FROM NEW OXFORD REVIEW:

The Polish Catholic Experience

The story of Polish Catholics in America, of being stripped of a vibrant culture and proud neighborhoods, is a melancholy one which teaches a valuable lesson.

[Excerpt]

But it is a shame — a profound shame — that the Mother Church in the U.S. has let languish and die the religious heritage of a people who were faithful to her from their baptism; a people who followed her teachings on the practice of usury and remained poor when other nations abandoned the Catholic vision and became rich; a Catholic nation that suffered the loss of everything and was itself enslaved but which learned to fight for its own freedom and the freedom of others; a Catholic people who, poorest of the poor in terms of 

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political power, tried to give the greatest glory to God in the monuments they built and who were never accepted, who were despised, and in the end, destroyed and discarded as a Catholic presence in the New World, while an often ideological bureaucracy fed the Church with the slogans and agendas of rich and powerful elites. St. Ignatius taught that “poverty has always been the bulwark of true religion.” Perhaps Bl. John Paul II was sent from what was a poor European country to remind us of that.

Read all about it...

http://www.newoxfordreview.org/article.jsp?did=0711-gawronski

 

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