories he once told, a piece of shrapnel still lodged near his spine serves as a reminder.

Pawlik, now 89, was struck by artillery fire in 1944, during the invasion of Normandy at the Battle of Merderet River.

—He carries with him an all-too-difficult memory of his service that day,— said Assemblyman Robin Schimminger, D-Kenmore.

Monday afternoon, with small American flags on the laps of many in a room at Buffalo’s Veterans Affairs Medical Center, Pawlik was named chevalier —” the equivalent of —knight— in English —” of the Legion of Honor by the French government for his contribution to France’s liberation during World War II.

The honor, dating back to 1802 under Napoleon, was conferred April 16 in a decree by French President Nicolas Sarkozy.

—Today, you are our hero,— said Pascal Soares, honorary consul of France in Buffalo, as he presented Pawlik the honor.

As a young man in Buffalo’s Black Rock neighborhood, Pawlik was eager to assist his country at war. He enlisted as a paratrooper and served as a technical sergeant.

Pawlik’s selfless nature would carry him through the war.

Three months after receiving a Purple Heart as a result of fighting at Merderet River, Pawlik was back in the front lines.

He didn’t want to leave the troops,— his daughter Terry Hans explained. —They needed him.—

In 1945, on a bitter winter day at Dead Man’s Ridge in Belgium, no one needed Pawlik more than his sergeant, who was wounded. As others took safety in their foxhole, Pawlik left his comfort zone to help his comrade to safety.

…

James Benz, a Vietnam veteran, was on hand as his friend was honored. —I’m very proud,— Benz, 61, said of Pawlik. —He’s like another father to me.—

Sto Lat! Mr. Pawlik, Sto Lat!

PNCC,

Days gone by, the PNCC and the PECUSA

There are several interesting documents at Project Canterbury related to the PNCC. Among them is Intercommunion between the Episcopal Church and the Polish National Catholic Church: A Survey of its Development by the Reverend Warren C. Platt. The document gives a rather thorough and very well researched look into the history of PNCC-PECUSA relations.

Currently the Rev. Platt is a non-stipendiary priest serving at the Episcopal Church of The Transfiguration in NYC (The Little Church Around the Corner). The Church of the Transfiguration and St Mary’s the Virgin are the two remaining churches of the Oxford Movement in NYC. Rev. Platt was an active participant in many of the PNCC’s annual history conferences.

Poland - Polish - Polonia, , , ,

Capturing the Remembering

From Buffalo’s ArtVoice: Before All Memory Is Lost: The Polish story of survival in Buffalo after Hitler and Stalin. The article is enhanced with wonderful photographs which capture more than history , but loss, bravery, and endurance.

Katyn by Jozef Slawinski

Deep in a dark recess in Buffalo’s City Hall is a terrifying piece of art made by the same Polish exile who created the Calasanctius mural. Jozef Slawinski’s hammered-copper bas-relief commemorates the place, the event, the process, the unimaginable suffering that the Poles know as Katyn.

Everybody has heard of Picasso’s Guernica, that terrifying huge canvas at a Madrid museum that portrays the German bombing of a Basque village during the Spanish Civil War. Everybody in the world should know of Slawinski’s abstract piece on the Soviet massacre of more than 16,000 Polish officers, elected officials, nobles, and intellectuals in the Katyn forest during World War II.

Had it not been for the late mayor Jimmy Griffin making a political gesture to Buffalo Poles, then not even Buffalo would know about Katyn.

It’s as if history has been privatized. Just as Slawinski’s Katyn is hidden away in an alcove few visit, the stories of a generation of as many as 20,000 immigrants to Buffalo have never become known beyond the whispered conversations of survivors. On the border between Buffalo and Cheektowaga, there are hundreds of stone monuments to members of the Polish army-in-exile who came to America, specifically to Buffalo, and who lived out the remainder of their lives in the hope of returning to their homeland, but while here created a complex legacy that literally reshaped our collective landscape.

Andy Golebiowski and a small group of volunteers formed the Polish Legacy Project to try to gather up some of the stories of the Polish DPs. DPs were the —displaced persons— who survived the German death camps, including Auschwitz and Buchenwald, where so many of their Jewish and Christian countrymen were murdered. The DPs were also the survivors of the German forced-labor camps and farm-labor slavery, people who then found themselves stranded in Allied zones at war’s end in 1945. The DPs were also thousands of Polish military men, like the legions who fought in Italy, who knew that Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt had decided the fate of their country at the Yalta conference in 1945—”which was to leave Poland in the Soviet sphere of influence, and leave them in need of a place to go that wasn’t going to be ruled by the Russians who had also slaughtered, deported, or brutalized their countrymen.

