Gorzynski, John S., Ret. Rev. Msgr.
(Apr. 25, 1869 - Oct. 7, 1935)
Diocesan consultor and pastorIn many ways John S. Gorzynski was an ideal candidate for the priesthood. He was born and raised in what is now the city of Koronowo in southern Pomerania, where Cistercian monks held way in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and left home when he was 17 years old and without bad habits to study for the priesthood in a foreign country. He emigrated to the United States on board the SS Hungaria, sailing from Stettin (renamed Szczecin after 1945) on the Baltic coast, and landed in New York on September 20, 1886. He traveled by train to his next destination - St. Vincent's Archabby, the fourth oldest seminary in the United States, 40 miles southeast of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania - and remained there until 1893. Unlike most of the students who came from western Pennsylvania, the Polish seminarian stood out like a snowman in Florida. The Benedictine monastery was founded in 1846 and staffed parishes in the surrounding counties.
Shortly after his ordination, Bishop Phelan of Pittsburgh assigned Father Gorzynski to serve Polish immigrants in and around Connellsville, in Fayette County, at one time the greatest producer of soft coal and coke in the world. For the first time in his life, Gorzynski, unlike George Washington who rode on horseback in 1780 to see a coal mine on the banks of the Youghiogheny River, used streetcars for the most part to visit Polish coaldiggers and other workers who lived literally in shacks on both sides of the same river. Their churches were not yet built, as was St. Wladyslaw in 1893 at Natrona, 25 miles northeast of Pittsburgh, named after a kind of salt discovered in the area. Due to a shortage of Polish priests, Gorzynski was the third one in nine months to shepherd the Natrona parish. There he added a church steeple, built a school, and left in April 1897 to take care of Our Lady of Czestochowa parish at McKeesport, where the first stainless steel in America was fabricated.
While he was in McKeesport, the growth of the coal and steel industries dramatically raised the Polish population in the Pittsburgh diocese. In 1904, for example, 102,200 of the 280,000 Catholics in the Pittsburgh diocese were Polish; 40 of the 362 priests were Polish; and 35 of the 249 Catholic churches were Polish. Pittsburgh, although the second largest city in Pennsylvania, had more Polish churches than Philadelphia.
By the 1910's Pittsburgh had about 800 persons from Poland. In 1920, it had 13,291 of the 24,893 persons from Poland in Allegheny County; 4,361 of them married women, which meant each one had at least half a dozen children not credited to these figures. The city became the jumping off point for Polish immigrants on the way to Braddock, Carnegie, Homestead, and company-owned coal camps scattered in Allegheny and surrounding counties. By 1930 Braddock had 649 persons from Poland, compared to Pittsburgh with 8,588. Upon the death of Father Wladyslaw Miskiewicz on April 23, 1906, Father Gorzynski succeeded him as pastor of St. Wojciech Catholic Church, which had more parishioners than any other Polish church in Pittsburgh, and soon the bishop of Pittsburgh appointed him a diocesan consultor. It was the first time a Polish priest held such a position in Pittsburgh.
Gorzynski remained in the position of power for the rest of his life.
From: Edward Pinkowski (2009)
Gorzynski, Rt. Rev. Msgr. John A., P.R., V.F., LL.D.
Pastor of St. Adalbert's parish, Pittsburgh, Pa., for a long time. Parish Priest's Consultor of the diocese of Pittsburgh. He was dean for said diocese. Died October 7, 1935.From: "Who's Who in Polish America" by Rev. Francis Bolek, Editor-in-Chief; Harbinger House, New York, 1943