By John Radzilowski Ph.D., Director of the Polish Institute of Culture & Research at Orchard Lake
One hundred and fifty years ago this fall, five Polish religious sisters from the Order of St. Felix of Cantalice arrived in America from Poland and traveled to the small, rural community of Polonia, Wisconsin. They had been invited by Fr. Józef Dąbrowski, who would later go on to found the Seminary of SS. Cyril and Methodius in Detroit (which in due time became the Orchard Lake Schools). They came to staff a parish school Fr. Dąbrowski created.
In 1874 Polonia, Wisconsin, was in the middle of nowhere. The thick forests that had covered the region had been cut down, leaving patches of low-quality stump-filled farmland with sandy soil. Land companies sold much of it to Polish immigrants because it was cheap, and few other farmers wanted it. At that time, only a few Polish settlements existed in America, mainly farmers in cut-over regions of Wisconsin, Michigan, or Minnesota, in the Texas hill country, or in the slums of cities like Chicago. There were a handful of Polish parishes and few of them were able to sustain a school. There were no large Polish organizations and just a couple newspapers, most of them an issue or two away from bankruptcy.
Fr. Dąbrowski had already experienced plenty of life’s difficulties by the time he arrived to minister to Polish settlers in rural Wisconsin. He lost his homeland and as a political exile wanted by the Russian secret police, he could not return home to see his family. He had wandered homeless in Europe before becoming a priest in Rome and being sent to what was then to all intents and purposes the end of the earth. Yet hard times forged wisdom and somehow Fr. Dąbrowski could sense that places like Polonia were only the beginning of something much larger that was coming and coming fast. Fr. Dąbrowski’s painfully earned wisdom gave him the sure knowledge that he could not face what was coming alone.
He needed the help.
Polish American history has mostly been forgotten (and ignored completely in Poland). Perhaps it was easier to forget, because much of our history was hard and bitter and it is often easier to blur out the painful memories of the past. Industrial employers in America had job categories of work so hard, dirty, and degrading that they were reserved for “p*****s and n*****s.” Humiliation and poverty was the daily lot of Polish workers. Hardships we can scarcely imagine stalked the Polish communities as they grew from a few scattered thousands to millions, filling cities large and small. In Chicago by 1920, Poles made up 1 in 10 Chicagoans but 1 in 4 inmates of the Cook County juvenile system. In Detroit, between 25-30 percent of all juvenile delinquents were Polish by 1930. Tuberculosis—the disease of the urban poor—ran rampant in Polish neighborhoods. In Detroit, only Blacks had worse rates of TB. In the 1920s as Americans sent aid to “starving Poland” in the wake of World War I, a Detroit social worker commented that most people weren’t even aware that another “starving Poland” existed in their very midst. Malnutrition and preventable childhood illnesses that today are just a bad memory or relegated to a distant corner of the Third World were common in Polish neighborhoods. Conditions were so bad that one Polish American editor wrote “Today our standing has fallen to such a degree that some compare us to Chinese coolies. If this continues, we will be completely lost, and no trace of our accomplishments will ever be found.”
Fr. Dąbrowski’s call for the Felicians to come to America wasn’t a call to come teach a few classes or help around the rectory. He was sending out an SOS and calling in the cavalry.
The Felicians were founded in 1855 in Warsaw by Blessed Mary Angela Truszkowska. She was a young, educated, upper middle class patriotic woman of deep faith who like so many Poles of her generation saw the firsthand effects of the loss of Poland’s freedom and seemingly unstoppable trends of modernity and industrialization. Warsaw and other cities were filling up with poor people from the rural villages displaced by economic hardship, war, or political repression. Along with other like-minded young laywomen who gathered for prayer at the Parish of St. Felix of Cantalice in Warsaw, Mary Angela Truszkowska dedicated herself to helping those in need, providing for their material wants, educating them, nursing them when they were sick, and teaching them to love God, and love their homeland through work and prayer.
The order grew steadily in Poland and after 19 years when Fr. Dąbrowski’s call for help arrived as from the midst of the American wilderness, the Felicians were ready, and the first five sisters made the journey to Wisconsin, becoming the first Polish women religious in America.
