Pinkowski Files

ZASOWSKI, RT. REV. MSGR. ANTHONY F.
(Oct. 21, 1901 - April 27, 1962)
Priest. No matter whether his parents, Bronislaw and Josephine (nee Orchechowski) Zasowski, were the first or second Zasowski family in Brooklyn, their first child, Anthony Francis, was the first Polish graduate of Cathedral College in Brooklyn, but not of St. John's Seminary, as Francis Makowski, who studied there under Vincentian priests, was ordained to the priesthood two years before him. It is perhaps not recorded at St. John's.
After ordination in the Vincentian church, St. John the Baptist, Brooklyn, on June 6, 1925, by Bishop Thomas F. Malloy, D. D., and celebration of his first Mass in his family's church, SS Cyril and Methodius, also in Brooklyn, he traveled by train to Wading River, tucked into the north shore of Long Island, between Brookhaven and Riverhead, to assist Father John Regulski, who had founded St. John the Baptist parish in 1920 for Polish farmers in Suffolk County and remained there until 1935. In season Father Regulski's table never lacked beets, onions, melons, carrots, corn and squash from his parishioners. Father Zasowski, however, was taken away in October 1925 to lessen the load of the ministry at St. Raphael's R. C. Church in Long Island City. The church, built shortly after the Civil War primarily as a mortuary chapel for Calvary Cemetery in Flushing, across the East River from New York City, devoted more and more time to Catholic families in a heavily industrialized part of Long Island.
Almost a repetition of his assignment in Wading River, Father Zasowski was transferred in December 1926 to help Father Adalbert Nawrocki, D. D., who had organized the Polish parish of Holy Cross in Maspeth, also in the Brooklyn diocese, in 1912 and remained in charge of it until he died Feb. 13, 1940. In the beginning the parish included 620 Polish families and 400 boarders, and one assumes that as the parish grew Father Zasowski was involved in a lot of baptists and marriages at Maspeth between 1926 and 1948.
Elaine Ostrowski of Maspeth remembers stories of Father Zasowski, whom her grandmother, Michalina Ostrowski, invited for Sunday dinner. He would always fill the home with laughter. When he married her parents, Anthony V. Ostrowski and Helen M. Kruk, Father Zasowski hesitated a moment, pointed to the back door of Holy Cross Church, and said to the young Ostrowski, "Tony, there's the door. It's your last chance." After the wedding, the guests asked the couple what made them laugh at the altar.
When he was appointed in June 1948 pastor of Our Lady Queen of Poland parish in Southampton, in the east end of Long Island, he found that parishioners were not only farmers but also foremen, mechanics, carpenters, masons, painters and small building contractors. The first Polish settlers, including Francis Kruszewski in 1890, sold livestock, cakes, breads, cut flowers, and other articles to raise money to build their own church in 1918. Father Zasowski devoted a great part of his ministry in Southampton from 1948 to 1953 to the education of children and grandchildren of the first Polish settlers, their spiritual welfare, and development of the parish.
In 1953, Bishop Malloy, who had ordained him 23 years before, put Father Zasowski in charge of a much larger parish, St. Isidore's in Riverhead. The parish fell out of the bishop's control on April 6, 1957, when the Diocese of Rockville Centre was created to cover 1,222 square miles of Long Island. Then, approximately three months after he became the first bishop of the new diocese, the Most Reverend Walter P. Kellenberg appointed Father Zasowski to advise him on church affairs and three years later invested him with the robes of a Domestic Prelate by authority of Pope John XXIII.
Riverhead was then in the midst of a baby boom. Many of the young men of Riverhead who had gone to war in the 1940s now had children in St. Isadore's parochial school. It was not enough that Father Zasowski remodeled the church, painted it, changed the organ and furnace, and repaired the stained glass windows. He installed an automatic system to ring the church bells at six o'clock in the morning, noon, and 6 P. M. The rectory, badly in need of repair, was the original church and school. Father Zasowski replaced it in 1956 with a new rectory, matching the architectural style of the church, and had the old rectory torn down to beautify the surroundings.
For the first time in the 1950s, when people came in cars to attend Mass, they didn't bring mud into the church out of the parking lot. Father Zasowski blacktopped the parking lot. From its earliest days, each pastor of St. Isidore's was afraid to build a school because it would cost too much. Not until land was bought from three different parties did Bishop Kellenberg give Father Zasowski permission to go ahead with plans for a eight classroom school and a convent. The parish hired a fund-raising firm in 1961 to raise $175,000. Father Zasowski, in a meeting of the parish on April 27, 1960, organized teams of solicitors and committees and asked them all to go to work. Within twelve days the parish had $175,000 in pledges. Bishop Kellenberg blessed 97 men individually and said they were an inspiration to him.
On May 8, 1961, Monsignor Zasowski blessed the school site and, in the meantime, the contract for the school and a convent -- the lowest bid was $554,680 -- was awarded to Magee Construction Corporation of Farmingdale, N. Y. Michael A. Pascucci, an architect of Glen Cove, N. Y., drew up the plans. In the course of construction, on April, 27, 1962, Monsignor Zasowski passed away and was laid to rest at the side of his parents in Calvary Cemetery. The school was opened by the Sisters of the Holy Nazareth on September 5, 1962. After a Solemn High Mass, the school children were led to their classroom by their teachers. At last Monsignor Zasowski enabled the parish to fulfill an old dream.
Author: Edward Pinkowski - e-mail: [email protected] - (2008)

St. Isadore Rectory and Church

St. Isadore School