Bishop Hodur’s Cathedral

As we began our great Road Trip home to California our first bit of tourism was a swing by Scranton, PA, where I got to look at St Stanislaus Bishop & Martyr, the Polish National Catholic Church’s cathedral, and home church to the PNCC’s founding bishop Francis Hodur.

I’ve a long time interest in the denomination, the only substantial schism from the Roman Catholic Church in American history. Originally founded in disputes over who actually owns the church property and more importantly deep resentment among the Polish speaking community of Irish and other non Polish speaking priests being appointed as their pastors.

Their leading pastor, the Reverend Father Franciszek Hodur was consecrated a bishop by the Archbishop of Utrecht, assisted by other bishops of the Old Catholic Union. For years they were the only church in North America other than the American Episcopal Church to be in communion with the Old Catholic Union. In later years the PNCC would break from communion first with the Episcopal Church, and later with the Old Catholic Union as these two bodies advanced in the admission of women to the priesthood and eventually the episcopate.

Now, while today the PNCC is very conservative, and are in fact in long term dialog with the RCC about rejoining in part motivated, I suspect, by their precipitous decline in membership in recent years, there was a brief moment when they looked hard at going in a much more liberal and to my heart interesting direction.

Bishop Hodur had a low Christology, emphasizing Jesus as exemplar and teacher. More important still, he was a Universalist in both the classic sense of believing all souls would eventually be reconciled to God, and in the more contemporary sense of seeing the world’s religions as all offering gates to the divine. However this view did not prevail within the denomination and as I noted with his passing they returned to, and have since maintained a very, very conservative if generally anti-papalist Catholic stance.

But, what an interesting thought. What if they had preserved Bishop Hodur’s vision? What would a Universalist Catholic Church look like?

Ah, those what might have been’s of life…