Kotecki, Rev. Maximilian
(1876 - December 28, 1959)The first Polish settlers of South Bend, Indiana, where in 1880 the city of 13,336 had 1,615 persons from Prussia, as nearly all of them were labeled, didn't have a chance to hold on to Maximilian A. Kotecki. For one thing, his father, Franz Kotecki, who came from Prussia in 1872, died when Maximilian was three years old, and Victoria Kotecki was unable to raise three children herself. After preliminary schooling in South Bend, Maximilian went away to study for the priesthood. In due course he was ordained by Archbishop Patrick A. Feehan of Chicago.
In November of 1900 the archbishop appointed him to organize the parish of St. Stanislaus, Bishop and Martyr, in Kankakee, Illinois, sixty miles from Chicago, for Polish Catholics, most of whom worked in a stove works and a furniture factory. Under Father Kotecki's leadership, a zealous flock of twenty families built a two-story combination church and school building. It was dedicated on the Fourth of July in 1901. At the same time, some of the faithful took out mortgages on their homes to put up a home for their pastor.
Father Kotecki returned to Chicago in December, 1901, to assume a bigger and more urgent assignment. The previous pastor of SS Peter and Paul Church in Mc Kinley Park, organized in 1895 to serve Polish workers in the Chicago stockyards, completed plans for a larger church at 38th and Paulina streets, and Father Kotecki arrived in time to go ahead with construction of a church in the Romanesque style at a cost of $100,000 after building a permanent rectory. Archbishop James E. Quigley laid the cornerstone of the church on September 3, 1906, and dedicated it on June 30, 1907.
The new school, which cost $85,000, wasn't completed until August 30, 1908. Chicago had never seen a dedication like it. Most of the homes around the three-story school, the church, and the rectory, where Father Kotecki and his mother lived, were decorated with bunting and Polish flags. The first pastor, then Auxiliary Bishop Paul P. Rhode of Chicago, turned up in full regalia to bless the school.
In 1926 Father Kotecki asked the archbishop for lighter duties. He served as an assistant at the Polish parishes of St. Pancratius and St. Turibius. He died on December 28, 1959. Unfortunately, the remarkable work of Father Kotecki is going to pieces. Most of the Polish families moved away after the decline of the stockyards in the 1950s and 1960s and their places were taken by families of other backgrounds and the Polish church in Kankakee was closed in the 1980s.
From: Edward Pinkowski (2008)