Special Affection for John Paul II : Poles in L.A. Warm Up to Greet One of Their Own

Eleven years ago, John Sobanski was drifting away from the church. He did not like Mass, and that Sunday in August was no exception.

But a Polish cardinal named Karol Wojtyla brought him back into the fold.

Sobanski is not being symbolic; he is 12 years old, too young for that. In 1976, he was a baby and literally toddling away from Our Lady of the Bright Mount Church near downtown Los Angeles when the resplendently garbed and mitered Cardinal Wojtyla retrieved the wandering child and carried him back to the church and his worried parents.

That cardinal is now Pope John Paul II, and first-generation Polish-American John Sobanski, no longer running away from his church, said, “I love him very much, and I want to show him I like our culture.”

On Sept. 16, Sobanski, decked out in 12 pounds of woolen costume and peacock-feathered hat, will dance at Dodger Stadium with about 50 Polish-American folk dancers of the Krakusy group, performing for the Pope a two-minute version of a medieval wedding dance called “Krakowiak,” a favorite of this man who was once bishop of Krakow.

Karol Wojtyla’s three-day visit to Los Angeles 11 years ago was a cozy home fest of Polish food and faith; to this day, girls who want to get married sometimes sit in the red brocaded chair where he sat in the parish hall because it is supposed to bring them luck.

On his current visit, as Pope John Paul II, he will be at the epicenter of a high-tech, two-day mega-event that promises to be witnessed by millions. Southern California’s Polish community--whose size has been put at anywhere from 50,000 to 250,000--is rejoicing, to be sure.

Already, they are stitching dozens of banners and 1,000 red-and-white Polish flags for the 4,000-plus Polish-Americans, including Boy Scouts and war veterans, who plan to gather near City Hall for the Pope’s motorcade to St. Vibiana’s Cathedral, said Chris Ciesiolkiewicz, head of the state Polish American Congress. They are hopeful that he will halt the Popemobile for a moment and speak to them.

Lucille Walker, who decided to carry on her late husband Tommy’s production business after he died last year, will miss the parade. She will be be putting the last touches on the Dodger Stadium pre-liturgy show, with its Scottish pipers and Aztec conch-shell blowers and dance groups. This is not just another show. When the archdiocese called to ask her husband to do the show--they phoned the day after his funeral--she decided to do it herself.

After all, her family name is Zlotek, her father looked a bit like the Pope and “I’m sure,” she said, that her Polish-born parents, both dead, “might be a little proud” of their daughter.

‘A Gift’ to the World

Mary Dziadula (pronounced Ja-du-la, she said carefully--”See? It’s easy”) has made sure that her television is in perfect repair. The Burbank woman, who campaigned to get the two-block-long Gen. Thaddeus Kosciuszko Way downtown named for the Polish hero who fought with George Washington, intends to settle down in her rocker beneath a framed picture of the Pope and watch this man whom she calls “a gift” to Poland and the world.

This trip will be as far from the intimate mood of the 1976 visit as the Super Bowl is from a backyard touch football game. Then, there were chats in Polish with parishioners; the cardinal slept in a modest upstairs bedroom of the Bright Mount rectory--a mahogany-appointed mansion that was originally home to silent film comic Fatty Arbuckle.

This time, the former Cardinal Wojtyla is an instantly recognizable figure as head of a worldwide church and there can be “no more” such visits, said Father Konrad Urbanowski, pastor of Bright Mount Church. “It’s impossible. He doesn’t belong to the Polish people only.”

Still, when they heard he was coming, there was a scramble. Andrew and Danuta Nizynski, veterans of the 1944 Warsaw uprising and of Nazi prisoner of war camps, wrote to the Vatican to ask if the Pope could briefly visit Poles in Los Angeles. Florence Swait, president of the state’s Polish Women’s Alliance, volunteered her members to wait the table when the Pope lunches at San Fernando Mission. “I’m trying real hard!” she declared.

Hoping for a Visit

At Szarotka, the Polish senior citizens’ home next to Bright Mount Church--a residence bought in 1976 on the advice of the visiting cardinal--one of the 24 residents is praying hopefully that, despite the Pope’s nano-second schedule, he might make a secret, brief visit one evening, “maybe like a ghost.”

Although “American Ethnic Diversity” is one of the themes of John Paul II’s visit to Los Angeles, the Poles can be forgiven for feeling more than a little proprietary toward him.

With the possible exception of Solidarity leader Lech Walesa, the Pope is the first modern Pole of international stature, surpassing even statesman-pianist Ignace Paderewski and physicist Marie Curie, who discovered Element No. 84 and named it polonium for her native land.

This first non-Italian Pope in 455 years was elected amid a decade-long run of Polish jokes that prompted one complaint to the Federal Communications Commission, to no avail, about jests on talk show. “It just seems to me there’s that undercurrent of bigotry or whatever you want to call it,” said Dziadula, who came home after hearing a Polish joke and penned the quatrain retort, “An ethnic joke/Becomes a yoke/Upon the bloke/Who spoke the joke.”

John Sobanski, who spoke Polish before he spoke English, said: “Sometimes in school the kids make fun of me because I’m Polish--that really hurts. I figure they’re jealous.”

But John Paul II’s papacy, coupled with American admiration for Solidarity, has had “a great effect” in diminishing such biases, said Tom Brudowicz, head of the Polish-American University Club of Los Angeles. “We had been going through strong anti-Polish feeling in this country, with Polish jokes. . . . It was a very degrading period for the Polish people.”

Understanding Poland

To understand the Poles’ dogged fealty to a culture and a faith, it is necessary to know something of Poland.

Poland has been Christian for more than a millennium. It promulgated the first constitution in modern Europe, only four years after the United States. But it is also a politically ravaged country that has been steamrolled, chopped up, pillaged and overrun.

