Church
attendance this week has taken me to St. Katherine’s, Sw. Katarzyna, Friday evening actually, for Devotions to St. Rita,
the patroness of difficult and hopeless cases: Polish language acquisition and the
state of my soul, respectively. As I wear her medal, and she has my mother’s
name, and as Katherine was my grandmother’s name and is my daughter’s middle
name, if any miracles are going to happen, they’re going to happen here. The
place was packed. I mean, this was a Friday evening after work. Snow had been
falling most of the afternoon, slowly but enslickeningly. I arrived fifteen minutes before the service—Mass,
basically, with a sprinkly benediction of the congregation and the flowers they
had purchased at the entrance—was scheduled to begin, and there was not a seat
to be had. (No shortage of difficulty and hopelessness in this crowd,
apparently.) It was standing room only in a side aisle, the altar completely
out of site. We latecomers were shoulder to shoulder, bark w bark, like rowdies at a soccer game, though, of course, much
less rowdy with lots of old Catholic ladies—though, I suppose, they could
surprise you. I could see the statue of St. Rita and the golden letters of her
name. From the vaults a hundred feet up into the darkness, a chandelier hung,
painted a matte gold, and as I listened to the service, I watched it very
slowly rotate, like a little solar system, but only a tenth or a twelfth of a
rotation, before reversing itself. No statues raised their hands just for me.
And though I was picking up words from the service and even from the sermon,
especially the word słowo, which
means “word,” I wasn’t suddenly, miraculously understanding everything, hearing
in tongues. That would have been great. That
would have made me a believer. But it was just words, a phrase or two, gdzieniegdzie, “here and there.”
The
picture below I took on a previous trip. The altar is currently behind a
screen, being renovated; the statue of St. Rita uplifts the hopeless from the
right. The church itself stands basically next door to Na Skałce, such that on almost every block in this city you have a
religious structure equivalent to a noteworthy cathedral at home in the States.
My guidebook informs me the Sw. Katarzyna
was raised by King Kazimierz The Great in “penance for murdering Father Marcin
Baryczka in 1349,” (drowned in the Wisła
for having delivered to the king a notice of his excommunication from the
priest’s bishops, Cracow, 124). Not a
historically safe neighborhood for the frocked, and yet they train here in
numbers and mill about in robes and heavy brown cloaks.
