Urbanowicz, Francis J., Msgr.
(0ct. 16, 1912 - Jan. 4, 1999)
Priest

One wonders when the Urbanowicz families will no longer go to Shenandoah, Pennsylvania, to bury their dead. When Monsignor Francis J. Urbanowicz was buried in St. Casimir Cemetery, there were only a few persons of the same name left in, his hometown, compared to 13 in 1920, and since his death three of the last of the Urbanowiczs have passed away.

Francis J. was the fourth of seven children born in Shenandoah to Alexander and Josephine Urbanowicz. His father, Alexander, who was born in Daszyna, Poland, March 1, 1879, sailed from Antwerp, Belgium, on the SS Vaderland and landed in New York on June 3, 1907. To support his family, Alexander went down into the bowels of the earth, hundreds of feet deep, to wrest the hard coal needed for cooking and heating, supply power to railroads, ships, and factories, and piling the rocks no one could burn on the sides of coal breakers. The family was part of the Polish population that contributed to the growth and development of Shenandoah.

The married women from Poland, 953 of them, deserve credit for bearing more than one third of the 24,726 persons in 1920. Few of them knew how to spell their last names, but they certainly knew how to raise babies and send them to the mines when they grew up and to fight in the nation's wars. Instead of following his older brother into the mines, Francis graduated from Annunciation Catholic High School and then went by train to Philadelphia to study for the priesthood at St. Charles Seminary. Coal was very much out of sight, out of mind - and, for his theology classes, just as well forgotten. He was ordained in 1939 at the Cathedral of Sts. Peter and Paul in Philadelphia. Prior to that time, most of the Polish priests out of Shenandoah attended the Polish Seminary in Michigan, first in Detroit and then Orchard Lake, and to find candidates for the priesthood now in Shenandoah would be as anachronistic as a horse and buggy.

In his first assignment, Urbanowicz assisted the pastor of St. Mary's R.C. Church in Reading, midway between Philadelphia and Shenandoah, where many Poles who lost jobs in the coal mines found work, and served as chaplain for religious sisters, civilians, and college students. No matter how far he had to go, he always made time to help the sick, the poor, and anyone who needed him.

In 1968, he was appointed pastor of a small parish, Sacred Heart in Oxford, filled with red-brick house's and retired farmers from the sparsely settled part of Chester County, and far from the Polish parishes for which he was best fitted.

It did not take John Cardinal Krol of the Philadelphia Archdiocese long to recognize his value. He transferred Father Urbanowicz in 1972 to Sacred Heart parish in Clifton Heights, seven miles from Philadelphia, where Polish families for the most part built a new stone church in Normandy Gothic style in 1937, and opened a new elementary school in 1953. Urbanowicz took good care of Sacred Heart parish, which was until 1964 strictly for Polish families living within its boundaries, and served it well into the 1980s. Although the parochial school was closed in 1986, the year after Pope John Paul II named him an honorary prelate, with the title of monsignor, Sacred Heart parish was so strong that Anthony Cardinal Bevilacqua, who succeeded Cardinal Krol, closed St. Hedwig's Church in Chester and sent its records and people to Clifton Heights on June 24, 1994, four years after Urbanowicz became pastor emeritus of Sacred Heart. Monsignor Urbanowicz died in the church rectory.

After Cardinal Bevilacqua celebrated a Funeral Mass at Sacred Heart Church, the monsignor's body was sent to Shenandoah for burial. According to records of St. Casimir Cemetery, his brother, Leo J. Urbanowicz, who died January 17, 1991, in Shenandoah, and his sister, Loretta J. Urbanowicz, who died October 13, 2005, also in Shenandoah, and Sister Mary Collette, who died in between them, rest together with the priest of 59 years. The cemetery would laster than the church of the same name. Maybe longer than Shenandoah itself.

From: Edward Pinkowski (2009)