Jankowski, Rev. Marcellus Arthur
(Jan. 30, 1931 - Oct. 18, 2006)The youngest of three sons of a Ford automobile maker, Arthur Jankowski was born on Jan. 30, 1931, in Dearborn, Michigan, to Bronislaus and Victoria Jankowski. In 1905, his father emigrated to the United States and worked in the soft coal mines of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania. Four years later he married a young farm girl, fresh from Poland, and they moved to Henry Ford's town in the early 1920s. Beginning with the great depression they sent their sons to a Catholic grade school. After high school, Arthur took a job on the midnight shift at the Chrysler plant in Detroit. He hated it.
Then someone said, "Why don't you try being a priest?" The Conventual Franciscan Friars, who provided pastoral care for Polish immigrants since Father Leopold Moczygemba formed a parish in Panna Maria, Texas, in 1854, accepted Jankowski into the Franciscan family in Chicago. After graduation from St. Paul's Seminary in Minnesota, he was ordained a priest on June 1, 1957, and given the name Marcellus. Work in Franciscan parishes in Chicago and Detroit followed.
Throughout the Vietnam war, more than 300 chaplains shared the dangers and discomforts with the troops, many of them sick, wounded, and dying. Among them was the Franciscan priest from Dearborn. After Vietnam, where 13 Army chaplains died, Father Jan, as Jankowski called himself, was stationed in Germany and Japan. He returned to a Franciscan parish in 1972.
Dedicated in 1926, St. Cyril's church was in the town of Sugar Creek, Missouri. Most of the parishioners were the children and grandchildren of Slovak, Czech, Hungarian, Croatian, Serbian, and Polish immigrants, who were attracted to the place by the jobs available in an oil refinery. Each year the parish held a Slavic Festival and Father Jankowski served there until the Conventual Franciscans decided to pull their priests out of the Kansas City diocese in 1980.
Shortly afterwards Bishop Sullivan incardinated Rev. Jankowski into the Kansas City-St. Joseph diocese but gave him other duties. He was assigned separately to four parishes in Kansas City and two in Savannah and Forest City in a space of eight years. Then he served as chaplain of St. Lukes's Hospital, Kansas City, for 19 years. The hospital ministry changed dramatically when he lost a leg, due to diabetes and neuropathy, and he was forced to use a wheelchair to roll from patient to patient. He drove to the hospital from his home in Independence, Missouri, in a car fitted with hand controls. When he retired in 2002, the hospital staff missed the sight of the motorized wheelchair.
He died when he was 75 years old at Kindred Hospital in Kansas City and the Mass of Christian burial was celebrated at St. Mark Church in Independence. Burial followed in the Fort Leavenworth National Cemetery in Leavenworth, Kansas.
From: Edward Pinkowski (2008)