In the last two centuries, Poland has been free for only 20 years--between the end of World War I, when its independence was established by the Treaty of Versailles, and September, 1939, when Nazi tanks on the west and Soviet troops on the east overran the country in five weeks. By the war’s end, one in six Poles--6 million, half of them Polish Jews--were dead, only a tenth of those in actual combat.

“On the map it (Poland) disappeared,” said Nizynski, whose 16-year-old sister died in the Warsaw uprising, “but the culture is still here.” His own home--its white walls barely visible behind the Polish and Catholic paintings, tapestries and wood carvings--testifies to that.

In many Polish-Americans, Catholicism has melded almost inextricably with patriotism. Poles “have almost a genetic Catholicism,” said Al Antczak, editor of The Tidings, Los Angeles’ Catholic newspaper, and himself half-Polish and half-Latino. “Catholicism is second nature with Poles.”

Whatever the American standards of separation of church and state, the state in Poland has so often been near extinction that the church has taken on some of its stature in the eyes of many Poles.

“The Catholic Church was playing a central role in the saga for independence after Poland was partitioned at the end of the 18th Century,” said retired political science professor Joseph Patyk of San Diego. “The church was instrumental in the preservation of national identity while Poland was under foreign rule.” In Poland even now, faith is “some kind of mental therapy to survive this very hard time; believing can help you somehow not to despair.”

Pilot in Polish Air Force

Stephanie Karpinski has not set foot in her homeland since 1939. She was a pilot in the Polish air force and fled to Romania, to France and finally to England as the Nazis advanced. She spent much of the war flying Spitfires and Mustangs from one British air base to another.

Now, a trim and elegant woman who wears three strands of Polish amber nuggets wound around her neck, she lives at the Szarotka home. A few weeks ago, as she was writing a piece about the Pope’s visit for a weekly Polish-language radio program, she sat in her room, whose walls are hung with portraits of her late husband, Gen. Stanislaw Karpinski, a record-setting civilian pilot who was later deputy chief of the Polish air force.

“Many people, and we ourselves, think sometimes that Poland couldn’t live without the Catholic Church,” she said. “When you are suppressed, your society is suppressed. Like in Poland, you develop in yourself strength; very often religion gives you strength.” The church in Poland “has a very dominant part; it keeps (Poles’) spirits up.”

Not Uniformly Catholic

But for all their ethnic and religious homogeneity, Poles are not uniformly Catholic or uniformly churchgoing.

Brudowicz, a fourth-generation Pole, said the zeal for the Pope’s visit, as for the church itself, is not an absolute. Sometimes, “you don’t have the strong Catholic feeling in the later generations as you had with the immigrant stock, and it varies in degree with most Americans. For those with strong ties to Poland, it’s a very gratifying thing; with the others who are very assimilated, it doesn’t mean very much.”

There is a far lesser-known Polish church, the Polish National Catholic Church, founded here in 1897 when the Roman Catholic hierarchy would not create more Polish parishes or teach Polish in its schools, its literature says. “We recognize (the Pope) as the first bishop of the Roman Catholic Church,” but not as an authority over their church, the Rev. Edward Kalata said.

Still, as on St. Patrick’s Day, when everyone is alleged to be part Irish, the Pope’s visit may strike the flint of pride, if not enthusiasm, for even the coattail Polish.

Not Like Chicago, Detroit

Southern California’s Polish-Americans are not geographically concentrated as in Chicago and Detroit, where many previously lived. Southern California distances “create quite a difficult situation,” Nizynski said. “Since we are separated, we try to make each of our homes part of Polish life. It’s not like a big (Polish) community in Chicago or Detroit or Buffalo, where everybody speaks Polish and has the same thing cooking in the pot.”

Bringing up their children bilingually and biculturally is tough, said Nizynski, who did it with his three California-born children. “The responsibility rests on the parents,” especially when much of the extended family may be dead or still in Poland. Often, it means long drives, three or four times a week, to Polish Scout meetings, folk dances and language classes.

There are three focal points for Polish-Americans in Southern California: the John Paul II Polish Center in Yorba Linda, one of whose stained glass windows incorporates the Solidarity logo; the St. Maximilian Kolbe Mission in San Diego, named for the Polish priest who took the place of another Pole condemned to death at Auschwitz, and the Bright Mount Church, named for the hill of the monastery of Czestochowa, which houses the revered, ancient Dark Madonna of Czestochowa icon.

A copy of the icon hangs in the Bright Mount Church, reproduced down to the twin sword slashes on the Virgin Mary’s cheek. Church history, parish volunteer Maran Pawlikowski said, holds that the painting was stolen by infidel invaders, whose horses, sensing their sacred cargo, stopped in their tracks. Frightened, the infidels threw down the painting, slashed it with their sabers, and rode off.

To Visit Hamtramck

A huge copy of that icon will serve as the backdrop for an open air speech when the Pope visits Hamtramck, Mich., a chiefly Polish town surrounded by Detroit. After a Popemobile procession past a park that contains one of the few statues of him in the United States, he will speak before a huge painting of the Czestochowa Madonna. (The Pope was going to speak in Polish, but he was advised to stick to English since “only the older generation still has good fluency,” said archdiocese spokesman Jay Berman.)

The Hamtramck shop windows are already taped over with John Paul II pictures, and the Polish restaurants and bakeries are going around the clock. “I think everyone in Hamtramck who’s got two square inches of sleeping space has got relatives or friends coming in.”

His visit is a boost for all “Polonia,” the estimated 12 million to 15 million Poles living outside Poland, Ciesiolkiewicz said. And Poles do not forget that one of those millions is a man once named Karol Wojtyla.

“He does belong to the world,” he acknowledged, “but he also belongs to us.”