…

Golebiowski’s mother can still tell how she came to America. His father, a prisoner of war who was forced to work on German farms, told his own harrowing stories, but they died with him in 1999. Many of the people who came to Buffalo have died, taking their stories with them. In the Saint Stanislaus Cemetery on Pine Ridge Road, gravestones in a special military section are marked with the names of regiments and the briefest of notes about war-time experiences. These notes form a succinct code of service, and of suffering. —Sibyr,— say many of them, a brief reference to the horrors of young men and women who were deported to Siberia. —Auschwitz— is carved into several of these crosses, reminding us that three million Christian Poles died during the same period that three million Jewish Poles were murdered. —Monte Cassino— is on several, a note about the Poles’ unheralded capture of Sicily before the armies of Patton and Montgomery won glory there.

The world the Poles made here

They began arriving after 1948, when President Harry Truman signed a special displaced persons immigration bill, which he criticized for being so insufficient a gesture that he called it —inhumane.— Americans today can be forgiven for having forgotten how immense the destruction of World War II was—”because that cataclysm ended 65 years ago, and since then we have seen Vietnam, Central America, the Rwanda genocide, the Bosnian massacres, Iraq, and more.

The story that will unfold in the Polish Legacy Project’s conference October 3 and 4 here in Buffalo, though, is partly about the local impact of the largest forced migration in history.

Everybody more or less knows about our great 19th-century immigrant stories. Joey Giambra recently made the documentary La Terra Promessa, about the Sicilian story. Irish-Americans succeeded, after many years, in erecting a memorial to the Irish famine of the 1840s, in which hundreds of thousands died, and which led to the mass exodus of the Gaeltacht. There has even been a film made of the pre-1920s Polish migration.

But the thousands of Poles who found refuge here after World War II are a different, separate, largely untold story.

…

The urgent task

The children of the DPs are themselves now in their 40s, 50s, and 60s. If the DPs themselves are still alive, there is not much time in which to do the job of —rescue— or —salvage— collecting.

Thus the urgency of the conference. Strolling the rows of crosses at the Polish Veterans’ Plot at St. Stan’s Cemetery, one senses the urgency-cognizant of the fact that in five years, when the 75th anniversary of WWII is commemorated, there may be no one left who can give a firsthand account of life then.

The Polish Legacy Project’s mission is to record and to share the untold stories before they join all the other undocumented stories at the cemetery. The PLP is fighting against the clock, trying to make up for 60 years of silence. Unlike the stories of the Holocaust, these stories of survival, suffering and heroism largely do not exist in the English language…

Poland - Polish - Polonia

Kresy-Siberia Virtual Museum

znicz_logoKSVMThe new Kresy-Siberia Virtual Museum website has been launched successfully!

All whose families were deported by the Russians to the outer reaches of the Soviet Union, will be able to add families’ stories and photos on this new fantastic website for all to see. The KSVM will be an important research site for anyone interested in Polish history.

The museum contains a beautiful memorial wall of names containing the names of over 31,000 persons deported from Poland when Russia invaded Poland on September 17, 1939 as part of its pact with Nazi Germany. The Virtual Museum’s logo is a reminder of the part of Poland torn away by the Russian invaders.

Poland - Polish - Polonia, , , ,

From the East…

From John Guzlowski’s Lightning and Ashes: The Men From the East Were Terrible

Today is the 70th Anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Poland. It came 2 weeks after the Nazis invaded.

70 years ago today the Soviet Union invaded Poland from the east and divided up the country with the Nazis. In some places in Poland, they light candles and put them in the windows to remember the dead and the suffering of the living during that time.

My mother was living west of Lvov in eastern Poland when the Russians invaded…

Tonight in Danville, Virginia, where I live, I will light a candle.

Poland - Polish - Polonia, ,

Adam Mickiewicz, The Life of a Romantic

From Cornell University Press: Adam Mickiewicz, The Life of a Romantic by Roman Koropeckyj.

Adam Mickiewicz (1798-1855), Poland’s national poet, was one of the extraordinary personalities of the age. In chronicling the events of his life-his travels, numerous loves, a troubled marriage, years spent as a member of a heterodox religious sect, and friendships with such luminaries of the time as Aleksandr Pushkin, James Fenimore Cooper, George Sand, Giuseppe Mazzini, Margaret Fuller, and Aleksandr Herzen-Roman Koropeckyj draws a portrait of the Polish poet as a quintessential European Romantic.

