“I think that God hears me better in Polish than English,” Annia Chojnowska said.
She has the desire to pray in her native tongue. Her daughter, born in the United States and now in her 30s, has told her she doesn’t think she would be able to go to confession with a priest who doesn’t speak Polish. She wouldn’t know how to say it, Chojnowska said.
Chojnowska’s family drives 40 minutes each Sunday morning to attend Mass in Polish at Holy Rosary, a Roman Catholic church in Upper Fells Point. The Archdiocese of Baltimore’s reorganization plan, finalized last month, has been gutting to Holy Rosary’s Polish families, many of them parishioners there for generations.
While the church is not closing, it will merge with the nearby, and predominantly Latino, Sacred Heart of Jesus. Holy Rosary will serve as an “additional worship site” with English, Polish and Spanish ministry. The merged parishes of Holy Rosary and Sacred Heart will plan how finances, buildings, sacramental records and scheduling will be handled. A pastor also will be named for the merged parish.
Auxiliary Bishop Bruce Lewandowski said the rhythm of life is likely to continue for Holy Rosary’s longtime parishioners.
He said Sacred Heart’s Latino community “in many ways is similar to our Polish brothers and sisters in their experience of immigration and finding a home here and making their home in Baltimore.” Lewandowski is of Polish heritage and has been a pastor at Sacred Heart.
“I actually am very optimistic and hopeful for this,” he said.
But some of Holy Rosary’s Polish parishioners see the archdiocese’s decision to reduce the number of parishes from 61 to 23, and lead to the closure of about 30 worship sites, as a further erosion of their culture.
The church’s elementary school shuttered in the mid-1990s, its high school in 2004. The archdiocese attributed both closures to declining enrollment.
But few believed the parish was at risk of losing Holy Rosary, Chojnowska said.
Census records show the population of those with Polish ancestry has been dropping in the city since at least the 1990s. The church can hold up to 2,000 people but only sees about 150 people worship there on a weekend, Lewandowski said.
Even so, parishioners felt that their attendance was strong and that the congregation was financially sound. The congregation raised about $1 million through community fundraising and donations in the past 10 years to renovate the roofs of the church.
Merging Holy Rosary with Sacred Heart feels like a betrayal, some of the congregants said.
“It does feel like an erasure of Polish history to me,” said Patricia Bienkowski, who grew up going to the church.
The church is where a mother asked a priest to have her son as an altar boy, hoping that her high-energy child would learn how to control his emotions; where a young couple got married one December evening, as Christmas decorations still lit up the church; where parishioners had pastries and teas in the basement after Mass; and where kids sprayed each other with water guns during Easter, an adaptation of a Polish tradition.
That sense of home, parishioners said, is what they fear will be lost.
‘Our little Poland’
Baltimore saw a surge in Polish immigrants starting in the late 19th century, with the first Polish church, St. Stanislaus Kostka, opening in 1880. As many Polish families settled in Fells Point, a second Polish parish, Our Lady of the Rosary, was established, with congregants initially meeting at the old East Baltimore Station Methodist Episcopal Church building a few blocks away on Eastern Avenue.
It wasn’t until after World War I that the present-day Holy Rosary Church was built. The Romanesque-style church features twin 110-foot bell towers, a marble-carved altar, a 3,000-pipe organ and wide feel due to a lack of pillars and columns. Many Polish families left their estates and gave up their houses and properties to be demolished, with the promise that a place of worship would be built for future generations.
Polish people poured “sweat and hard work” into the church, said Alicja Januś, who is in her 60s. They built it stone by stone. They attended baptisms, First Communions, weddings and funerals there. They went to Masses in an annual remembrance for more than 22,000 Polish military officers and civilian leaders executed by the Soviet Union in 1940 during what is known as the Katyń massacre. And they organized and hosted festivals, including the popular Holy Rosary Annual Polish Festival.
Januś' family moved to Baltimore in 1978 at the request of her uncle, who had grown lonely after leaving Poland following World War II. She was 19, she said. She did not know English or how to drive, and she knew no one. She had to translate “every single word” of her reading materials for school from English to Polish.
She ventured out to listen to classical music and poetry with her friends from church, older than she was and usually married, for support and for when she missed home. And when she met someone and had two children, she still kept going to the church. She wanted her children to know Polish — to be Polish.
When she was a student at Western High School in the 1990s, Marysia Nowicki taught a kindergarten class at Holy Rosary. She loved teaching the kids. She knew it was important to the parents, too. Holy Rosary is a place of worship, she said, but it’s also a place of culture and traditions.
“This is our little Poland,” she said. “Everyone misses Poland in some way.”
Nowicki got busier as she neared graduation, but she still made time for the dance group and the choir, singing at Sunday Mass and performing in festivals at which she wore traditional clothing, dresses beaded based on region.
The music and dances, she said, date to the 13th century, yet are familiar. They took her back her hometown in the southeastern region of the country. They also told stories about a distant past, at times romanticizing village life, through lyrics about young women wandering fields and picking flowers, young men strolling to work.
When she danced, she felt like she was back in Poland.
“I’m thinking about my ancestors,” Nowicki said. “I’m thinking about history.”
It doesn’t sit right
Olga Lannon was born in the Baltimore area and grew up attending Mass and Polish school at Holy Rosary. Now she watches how her young son is learning about letters and numbers in Polish, the different flags. In playdates where kids in the parish get together, the families speak both Polish and English.
Lannon worries about how much more exposure to Polish customs he will have, and whether her youngest child will experience any tradition at all. Her sister, Patricia Bienkowski, has attended meetings held by the archdiocese. The parishioners have been outspoken and intentional about standing up for themselves, Lannon said. Bienkowski has tried to share the archdiocese’s updates with parishioners, some of whom speak limited English, on what the archdiocese intends to do.
Still, Bienkowski said, she doesn’t quite understand the reasoning behind the reorganization at Holy Rosary. It doesn’t sit right, she said.
She thinks about what has happened within the church’s walls: Cardinal Karol Wojtyla, now Pope John Paul II, once celebrated Mass there and lunch at the parish school, according to The Baltimore Sun. A miracle took place there too, when parishioners and a priest facing a life-threatening heart condition prayed to Faustina Kowalska for his health; a few months later, his doctors said he was fully recovered, and the event led to her canonization.
Bienkowski also thinks about the relics stored at the church, taken from the bones of St. Faustina and Blessed Michael Sopocko and the blood of St. John Paul II.
Bienkowski and others feel disappointed — worried that their chosen family is going to dissipate, and with that their history in the city.
Lewandowski said there will always be anxiety about change.
“We want to preserve what they have,” Lewandowski said of Polish parishioners. “We want to take care of this treasure, this gift this blessing we have sustaining and supporting, encouraging and sharing.”
Chojnowska hopes her parish doesn’t go completely silent.
“The music … it’s healing your soul and your heart and your mind,” she said. “By religion, by music, you can actually speak to God.”
