Fligier, Walerian, Rev.
Pioneer priestLittle is known of Father Fligier, where he was born and educated, ordained, and started his priestly career. He deserves more attention than he has received. Hopefully someone will pick up his trail and put flesh on him. So far as is known, shortly after he came to the United States in 1904, he was the first priest to minister to newcomers from Poland, Slovakia, and Lithuania in the soft coal pits surrounding the borough of South Fork, just north of Johnstown, Cambria County, Pennsylvania, where they built a temporary church, St. Anthony of Padua, in 1905, and evidently in 1906 he brought his sister from Poland and a servant in 1909 to keep house for him. As Poles outnumbered the Slovaks and Lithuanians, their language was used in the pulpit. Two historians do not agree on the first pastor. Father Waclaw Kruszka, who wrote a history of the Poles in America to 1908 in Polish, said Fligier was the first pastor. In 1997, Father John L. Sredzinski, who wrote a history of the Polish Roman Catholic parishes in Western Pennsylvania, " They Came - They Gave," in English, attributed the first Mass to the Rev. Wiktor Pausztko, who built a brick church in 1910 and laid a new cornerstone, with the last words, "Polski-Slowacki-Litewski." The church was closed in 1995 and changed to a flea market.
The second place in the United States in which Father Fligier administered the sacraments and performed other duties was in Pultney Township, Belmont County, Ohio, where soft coal was mined at several points and sold to steamboats on the Ohio River and shipped in barges to other places. The township lies across the Ohio River from West Virginia, and, consequently, Father Fligier found Polish miners in both states and tended to their spiritual needs.
In too much for words, seeking a spot where his services would be appreciated, he found himself in 1913 with a bunch of Polish mill workers in the village of West Warren, Massachusetts. Among them were Andrew Jaworski, Frank Szczygiel, Martin Misiaszek, and Peter Trzepacz. At first they attended St. Paul's church in Warren and St. Thomas Aquinas in West Warren. Then when Father Fligier showed up in the small village of Worcester County he led a delegation to Springfield to ask Bishop Thomas Beaven's permission to organize a parish. Thus, Fligier was appointed the first pastor of St. Stanislaus Bishop and Martyr R.C. Church and the bishop added the Polish families at Warren in the new parish. The parishioners, however, didn't have money to build a church until 1917.
In the meantime, because more Polish families in Northampton, Massachusetts, were without a priest, Father Fligier assumed new duties as pastor of St. John Cantius parish.
From: Edward Pinkowski (2009)