Background
Francis Hodur was born April, 2, 1866 in the village of Zarki, 35 miles from Kraków, Poland. He was he was the son of an impoverished peasant couple, John and Mary Koszowska Hodur.
( In the late nineteenth century, Bishop Francis Hodur or...)
In the late nineteenth century, Bishop Francis Hodur organized the Polish National Catholic Church of America, the oldest existing U.S. church that split from the Roman Catholic Church.This collection of Hodur's own sermon outlines and occasional speeches includes his views on theological problems, denominational challenges, social justice, ethnic issues, political questions, patriotic subjects, historical events, and more.
https://www.amazon.com/Sermon-Outlines-Occasional-Speeches-1899-1922/dp/0944497136?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=0944497136
Francis Hodur was born April, 2, 1866 in the village of Zarki, 35 miles from Kraków, Poland. He was he was the son of an impoverished peasant couple, John and Mary Koszowska Hodur.
In 1879 Hodur enrolled at the government secondary school of St. Anne in nearby Cracow. He graduated at the head of his class in most subjects, preparing himself well for future academic accomplishments at the Polish Lyceum and the University of Cracow. After completing the prescribed ten-year secondary program in 1889, Hodur decided to enter the Roman Catholic priesthood. Emigrating to the United States in 1892, he completed his theological training at St. Vincent Seminary in Betty, Pennsylvania, and was ordained in 1893.
Hodur's first pastoral assignment was in the anthracite-mining region of Lackawanna and Luzerne counties, in eastern Pennsylvania, an area already densely populated with recently arrived Polish immigrants.
In 1894 Hodur was transferred to Holy Trinity parish in nearby Nanticoke, where he remained for the next three years. Several disputes arose between his former parishioners at Sacred Heart and their new pastor, the Reverend Richard Aust, regarding the issues of parish management and ownership of church property.
Although these contentions appeared similar to the trusteeship controversy that had rocked mid-nineteenth-century American Catholicism, they were in reality the first stirrings of a militant Polish ethnic reaction to the policies of Americanization championed by James Cardinal Gibbons, Archbishop John Ireland, and various other American bishops.
In any event, when an ad hoc committee of Sacred Heart laypeople approached the local ordinary, Bishop O'Hara, with their grievances, they were instead personally admonished by O'Hara for disobedience to Aust. As a result, the enraged Sacred Heart parishioners, already arguing amongst themselves, engaged in bloody street fighting.
Hodur attempted to have the new parish legitimately consecrated by O'Hara, but his request was denied. He consequently journeyed to Rome in 1898 to petition that Poles be allowed to form parishes on a strict nationality basis with lay ownership of church property. He was again refused.
When Hodur persisted in publicly maintaining these ethnocentric views in the face of Vatican condemnation, he was excommunicated on October 22, 1898.
Hodur's movement made no doctrinal or liturgical changes until December 16, 1900, when the St. Stanislaus parish assembly chose to hold services in the vernacular (Polish) rather than in the traditional Latin.
The First General Synod of the PNCC (1904), an assembly of 147 clerical and lay delegates representing approximately 20, 000 communicants, went much further.
Similar ethnocentric movements were already underway among Polish Catholics in Chicago, where hard-line nationalists at St. Hedwig's parish formed the schismatic All Saints parish under the leadership of Bishop Anthony Kozlowski.
The ceremony which was performed in Utrecht on September 29, 1907, by the Most Reverend Gerald Gul, Archbishop of Utrecht and head of the Old Catholic Church; the Right Reverend Jacob Jan van Thiel, Bishop of Haarlem; and the Right Reverend Nicolaus Bartholemew Peter Spit, Bishop of Deventer--culminated the first and only major schism in the history of the American Catholic church.
In 1908 the Roman Catholic hierarchy, almost undoubtedly in response to pressures created by the schism, consecrated Polonia's first Roman Catholic bishop, Paul Rhode of Chicago, but the action came too late to stem the momentum of the PNCC.
After his consecration, Hodur labored for nearly a half-century to promote and consolidate the growth of the PNCC from his Scranton headquarters.
At first he attempted to recruit from among the Roman Catholic clergy, but when these efforts proved unsuccessful he founded the Savonarola Seminary in Scranton in 1927 to train priests, to whom the PNCC had granted the privilege of optional celibacy.
In his lifetime, Hodur consecrated nine other bishops in order to ensure continuity and succession for the PNCC.
In 1913 he drew up the Confession of Faith, which he based on the councils of Nicea, Constantinople, Ephesus, and Chalcedon (excluding all other ecumenical councils), and in 1923 he drafted the Eleven Great Principles, a pastoral work synthesizing the beliefs of the PNCC. Hodur attempted throughout his life to effect a reconciliation with Protestantism. He succeeded in gaining membership for the PNCC when the National Council of Churches was formed in 1950; in 1948 he had brought it into affiliation with the World Council of Churches. These five dioceses administered to the spiritual needs of 265, 879 believers in 1953, with the laity controlling property in excess of $14 million.
With Hodur's encouragement and active support, the independents constructed St. Stanislaus Bishop and Martyr parish in Scranton, which was hailed as the first Polish National Church in America; Hodur became its first pastor on March 14, 1897, the date generally accepted as the birth of the Polish National Catholic Church in America (PNCC).
In 1914 he carried out a union with Lithuanian Old Catholics; during the 1920's he encouraged closer ties with Slavic Lutherans; in 1938 he sent envoys to the prestigious ecumenical Edinburgh Conference; and in 1946 he was instrumental in negotiating the intercommunion with the Church of England (which included union with the Protestant Episcopal Church of America).
Hodur is best remembered as the founder of Polish National Catholic Church and Prime Bishop of the Polish National Catholic Church in America. He founded the Polish National Union in 1908 to strengthen ties between the clergy and laity and worked vigorously to acquire the increasing number of priests needed to tend a flock that had grown to 28, 000 communicants by 1923. Libraries housing the most substantial collections on Hodur and the PNCC are the Alliance College Library in Cambridge Springs, Pennsylvania, and the libraries of the Polish National Alliance and Polish Museum of America (formerly the Polish Roman Catholic Union Museum and Archives), both in Chicago.
( In the late nineteenth century, Bishop Francis Hodur or...)
Hodur was a member of the Polish National Catholic Church.
He attempted throughout his life to effect a reconciliation with Protestantism.
Hodur supported socialists.
The Marxist Polish historian Hieronym Kubiak has described Hodur as an idealistic revolutionary who possessed a deep understanding of his working-class constituency in the coal mines of Pennsylvania, while the Roman Catholic priest-historian Wenceslaus Kruszka has portrayed him as overly ambitious and naïve.
Hodur never married.
