By Michael O'malley
The Plain Dealer
November 29, 2009
http://blog.cleveland.com/metro/2009/11/st_casimir_church_advocates_pr.html
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| Former parishioners of St. Casimir Catholic Church stand outside the church for a morning prayer service Sunday, November 29, 2009. About a hundred people turned out for the service a month after the church closed it's doors. Photo by Gus Chan, The Plain Dealer |
CLEVELAND, Ohio — About 100 Polish-Americans bowed their heads in somber prayer and song today in front of a chain-link fence that surrounds boarded-up St. Casimir Catholic Church on Cleveland’s East Side.
The group, protesting Bishop Richard Lennon’s closing of the ethnic church three weeks ago, decorated the fence with drapes of red and white, the Polish colors, and paintings of Jesus and the Virgin Mary.
For an hour, the protesters sang hymns in Polish and English, their voices wafting under sunny skies through the blighted and mostly deserted neighborhood at East 82nd Street and Sowinski Avenue. It was the largest turnout yet for what have become weekly gatherings.
Carol Arbaczewski, 55, of Mentor, said she was glad her mother didn’t live to see the day that her beloved church closed.
“My parents were married here and buried here,” she said. “My roots are here.”
Ray Kasperski, 81, expressed the anger that simmered beneath the surface.
“I was baptized here,” he said. “I may stop going to church altogether.”
St. Casimir was a casualty of Lennon’s ongoing plan to close 50 parishes in the eight-county diocese by June. More than a dozen parishes have been shut down so far. Another Polish church, St. Barbara on Cleveland’s West Side, is scheduled to close next year.
The bishop says the downsizing that has frustrated and saddened many is needed due to a scarcity of priests, collection-basket money and people in the pews. Most of the diocese’s 750,000 Catholics have migrated to the suburbs, leaving behind urban churches.
When Lennon went to St. Casimir Nov. 8 to say the last Mass and officially de-sanctify the 91-year-old building, he was met with hostility in the packed sanctuary. During the Mass, hecklers shouted “Judas!” and angry worshippers broke out in Polish songs, interrupting the service. A man in his 90s pulled the plug on the bishop’s microphone.
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| A crowd gathered Sunday for a prayer service at St. Casimir Church about a month after the church closed its doors. Photo by Gus Chan, The Plain Deale |
St. Casimir parishioners have appealed to the Vatican in Rome in an attempt to overturn Lennon’s order. They say the church, founded by Polish immigrants in 1892, had money, a priest from Poland and was well-attended.
The twin-towered building was built in 1918 and is richly adorned with sacred icons and an elaborate altar that stands as a shrine to the Virgin Mary. Polish Pope John Paul II visited the church in 1969, when he was Cardinal Karol Wojtyla.
St. Casimir is attracting national attention as Polish-American activists oppose the closing of churches across the country and try to save the sacred works of their immigrant ancestors.
Ken Kaminski of Portage, Ind., has taken up the St. Casimir cause through an organization he recently founded called Unite Polonia.
Kaminski, who regularly travels to Cleveland, said his organization has spurred about 2,000 people nationwide to send letters to local dioceses and Rome, urging the preservation of Polish churches. St. Casimir is the poster child for that action, he said.
“Not all churches can be saved, but this one should be,” he said at the protest. “I’ve been to churches in Chicago, Toronto, Detroit, Philadelphia and New York, and this church is in the top three. It’s spectacular, irreplaceable. It would be a sin to lose it.”
“There’s a sacredness in there,” Joe Feckanin, 60, of Seven Hills, said before the protest. “When you come out of that church you feel calm.”
Anetta Reszko, 32, of Shaker Heights, was married in St. Casimir.
“This is our church,” she said. “They stole it from us. We have to take action.”
Organizers plan to continue their protests and try to draw increasingly larger crowds.
“We’re hoping this church will be reopened,” said Michael Klimiuk-Wieczeski, 71, a retired physician who came here from Poland in 1975 and lives in Cleveland’s Slavic Village neighborhood. “We’re going to pray each Sunday outside the church as long as possible. We don’t care about winter.”
The emotion of today’s protest touched one of the Cleveland police officers who blocked the street for the demonstrators.
“I feel sorry for these people, locked out of their own church,” he said.
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