The Polish peasant in Europe and America; monograph of an immigrant group
by William Isaac Thomas
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Excerpt:
~in 1873 Priest Gieryk of. Detroit planned some kind of super-territorial institution in which the representatives of various coTonies would meet and manage the common affairs of the American Poles. But this plan, though
~Tater supported by one of the best Polish-American organizers, Priest W. Barzynski, failed completely. The failure was inevitable, for the organization began as a vague association of priests, who as such represented their respective parishes. It meant thus implicitly the use of the parish system as a basis of the super-territorial system. But the parish is, as we have seen, essentially a territorial institution with all its activities concentrated upon the local Polish-American group. There are hardly any practical interests common to all the Polish parishes in this country, and a super-territorial organization with the parish as the unit would have nothing to do. Priest Barzynski in spite of all his ability and influence could not even induce all of the parishes in Chicago to form one social body; their solidarity has never gone beyond cooperation in a few public manifestations of a national character.
It even proved impossible to create a formal superterritorial organization of all the official leaders of parishes, 1. e., the Polish-American clergy, for the latter belonged to many different dioceses and did not constitute any one unit of the Roman Catholic hierarchy. The aim of the Order of the Resurrectionists, which from the beginning played a very important part in PolishAmerican life, seems to have been precisely to create a unified body of Polish clergy outside of the administrative Catholic hierarchy of America by placing members of the Order at the head of all Polish-American parishes, which would thus remain under the control of one Polish religious institution. But the number of Polish-American parishes grew so rapidly that the Order could furnish only a small minority of the priests who were needed. And probably, in spite of the relatively high intellectual and moral level of the Resurrectionists, the American Catholic clergy opposed the growth of the Order as a foreign organization primarily dependent on its superiors in Rome and only secondarily on the local bishops. The manifest theocratic tendencies of the Order further developed a strong reaction against it among the American Poles themselves, and the lay Polish priests who came to this country also resented the control of the half-monastic institution. Though the Order still preserves a strong moral and intellectual influence due to the definiteness of its purpose, to the high education of its leading members, and to the "pull" it has at the Vatican, it has failed to achieve a unification of the Polish-American clergy. A free organization recently founded (in 1910) on the initiative of Bishop P. Rhode, under the name Alliance of Polish Priests, can hardly fulfil this task.
There is, of course, some unity among the PolishAmerican parish leaders but it is only informal, manifested by occasional meetings and by the existence of a^ few institutions—seminaries, schools for teaching nuns, publications—which are in a sense common to all the parishes simply because they produce religious or educational values which every parish needs. But this informal unity does not actually produce any conscious social cohesion in the Poles. It gives perhaps a certain general uniformity to the policy of the Polish-American priests and of those lay leaders who serve the interests of the clergy, but this- is not enough to make one social body of the various separate colonies which the individual members of the clergy respectively try to control.
The real super-territorial organization of the American Poles is based not upon the parish but upon the local association. For although the association is included within the territorial community and serves its interests, it may be able to cooperate for certain purposes with analogous associations existing in other communities. While the only real aim of the parish, like that of every primary-group, is its own existence as a coherent social body, the association has definite objective aims—economic, hedonistic, political, religious, aesthetic, intellectual—which often may be little more than the pretext for associating but are a necessary pretext and open the way for participation of the association in wider organizations of the secondary-group type.
The first consistent and fairly successful attempt to construct a super-territorial Polish-American system with the local association as a unit was made by the founders of the Polish National Alliance in 1880.1 Following this example several other organizations were established, the Polish Roman Catholic Union, the Alliance of Polish Socialists, the Women's Alliance, the Sokols, the Alliance of Polish Troops, the Polish Alma
1 The Alliance at first intended to include parishes but since no parish Joined, it developed exclusively as a system of associations.