The five sisters began teaching in Wisconsin and the Felicians then followed Fr. Dąbrowski to Michigan, and along the way something remarkable began to happen. In 1874, except for the five sisters in America 100 percent of all Felicians lived and worked in Poland. Within fifty years, the number of Felicians in America dwarfed the size of the community in Poland. When the Sisters celebrated their centennial in 1954, over 80 percent of all Felicians served in America and almost half of all Polish parochial schools in America were operated by the order.
Thousands of young Polish immigrant women answered the call to serve their communities through the Felicians and other Polish American religious orders at the very moment Polonia needed them the most. The challenge was immense. Schools were needed for a community that was growing rapidly. By the start of the 20th century, even before immigration from Poland reached its peak, at least half of all Poles in America were under the age of 16. Immigrants arrived from Poland with limited education, often speaking regional dialects, and had to learn standard Polish before they could be taught to read, let alone learn math, history, science, or the catechism. On top of that they had to learn English for life in America.
There were no textbooks for the schools Fr. Dąbrowski and the Felicians envisioned for Polonia. So, the sisters wrote textbooks. And they created their own publishing houses to print them. They instilled in generations of Polish Americans a love of learning, the Catholic faith, and patriotic love for both Poland and America, “our two fatherlands.” No one fought harder and longer to keep the Polish language alive in America than the Felicians and other Polish teaching sisters, even when in the 1950s most parents demanded classes in English only from fear that even a hint of a Polish accent could prevent their sons and daughters from getting decent jobs or attending college.
The Felicians went far beyond teaching. They cared for orphans, single mothers, and the destitute. During the Depression of the 1930s in Hamtramck, each morning before dawn lines of children and mothers formed outside of Polish convents where they received what for many would be their only full meal of the day. They set up hospitals and clinics. At time when the idea of women running, let alone starting a hospital seemed absurd, the Felicians built and ran what was then the largest hospital in the Detroit area, St. Mary Mercy in Livonia. And if the schools needed teachers or the hospitals needed nurses, they founded colleges to train the personnel they needed.
Nor was it just about Polonia. Although their own community was in need from the beginning in Polonia, Wisconsin, Fr. Dąbrowski and the Felicians knew that if the hardships facing Polonia and the terrible tragedies of Polish history made us turn in on ourselves and ignore others, we had learned nothing from our past and could scarcely merit the title of Polish and Catholic. At a time when even many Catholic orders shied away from teaching on Indian reservations or in African American schools due to racial discrimination, the Felicians stepped forward to take on the task. If you are Black and went to a Catholic school in Michigan between the 1920s and 1970s, your teachers were probably Polish religious sisters and most likely Felicians.
When they weren’t building something themselves, the Sisters were mobilizing others. No Felician Sister was an island and in the close-knit Polish communities of cities like Detroit each sister could call on a reserve platoon of brothers, sisters, nephews, and nieces. With three aunts in the Felician order, my father, his brothers, and sisters would be up bright and early on many weekends to accompany my dziadek to “help the sisters,” working at events in the parish or at the motherhouse in Livonia.
In a time when many Polonia groups are held together by as few as one or two overworked and unappreciated volunteers, we may look back with amazement and wonder what secret recipe allowed the previous generations to accomplish as much as they did. We Polish Americans forgot or failed to learn a lot about our history. Perhaps it was easier to forget that we once were orphans in this country, facing hardships and humiliation that scarcely bear remembering. After all, Polish Americans today are in our great majority comfortable, middle class, educated, secular, and secure, and the Polonia that was just coming into being in 1874 with so much pain, seems like a fairy tale from a distant land. But forgetting has a steep price, too, for we lose the very reason for our being, the virtues that made us great and allowed us to overcome. We fall prey to the greatest communal sin of all—ingratitude—if we forget that when we were at our weakest, there were the hands that reached out to steady our steps, the hands that taught us who we were, where we came from, and what we are worth.
Finding our home in America as Polish Americans was never easy, but it was religious sisters like the Felicians that strengthened us and led us when we needed it the most. Niech żyją siostry zakonne z zakonu felicjanek!
Photo: “The author’s father, Tadeusz Radzilowski, in 1939, age 1.5 years, with his grandfather, Stanisław, and his aunts Sister Mary Columbine and Sister Mary Calasantia of the Felician order. Sister Mary Columbine would later serve as Provincial Superior of the Livonia province of the Felicians.”