Spanning five decades of one of the most turbulent periods in modern European history, Mickiewicz’s life and works at once reflected and articulated the cultural and political upheavals marking post-Napoleonic Europe. After a poetic debut in his native Lithuania that transformed the face of Polish literature, he spent five years of exile in Russia for engaging in Polish —patriotic— activity. Subsequently, his grand tour of Europe was interrupted by his country’s 1830 uprising against Russia; his failure to take part in it would haunt him for the rest of his life. For the next twenty years Mickiewicz shared the fate of other Polish émigrés in the West. It was here that he wrote Forefathers’ Eve, part 3 (1832) and Pan Tadeusz (1834), arguably the two most influential works of modern Polish literature. His reputation as his country’s most prominent poet secured him a position teaching Latin literature at the Academy of Lausanne and then the first chair of Slavic Literature at the Collège de France. In 1848 he organized a Polish legion in Italy and upon his return to Paris founded a radical French-language newspaper. His final days were devoted to forming a Polish legion in Istanbul.

This richly illustrated biography-the first scholarly biography of the poet to be published in English since 1911-draws extensively on diaries, memoirs, correspondence, and the poet’s literary texts to make sense of a life as sublime as it was tragic. It concludes with a description of the solemn transfer of Mickiewicz’s remains in 1890 from Paris to Cracow, where he was interred in the Royal Cathedral alongside Poland’s kings and military heroes.

Perspective,

The world, Europe, Chrstianity, and the creation of greatness

A recommended read from The Brussels Journal: Europe and Human Accomplishment with salient points about freedom, individualism, and Christianity. It’s a lengthy piece but worth the read. An excerpt follows:

…

Western culture has by and large enjoyed the benefits of greater political freedom and more individualism as opposed to the common emphasis on consensus and traditionalism. Purpose and autonomy are intertwined with another defining cultural characteristic of European civilization, individualism…

Christianity played an important part in this, too. As Murray writes, —It was a theology that empowered the individual acting as an individual as no other philosophy or religion had ever done before. The potentially revolutionary message was realized more completely in one part of Christendom, the Catholic West, than in the Orthodox East…

The Enlightenment’s passionate commitment to reason was close to religious, yet after Freud, Nietzsche and others with similar messages, the belief in man as a rational being took a body blow. It became fashionable in Europe at the turn of the twentieth century to see humans as unwittingly acting out neuroses and subconscious drives. God was mostly dead among the European creative elites at this time. Such beliefs undermined the belief of the creative elites that their lives had purpose or that their talents could be efficacious. Murray believes that the twentieth century witnessed a decline in per capita accomplishment, as intellectuals rejected religion. He expects that almost no art from the second half of this century will be remembered 200 years from now. It’s a challenge for democratic societies to keep up standards of excellence when there is an obsession with making everyone equal. He has noticed that young Europeans no longer take pride in their scientific and artistic legacy; attempts to point this out to them will typically be met with pessimism and a sense that European civilization is evil and cursed. The decline of accomplishment in Europe, once the homeland par excellence of geniuses, was in all likelihood initially caused by loss of self-confidence and a sense of purpose.

Maybe belief in a higher purpose is necessary for the creation of true greatness. Achievements that outlast the lifespan of a single human being are generated out of respect for something greater than the individual. Many Europeans no longer experience themselves as part of a wider community with a past worth preserving and a future worth fighting for, which is perhaps why they see no point in reproducing themselves. Europe in the past believed in itself, its culture, its nations and above all its religion and produced Michelangelo, Descartes and Newton. Europe at the turn of the twenty-first century believes in virtually nothing of lasting value and so produces virtually nothing of lasting value. It remains to be seen whether this trend can be reversed.

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St. Albertus Fest in Detroit

From Creative Gene: 5th Annual St. Albertus Fest

The Polish-American Historical Site Association Inc. (PAHSA) would like to announce the fifth annual St. Albertus Fest on the campus of the Registered National Historic Site, St Albertus Church, located at 4231 St. Aubin at E. Canfield, Detroit. This year’s fundraiser is taking place on Saturday, September 19, 2009, from 12:00 p.m. —“ 12:00 a.m. The outdoor music festival is $5 and features two covered stages filled with music throughout the day with a focus on Detroit’s finest local bands and musicians. Polish food, beer, wine and beverages will be for sale as well.

