Early views of St. Mary's Byzantine Catholic Church

St. Mary's, known for years as the "Greek Church," was founded in 1887 by immigrants who came chiefly from the Carpatho-Rusyn area of Slovakia and probably also Ukraine. This photo came to me from John Zubach, and is evocative of very early Freeland. This architecture was unlike that of any other church in town, with its exotic combination of a large round dome and a steeple topped with an onion dome and Byzantine-style cross with its three cross-bars, the bottom bar pitched on a slant. These crosses are found on both Eastern Orthodox churches and Eastern Catholic churches in the Byzantine rite. It looks to me like this photo is early enough that the building that the students on a related page were standing in front of in 1896 had not yet been built to the left of this church. The fence around the church is also interesting, with its gates of a very eastern European style. A number of Freelanders kept livestock in the early years of the town, and my brother and I speculate that this church fence was made in part to keep out livestock wandering in the area. I wonder if the rather elegant building to the right of the church could have been the original rectory.

This is an early prayerbook from St. Mary's, once owned by a parishioner in Eckley. Perhaps they, like my grandparents and other eastern European mining families in Upper Lehigh, walked to Freeland to attend church every Sunday. When I was a child and attending school and church at St. Mary's, we learned to pray in Rusyn (referred to as Porusski, which is the Slovak word for Russian language, but in this case it was referring to Rusyn, or Carpatho-Rusyn). The prayerbooks we received for our First Holy Communion ("Heavenly Manna - Nebesnaja Manna," with white covers for the girls and black ones for the boys) no longer had the lettering in Cyrillic like this prayerbook does. We school kids sang the mass in Porusski six days a week. That linguistic connection to the old country was all but obliterated when the Vatican decreed in the 1960s that Catholic masses in the U.S. would only be celebrated in English, and that must have felt to the older parishioners like a severe blow. The page opening shown here is for Easter.

This Rusyn textbook at right was in use in St. Mary's in the 1920s-1930s and perhaps later. The children were taught Rusyn in school to maintain a cultural connection with the old country. This book was given to me by a classmate, Patricia Bzdil (now Patricia Paul). It was her mother's textbook from her own childhood at St. Mary's. By the time I attended school there in the 1950s, we were no longer taught to read, write and speak Rusyn as a second language. Note that this textbook and the prayerbook shown above are both printed in Cyrillic. I'm guessing that the Slovak language used at St. John's Nepomucene Roman Catholic Church in prayerbooks and other uses would have been printed using the Roman alphabet that we're all familiar with, not in Cyrillic. See the Ethnic groups page for a downloadable PDF copy of this book.