Bishop Francis Hodur: Biographical Essays

Bishop Francis Hodur. Biographical Essays. By Joseph Wieczerzak. Boulder: East European Monographs, 1998. Distributed by Columbia University Press. 312 pp. illus. maps. $49.00 (cloth).

The Polish National Catholic Church, headquartered in Scranton, Pennsylvania, is unique among religious movements of the late nineteenth century as the most enduring and significant schism of the Roman Catholic Church. As the only officially recognized North American Old Catholic body, her connections with the Anglican Communion and with Roman Catholicism-amounting to communio in sacris with both bodies-make her historical and ecclesiological position singular.

Formed in response to perceived threats to Polish identity by the German and Irish Roman Catholic hierarchy in the last century, the PNCC promoted the use of the vernacular in the liturgy, communion in both kinds and optional priestly celibacy. Parochial administration matters and fees for the sacraments were also key in early Polish agitation for separation from the Roman Catholic Church. In the wake of the first Vatican Council's definition of Papal Infallibility and the subsequent genesis of a European Old Catholic movement, these independent Catholics found willing supporters in their brethren across the Atlantic. Ties with Anglicans were also strong from the outset. Intercommunion between the Church of England and the Old Catholic Union of Utrecht was established in 1932, and it existed between the Episcopal Church and the PNCC from 1946 until 1977.

Literature on the Old Catholic movement in Europe abounds, but material on the establishment of like bodies in the Americas is harder to come by This collection of biographical essays on one of the PNCC's founders is thus a welcome addition to the English-language body of information on its beginnings. Francis Hodur, leader of the Scranton-area movement for the establishment of an independent Polish Church, has not yet been the subject of a full-scale biography, and this volume declares itself the first step toward that goal.

Born in Poland in 1866, Hodur was a seminarian in Krakow before emigrating to the United States in 1893. After ordination to the priesthood in Pennsylvania, he was assigned to work in that state's coal-mining region, a center of Polish-American population. Here, he found fellow Poles "losing the reverence due bishops and priests" because many American clergy were "tyrants" who forbade the Polish language in worship, schools or pastoral rounds.

Hodur petitioned Rome for a Polish-American bishop or Apostolic Delegate, for the suppression of "games" and "lotteries" directed by priests in the name of the Church" and for lay influence in parish affairs. These requests denied, a full-scale schism resulted that continues to this day. Scranton's independent-minded Poles elected Hodur their bishop and would have sent him to Europe for consecration but for Chicago Poles' previous election of another prelate. Hodur succeeded Bishop Antoni Kozlowski-leader of the Chicago Independent Church movement-after the latter's death in 1907. He died in 1953, having founded a seminary, erected dioceses in Canada and Poland and shepherded his Polish-American flock to a peak membership of about three million.

Essays in this volume examine aspects of Hodur's extra-ecclesial life in addition to presenting the first English translation of Hodur's own account of his consecration at Utrecht. Most of the essays have appeared previously in PNCC Studies.

Anglican readers will be especially interested in the twelfth essay's account of various other National Churches contemporary with the PNCC, some of whose parishes subsequently became affiliated with the Episcopal Church. Saint Anthony of Padua Episcopal Church (Hackensack, NJ), whose incongruous name testifies to its origins as an Italian mission of the PNCC, is the most lasting of these mergers. Accepted into the Episcopal Diocese of Newark in 1925, it continues as a growing part of that Diocese, a witness to the early and close ties between the PNCC and the Episcopal Church.

Until a full-length biography of Hodur is realized, this volume "vill be the English-speaking world's best resource on his life and work. It fills a hitherto conspicuous lacuna in North American ecclesiastical history and biography.

RICHARD J. MAMMANA, JR.

Columbia University New York, New York

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