A Polish priest's journey of resistance and faith
In 1996 I wrote about Marian Mazgaj, a retired Episcopal priest, who resisted the Nazis and Communists in Poland, emigrated to the U.S. and was tending to several flocks in Wheeling, W.Va.
Christmas Eve, 1996
Like the few children and dozen adults who preceded her, the little old lady fil- ling out of the sanctuary of St. Luke's Episcopal Church is quickly captured by the powerful, wide-open arms of Father Marian.
As she half disappears in the flowing sleeves of his white cassock, the priest hugs her, tenderly kisses the top of her gray head and thumps her tiny back so soundly it can be heard 8 feet away.
"I love you all," the Rev. Marian Mazgaj (pronouncced Maz-guy) broadcasts in a strong, Polish-accented voice to the dozen worshippers hovering in the church foyer. "You're wonderful. people."
"We love you too, father," a woman responds, speaking for the entire membership of St. Luke's, an outpost of Episcopalianism on Wheeling Island that dates from 1893 but now has just 25 members and no permanent priest.
After witnessing just one of his Sunday services, it's easy to understand why everyone loves Father Marian, a retired Episcopal priest who lives in Greene County, Pa., but spends a great deal of his time filling in for other priests and ministering to the old and sick in and around Wheeling.
His sermon had a heavy religious theme — if you let Christ enter fully into your life, you'll never be the same. He delivered it standing on the front edge of the altar steps, slashing the air with his strong hands, clenching his fists, pumping and extending this arms.
Forceful, credible and intellectual, it was the spiritual equivalent of a Vince Lombardi pep talk. Except Father Marian sprinkled it with Latin and Greek phrases, theological metaphors and a reference to his days battling not the Dallas Cowboys but the evil Nazi empire.
By all accounts, the parishioners of St. Luke's truly appreciate Father Marian, who arrives in a high-mileage Mercedes sedan with his priestly vestments stashed in the trunk.
Yet few of them realize what an amazing, rich and interesting life he led before he started regularly blessing and hugging them. And that along with knowing how to celebrate Mass, comfort the sick and synopsize the ideas of philosophers like Martin Heidegger and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, he knows what it feels like to blow up a railroad bridge.
*****
To go to war at 16.
To kill men in battle.
To be able to do nothing while 74 men, women and children are butchered in their homes by Nazi soldiers.
To see your friends and fellow partisans tortured, shot or sent to Siberian gulags.
To sleep with a pistol under your pillow in fear of the Communist police.
All these terrible things Father Marian experienced during his life under Nazism and communism. He is a remarkable man, the kind we all can hope history won't be in need of anymore.
Ordained as a Roman Catholic priest in Poland in the early 1950s, but an Episcopal priest since the early 1970s, he has led many distinct lives in his 73 years — Polish farm boy, freedom fighter, scholar, priest, college professor, married man and father.
Until he retired, he was the minister of his own Episcopal parishes in Weston, W.Va., and Steubenville, Ohio. Going back in time, he's been a college philosophy professor in Pennsylvania at Penn State's McKeesport and Fayette County campuses and a theology instructor at a Catholic seminary in Ohio. Before that, he was a philosophy graduate student in Pittsburgh at Duquesne University and in Washington, D.C., at Catholic University.
In Communist Poland, which he left in a hurry in 1957 because he was afraid the secret police were about to pick him up, he earned his doctorate in theology during the mid-1950s at the same university in Krakow where Karol Wojtyla, the future Pope John Paul II, was studying.
Though not a particularly close friend of the future pope, Mazgaj emembers him as extremely self-effacing, shy, philosophical and smart. In any case, Pope John Paul has since become Mazgaj’s personal hero and earthly role model. "I adore him as a man to be imitated and followed," he says. "He's my example of how to love God, love your people and serve them to the end of your life."
It seems a contradiction that Mazgaj has come to pattern his own priestly life after the pope.
