Image: Holy Mother of the Rosary Polish National Catholic Cathedral, Lancaster, New York - 20210814

Description: Holy Mother of the Rosary Polish National Catholic Cathedral, 6298 Broadway, Lancaster, New York, August 2021. Built in 1995, this sprawling brick edifice is an excellent example of the Postmodern architectural style as employed for ecclesiastical design, perfectly epitomizing the marriage of stylized Classical forms (present here mainly in the form of numerous pediments on the clerestory, above the main entrance, and as dormers piercing the roof, and which also, unusually, double as windows and/or skylights) with the sleekness, angularity, and minimalist ornamentation of 20th-century Modernism. The history of Holy Mother of the Rosary traces back to the East Side of the nearby city of Buffalo, and specifically to the Roman Catholic church of Saint Adalbert, a troubled congregation constantly plagued by infighting, principally over the question of ownership and control over the parish building and grounds. The disagreements led to a revolving door of unpopular priests who tried and failed to maintain order among their flock, and finally, in 1895, to the anti-diocesan faction splitting not only from the church but from the Roman Catholic Diocese of Buffalo itself, buying a plot of land a block away from St. Adalbert's, and founding Buffalo's first "independent Catholic" church. Under the able leadership of founding pastor Stefan Kaminski, Holy Mother of the Rosary at first managed to defend itself against the insults, jeering and occasional violence that the flock endured from the rest of the community, and to dedicate their original home church on Sobieski Street in the heart of Buffalo's Polish district in 1906. However, after his death, his much less astute successor steered the church into financial ruin, culminating in the Buffalo Diocese's purchase of their church in a foreclosure auction. It was at this time that the now-homeless Holy Mother of the Rosary congregation affiliated itself with the Scranton, Pennsylvania-based Polish National Catholic Church, which had split from Rome acrimoniously some years earlier over a host of complaints, foremost among which was a shortage of Polish-speaking priests to lead immigrant congregations. That had never been a problem in Buffalo's Polonia; however, Rev. Franciszek Hodur, the Polish National Church's founder and "Prime Bishop", had been undertaking an aggressive campaign of expansion based largely on swallowing up such small independent Catholic congregations, and he saw an opportunity to use Holy Mother of the Rosary's plight as a proxy to strike back at Rome. With Bishop Hodur's financial backing, the congregation sued the Diocese and, in 1915, won their church back plus $24,000 in back rent for the 22 months the Roman Catholics occupied the building. Thenceforward, Holy Mother of the Rosary settled into a quiet and stable coexistence with the other Polish churches of the East Side - and, similar to its neighbors, as the 20th century wore on, the decline of and demographic changes in old Polonia made it more and more difficult for the church to continue on in its original location. In 1992, the congregation finally approved the move to the suburbs that it had been contemplating for a long time. Its former home is now a mosque and Islamic school.
Title: Holy Mother of the Rosary Polish National Catholic Cathedral, Lancaster, New York - 20210814
Credit: Own work
Author: Andre Carrotflower
Usage Terms: Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
License: CC BY-SA 4.0
License Link: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
Attribution Required?: Yes