This year’s festival will feature a recital by the Oakland University Classical Guitar Ensemble. The recital will take place inside the Church auditorium as the opening of the festival at 1pm. Following the recital the music will begin on the two stages which will be setup outside the Church under tented areas.

The festival includes an amazing collection of bluegrass and folk influenced musicians throughout the day including Detroit based groups The Run-ins, 9 Volt Hammer and Catfish Mafia. This year we’re also excited to have local greats the The Planet D Nonet wsg Charles “Buddy” Smith for the first time. Our good friend Gretchen Wolff will be performing again this year, along with local rock bands Man Fransisco, Dr. Doctor, The Replicas, Pigeon, Eyer Department and Best Idea Ever. Also, Chicago based group Essex Channel are traveling to Detroit in support of St. Albertus

St. Albertus was the first Polish [Roman] Catholic Church in Detroit (est. 1872) and the Heart of the area once known as —POLETOWN—. After its closure by the Archdiocese in 1990, a group of former Parishioners, Historians, and Preservationists established a 501-C3 non-profit under the name PAHSA, and reopened St. Albertus as a museum of cultural history.

PAHSA holds the St. Albertus Fest to remind the Detroit community that St. Albertus not only still exists, but is as beautiful and impressive as ever. For the past four years we’ve had musicians from a variety of backgrounds dedicate their time and talent to the festival in support of our cause. Please join us for the fifth annual St. Albertus fest, if you love Art, History, Architecture, Music, Food or even Beer then you don’t want to miss the St. Albertus Fest.

Gates open at 12:00 p.m., rain or shine, and live performances will run straight through from 1pm until 11:00 p.m. Tickets are $5 at the door, 100% of the proceeds will go towards the Preservation of the St Albertus historic site. This event is all ages; beverages will be available for purchase, alcohol for those 21 and over. Traditional Polish food will be sold on the premises. Tours of the historic St. Albertus Church will be given throughout the day.

For further information and showtimes please visit their myspace page.

Christian Witness, PNCC, Poland - Polish - Polonia, , , ,

The National Church model versus Ostpolitik

Bishop Hodur strongly advanced the idea of the National Church model (really no different than the Orthodox model – the local bishop with his clergy and people around the Holy Eucharist represents the fullness of the Church). Among the reasons for this advocacy was Bishop Hodur’s knowledge and experience of the Polish Church’s struggles. Real world experience showed that the good of the local Church was often secondary to the political machinations of the Bishop of Rome and the Vatican bureaucracy.

Hillary White (thanks to the Young Fogey for the links) has two articles that explore the Vatican’s betrayal of local Church leaders, particularly Cardinals Mindszenty and Beran. The Wikipedia article on the Vatican’s “Ostpolitik” refers to the phenonena as an invention of Paul VI. In fact it is a policy that has been entrenched in the Vatican for centuries. Poland was betrayed numerous timesNorman Davies, God’s Playground, a History of Poland: 1795 to the present, Chapter 7, pages 207-225 and Georg Brandes, Poland: a study of the land, people, and literature page 251 for examples. in the interest of “global” politics.

Read Church of Traitors and Church of Traitors, Part II. The telling lines from Part II:

Casaroli continues,

…

“We opted for negotiations, because we didn’t know how long those regimes would last, and in the meantime we had a moral obligation to insure that the Church had priests, that the faithful could receive the Eucharist and go to Confession. If we lost the hierarchical institution, we would lose the Church…”

Now, this is interesting, because I have known some priests who were underground in Soviet bloc countries and their stories are illustrative. Had the Vatican supported their efforts, would the Faith have died or flourished? Would the Church have been “lost” as Casaroli said? Hard to say at this distance in time.

But from what I have been told, the Church was flourishing. And one of my informants was a Slovak priest who was ordained secretly in Czechoslovakia, one of the countries that Casaroli described as a “hardline” state in which the Church would have “died out” without his “careful step-by-step diplomacy”.

The difference, perhaps between men like Casaroli in the Vatican and the men actually baptising and marrying and saying Mass in secret in these countries was that the latter knew and accepted the possibility of martyrdom. It seems that Casaroli and his popes rejected that possibility utterly and were more interested in creating comforts, a typical Novusordoist goal.

I wonder, who bore true witness to the faith, who stood on the side of God’s politics? In my book it was the local Church, those who knew the situation on ground, the evils of the communist system, the violence and selfishness of its leaders, and who nevertheless chose to face the consequences of witness to the faith. As Tertullian wrote: The blood of martyrs is the seed of the Church.

Cardinal Mindszenty on trial

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