By Gloria O’Brien
During the 1930’s, 40’s
and 50’s,
Our family lived just
three blocks away from the church. Mama
was a long-time secretary for the Rosary Society, and all three of her children
had enjoyed the benefit of the excellent primary edu
The life of the parish
followed a cycle of annual events.
Masses on January 1st were attended by the usual staid
complement of older parishioners, but also by a bleary-eyed contingent of
younger folk left over from the New Year’s Eve party in the parish hall. St. Blaise’s feast day, in February, drew all
to the church to be blessed by the priest holding two crossed candles at the
throat, and on Ash Wednesday we all lined up for ashes. Most of our parish priests placed a little
daub on our foreheads, but occasionally a visiting priest would decorate us
with a great big smudge. During Lent, a
visiting missionary would come to hold “missions” – “rekolekcijas” – and exhort us to
cleanse our souls in preparation for Easter.
During those times, the church vestibule was filled with tables holding
religious items and books for sale. As
children, we delighted in looking over these treasures, and almost everybody’s
Mama would buy them a little rosary, prayer book or shiny medal.
Passion Sunday brought our
choir’s annual church concert. “The
Seven Last Words of Christ” in its beautiful Lithuanian translation was usually
the main offering, with additional choral works and solo pieces, along with
some showy organ works masterfully presented by our talented choir director and
organist, Paul Sakas. On Holy Thursday
and Good Friday, we made the rounds and visited as many churches as we possibly
could.
Easter Sunday meant
Sunrise Mass, with all the priests and altar-boys and little girls and boys in
their Communion outfits carrying calla lilies in solemn procession. Our pastor, Father Norbert Pakalnis, a man of
dignified and serious mien with a deep, booming voice, swathed in gold vestments, carried the
monstrance while acolytes held the baldachin over him, and everyone followed,
bells chiming, and the organ swelling,
as our wonderful choir, in full voice, sang the joyous “Linksma diena
mums nušvito”. (A Joyous Day for Us Has Dawned) Unforgettable.
Some time during the
school year, the
Dominican nuns who served our school
as teachers would hold a bazaar in the downstairs
hall. The month of May brought well-attended daily evening devotions with
Benediction, and the crowning of Mary’s statue as Queen of the Angels, by a
young lady chosen from the ranks of the Sodality. Summertime meant a well-deserved hiatus for
the choir, and the annual parish picnic.
Each evening during the month of October
the Rosary was recited, and Forty Hours Devotion
brought visiting priests from everywhere to chant the litanies of saints, and
in November on the feast of Christ the King to participate in vespers and antiphons
sung in Latin with the choir.
As the month of December
approached, every parish household received a
postcard announcement that would precipitate a whirl of
furious activity. “Kunigas ateina Kalėdot!” The parish priests were making their annual
Christmas visit. This “Kalėdavimas”
(Christmasing) was
an old custom that Lithuanian immigrants had brought with them from the Old
Country. Every family considered this
pending visit a great honor, and housewives did their utmost in preparation.
Every room was turned
inside out. Walls were scrubbed; windows
were washed; furniture was cleaned and polished; floors were washed by women on
their hands and knees, then waxed to a fare-thee-well;
closets were emptied and clothing washed or dry-cleaned and re-arranged;
cabinets were emptied, shelves washed and re-lined with clean paper; dishes
were washed and replaced in the cabinets.
Ice-boxes were emptied, washed and refreshed. Coal stoves, which for a long while remained
the only source of heat in many apartments, received a coat of blacking, and
bathrooms were scrubbed with Lysol. Many landlords, themselves parishioners, scrubbed hallways, floors,
stairways and landings, as well as their own apartments.
All was in readiness on
the appointed evening. Family members
were decently dressed, and had already eaten a hurried meal, all evidence of
which had long since been put away.
There was nothing left to do but wait for the doorbell to ring. Finally came the awaited signal, and we
opened our door to one of the vicars, usually accompanied by another man,
sometimes the organist, or one of the ushers.
Few families could pride themselves on a visit from the pastor; he often
delegated this job to the vicars and seldom went himself. Often, it was curly-haired Father Petrauskas
who visited us, or Father Kruzas - tall, bespectacled and
ascetic-looking. He quickly passed
through all of the rooms in our apartment, blessing each with his
sprinkler-bottle of holy water. Next, he
presented a small black crucifix to each of us for a kiss, wiping it with his
spotless folded handkerchief each time.
Politely declining to remove their coats, he and his escort agreed to be
seated for “just a while, as we have many more stops for tonight”. Sometimes, the other gentleman, whose job it
was to distribute Christmas wafers (“plotkelės”), would accept a glass of
liqueur, wine or coffee, but
Father always refused.
There followed a series of murmured questions and answers between the priest and our
parents, and Mama usually took this opportunity to pay our parish dues, all of
which was carefully written down in Father’s notebook. Mama usually had some Lithuanian pressed
cheese ready-sliced and offered this to our visitors, and they sometimes took a
slice or two. But this Christmas visit
by our parish priests was usually short and business-like, though friendly, and
over in about fifteen minutes. They had
three more families to visit in our building, and many more before the night would
be over.
Over the following days, the ladies of the
parish compared notes: “Ar
girdėjote kad pas Mockeliunienę kunigs visą valandą
užbuvo?” (Did you hear that the priest stayed for more than an hour at
Mrs. Mockeliunas’s?) “Man
sakė kad pas Ten Eyck Stryto Kivytienę kunigas vakarienavo”. (Someone
told me that the priest had dinner with Mrs. Kivyta from
In the years after World
War 2, our church’s membership was increased and strengthened by the arrival of
the second wave of Lithuanian immigration, the so-called “dypukai” (D.P.’s),
most of whom became actively engaged in many aspects of parish life. But urban change took over in the late 50’s,
when the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway was built, destroying blocks of what had
been a stable, well-organized, cohesive neighborhood. People began to move to the suburbs and to
© Gloria O’Brien 2003
This
article was printed in Lithuanian Heritage, Nov/Dec 2003