One of the few significant differences between Roman Catholics and Episcopalians — two churches whose theologies and traditions have remained nearly identical since King Henry VIII established the Church of England — is that Episcopalians do not recognize the Pope as their spiritual leader.
But in a long life lived during the turbulent middle of the 20th century, such contradictions make eminent sense.
****
Many details of Mazgaj's early life in the Polish countryside can be found in "Visiting Home in Poland After 33 Years," a book of reportage and reminiscences he wrote describing the trip he, his wife Mildred and two teen-age sons made to his hometown in 1990.
The paperback, available in Downtown Pittsburgh at Bradley's Book Cellar and in Oakland at University Book Store, also includes several stories about some of his most harrowing wartime experiences.
In 1939, when Mazgaj was 16 and Hitler's armies were sweeping across Poland, he left home and became a commando with the Polish Home Army.
Living in safe houses in the forests far from his hometown and trained and supplied by British paratroops, he and his small unit blew up railroad lines, ambushed German patrols and raided German barracks for weapons.
Mazgaj was nearly captured or killed several times. One winter night, during an attempt by his unit to capture a railroad bridge, he jumped down from a train and ordered a German guard to drop his rifle and raise his hands.
Instead of complying, which most of the soldiers captured by the Polish resistance usually did, the guard pulled a pistol from his tunic and emptied it at Mazgaj before the future priest could kill the German with his rifle. Miraculously, Mazgaj's only injury was from a bullet that nicked his ear.
Though they fought to free their country from a brutal enemy, the unit Mazgaj served with never killed German soldiers needlessly. They knew that many of the men in the regular German army had been forced into the service, so they treated their foes with Christian charity. If Germans they attacked or ambushed turned over their weapons peacefully, the Poles would set them free with a handshake.
The Germans who occupied Poland were not so kind, however. Mazgaj himself watched from a hillside as an SS unit surrounded a town, marched its entire Jewish population off to concentration camps and shot those who lagged behind or tried to escape.
He also was unable to stop the slaughter of Struzki, a small town whose 74 residents were shot, bayoneted or burned to death in their homes in retaliation for a partisan ambush that had killed several German soldiers.
When the war ended, Mazgaj returned to his parents' farm. It was a particularly joyous homecoming, because they had been told months before that he had been killed in action.
The celebration was short-lived, however. Mazgaj's troubles — and his country's — were far from over. Defeated German soldiers had merely been replaced by Soviet soldiers.
Poles like him who had fought in the resistance on behalf of the exiled Polish government in London — and were almost in a civil war with the Communist resistance units linked to Moscow — were not being treated as heroes. They were being rounded up by the Soviet secret police and sent to Siberia.
Mazgaj took no chances. He quickly moved far away to a part of Poland where he was not known. Keeping a low profile and staying away from the police, he finished high school and entered college. There, living in fear of the secret police, he often slept with a pistol under his pillow, ready to run "into the orchard every time a dog barked."
Becoming a priest didn't bring him much peace of mind. As late as 1956, when he was a popular 33-year-old pastor in a small town, he was called in for interrogation by the secret police, who wanted to know his attitude toward Communist guerrillas in World War.
When the secret police began to follow him and he began getting phone calls in the middle of the night, Mazgaj decided it was time to leave. He had trouble getting a passport at first, but luckily, with uncles waiting for him in Buffalo, he got an American visa and flew to freedom.
****
Fifty Christmas Eves ago Marian Mazgaj was a 23-year-old war hero in hiding. But he sneaked home to his parents' farm to celebrate a traditional, family-centered Polish Christmas, which sounds like a ceremony straight out of the Middle Ages.
As usual, Mazgaj's father Jozef went to the barn and brought back a bundle of straw and a handful of hay. The straw went in the corner of the dining room, while the hay was placed in the middle of the long table that had been covered with a white tablecloth, lit with candles and set for a family of 12.
