Pinkowski Files

Migdalski, Rev. Adalbert (Wojciech) Anthony
(April 23, 1870 -- March 19, 1943)
Catholic priest.
Although census takers never caught the Rev. Wojciech Migdalski on American soil, the people of Maciejkoowice, a farming village nine miles north of Krakow, Poland, where he was born and raised by Ignacy and Agnieszka (nee Milica) Migdalski, never forgot the nation two of their countrymen helped to create across the Atlantic ocean. For centuries, they were told, and still are, that on October 10, 1794, while fighting for Polish independence on their earth, General Thaddeus Kosciuszko, a hero of the American Revolution, was taken prisoner by Russian troops and jailed in Czarist Russia for two years. No doubt that Wojciech, as Adalbert is known in Polish, Migdalski learned all this and a lot more at the gymasium he attended in Krolewska Huta, which means Royal Iron Works, a city of 19,500 imhabitants in 1870. It and three neighboring cities continued to grow by the thousands every year and were later combined and named Chorzow.
It was a sad day in 1893 when Wojciech Migdalski left his loved ones to study in Italy. He spent three years at a Salesian prepartory school in Lombriasso, Italy, and seven years in the Pontifical Gregorian University at Rome. He was ordained in the priesthood at Mondefrascone, Italy, on December 20, 1902, and earmarked for the Diocese of Cleveland, Ohio.
When the young priest arrived in Cleveland in February 1903, his English was so poor that Bishop Ignatius Horstmann sent him to the Polish Seminary in Detroit for more English lessons. Two months later he was assigned to assist the aged Father Benedict Rosinski, pastor of St. Stanislaus Roman Catholic Church in Cleveland. "The parish of St. Stanislaus," wrote Rev. Waclaw Kruszka, historian of the Catholic exodus from Poland, "was at that time similar to a tree rampaged by a tremendous wind; the tree trunks swayed, branches were broken, the yellowed leaves fell, but the main trunk remained immovable." Whatever the reason, the bishop turned over the pastorate of the fourth oldest Polish parish in Cleveland to Franciscan Fathers in 1906.
At the time, two bishops -- Bishop Horstmann of Cleveland and Bishop Francis Hodur, who broke away from Rome in 1897 and set up his headquarters in Scranton, Pennsylvania -- tried to bring into their fold a group of Polish immigrants in Brooklyn Township, Cuyahoga County, Ohio, where in 1900 the census taker found 3,829 inhabitants, 105 of them from Poland. It included seventeen Polish families, most of the women in their 20s and 30s, with their children and fifty boarders. The children for the most part were born in Ohio.
Then, on April 11, 1906, Father Migdalski stepped into the picture when Bishop Horstmann put him in charge of building a Polish church in the village of South Brooklyn, across the Cuyahoga River from Cleveland, which later annexed it, and evidently the bishop left it up to the priest to select its patron saint. Thus, it was no quirk of mind that Father Migdalski chose St. Barbara, also the name of an old church at Chorzow, which he attended in his youth, and the neighborhood of the church was referred to as Barbarowa. Over the years, dating back to the days of the first settlers from Connecticut, the name of the settlement was changed again and again by the inhabitants.
The cornerstone of the first church, designed by 33-year-old Emile Uhlrich, a graduate of the Ecole des Beaux Art in Paris, France -- also the architect of St. Propcop in Cleveland, St. Ladislaus in Lorain, and Our Lady of Consolation in Carey, all three churches in Ohio, and Our Lady of Victory Basilica, Lackawanna, New York -- was laid on December 2, 1906. It was different from anything anyone can remember. It was a three-story building, 36 x 76 feet, with the church on the first floor, and two classrooms each on the second and third floors. Without waiting for the builders to complete their work by Easter of 1907, Father Migdalski, surrounded by scaffolds, celebrated Mass at Christmas.
St. Barbara's school, in charge of a female teacher, was opened on September 17, 1907, with 8 boys and 11 girls. Father Migdalski reported to Bishop Horstmann that 25 families refused to send their children to the Catholic school. No matter what argument he used to convince them to send their children to St. Barbara's school, they sent their children to the public school in 1908. The children would not attend the parish school when conditions were dangerous.
Actually, the first St. Barbara's church -- close to Ferdinand Eggers' brick yard and Charles Masek's soap works -- was built in the wrong place. For most of the parish there were two railroad tracks and a bridge between the church and their homes, and they would not attend Mass in wintry and rainy weather. In 1908, Father Migdalski confessed to Bishop Horstmann, "I celebrate daily Mass without any servers and without a congregation," and resigned. Inevitably the parish wiped out Father Migdalski's choice when it built St. Barbara's church in a different location.
Exactly when he was freed from the jurisdiction of the Cleveland bishop is not clear. The prospect of finding another church in Ohio to take care of diminished due to his ill health. One church listed him as an assistant in 1909. The search for his name in U. S. census records and passenger lists of ocean liners yielded no results. The first women of the same name listed in this country, Ewa and Anna Migdalski, who could have been his sisters, changed their last name by marriage. Anna married Jozef Swisziak in Ohio. On July 4, 1914, with the consent of the Cleveland bishop, the priest of Maciejkowice (St. Michael the Archangel parish in Michalkowice claimed him, too) took a three month vacation in Upper Silesia.
In the first year of the First World War, while he was still in German territory, Father Migdalski was drafted to serve as a chaplain in Kaiser Wilhelm's army. To the bishop of Cleveland it meant trouble. He sought help from Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan under President Woodrow Wilson to seek the release of Father Migdalski. Nothing happened. Father Migdalski served three years in the German army. Picking up the campaign where the State Department left off, Cardinal Adolph Bertram negotiated in a friendly way with the German government and won Father Migdalski's release in 1917.
Instead of returning to Cleveland, Father Migdalski was listed as an assistant at the Catholic church in Swietochlowice, a city in Silesia west of Chorzow, where he took part in the plebecite of the population; 31,864 voted to stay with Germany and 10,704 favored Poland. After three uprisings, the eastern part of Upper Silesia, including Swietochlowice was separated from Germany in 1922 and awarded Poland.
When he became attached to the Diocese of Katowice in southern Poland, Father Migdalski served as administrator of the church at Brzezce, 1923, which was more beautiful than the Polish churches in Cleveland; assistant pastor, Lubomia, 1924; and pastor of Most Holy Trinity in Wielka Wisla, 1924-1934. He retired in 1934 and died on March 19, 1943, at Miedzna. He was buried in a cemetery at Pszczyna, 22 miles south of Katowice.

Church of the Blessed Mother of the Scapular in the village of Brzezce, Poland, where Fr. Migdalski was administrator in the 1920s.
From: Edward Pinkowski --- assisted by Peter Obst (2010)