A huge meatless meal that included fish, pierogi, mushroom soup and several special holiday breads was prepared and waiting in the kitchen. In the middle of the table his mother Jozefa had placed wafers of a communion-like bread called oplati.
As the family of 12 stood around the table, Mazgaj's father took a piece of oplati and turned to his wife. He held the wafer out to her and apologized for all his shortcomings, asking for her forgiveness. When she accepted his apology, she ate pieces of the wafer and the two hugged and kissed each other with tears in their eyes.
Then, in the same way, Mazgaj's mother asked for forgiveness from her husband, who in turn went to his oldest son, Marian, and soon, down the line. By the time the Mazgaj family said a prayer and sat down to eat, there had been a great deal of kissing and hugging.
After dinner, the family would light the Christmas tree and sit around and sing carols until it was time to go to midnight Mass. The Mazgaj family walked 2 1/2 miles to the parish's huge 13th century English gothic church, becoming part of a stream of 2,000 worshippers coming from a dozen small towns. The next morning, after going to another Mass, families would return to their homes.
They'd eat and sing carols, but would not visit anyone, not even next-door neighbors. Visiting was saved for Dec. 26. And because presents had been exchanged weeks before on St. Nicholas Day, the sacred, holy nature of Christmas Day was preserved in a way that would appeal to many Americans today.
Today and tonight, Father Marian, who continues to follow the Polish Christmas traditions of his father in his own home, will celebrate Christmas Eve services at three churches in the Wheeling area.
In each of those churches, Father Marian will deliver a sermon entitled "The Power and the Glory," in which he will show that, throughout history, the power and the glory of God often appears in the most insignificant places and through the most humble people.
"For one reason or another," Father Marian explained yesterday, "God doesn't use the most important persons in the world. He doesn't use the most important places in the world. He doesn't use the powerful and the celebrities of this world."
In his sermon, Father Marian uses many examples to make his case, beginning with the birth of "the weak, defenseless, newborn Baby Jesus" in a stable.
Other humble instruments of God's power and glory include John the Baptist, who proclaimed the coming of Christ not in a temple in Jerusalem but in the desert; the slum dwellers of Jerusalem, who became Christianity's first converts; and Mother Teresa, who made the power and glory of God "real and visible in the slums of Calcutta."
Father Marian says he's trying to show that "sometimes when people look for delivery from the situations such as the crisis in Peru or the Mideast or Africa, they look to the White House, to the politicians. But many times the delivery comes from somebody that people do not expect at all."
A good example of what he means, says Father Marian, is the working-class Polish electrician, Lech Walesa, "a humble fellow who never went to college," yet who "for one reason or other God had chosen to be the instrument of chipping out the block of communism until it fell apart."
Likewise, Father Marian will say in his sermons today, if God is to intervene in the midst of mankind's contemporary troubles — mass slaughter in Africa, terrorism — we should look for him to act "through weak, unknown and humble people and places no matter whether clerical or secular.
"That," he will say in conclusion, "is where our eyes of faith should be directed as we experience the power and the glory of the saving God appearing to us tonight in the humble stable of Bethlehem in the presence of obscure shepherds.
"Here is a clue, an indication, and a forecast of God's powerful and glorious salvation of His people in our times. Therefore there is no need for sadness and for tears. Having experienced the new sign of God's love, let us join the multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying, 'Glory to God in the highest, and on Earth peace among men of good will (Luke 2:14). Amen.’ “
Ex-newspaperman Bill Steigerwald is the author of 30 Days a Black Man, which retells the true story of Pittsburgh Post-Gazette star reporter Ray Sprigle's undercover mission through the Jim Crow South in 1948. Sprigle's original series is in Undercover in the Land of Jim Crow. Steigerwald also wrote Dogging Steinbeck, which exposed the truth about the fictions and fibs in Travels With Charley and celebrated Flyover America and its people. And in 2022 he published Grandpa Bear Goes to Washington, a satirical kids book for all ages that all polar bears and lovers of freedom will like.