Ukrainian Catholic faithful celebrate 140th anniversary of first service in U.S.
KAYLEE LINDENMUTH / SHENANDOAH SENTINEL - Metropolitan Boris Gudziak speaks during a service at St. Michael's Church in Shenandoah on Dec. 22, 2024.
SHENANDOAH – In the 1870’s and 1880’s, Shenandoah was a boom town and experiencing its second wave of immigrants coming from Europe. This wave came from eastern Europe, from what is now Ukraine.
This month marks 140 years since the letters and prayers of Shenandoah’s Ukrainian Catholic faithful were answered and they established a church of their own, St. Michael’s, the first of its kind in the United States.
Metropolitan Borys Gudziak, Metropolitan-Archbishop of Philadelphia of the Ukrainian Catholic Church, visited Shenandoah Sunday for a service recognizing the anniversary and told the story of its formation.
“Our people were seen by the owners [of the coal mines] basically as strike breakers, to push the Welsh and Irish out,” Gudziak said. “Instant conflict-creating circumstance.”
“Our people, when they came here, they needed support, and they wrote from here, in Shenandoah, they wrote to the Metropolitan, saying ‘We lack God whom we can adore in our own way,” Gudziak said.
Gudziak said the people of the Anthracite region, from Shenandoah to Shamokin and more, gathered the funds needed to have a priest sent to the United States, Reverend John Woliansky.
Woliansky established six parishes from Jersey City to Minneapolis, but the first service was Dec. 18 in Shenandoah, Gudziak said.
Dec. 18 at the time was Saint Nicholas Day in the church.
The first church service took place in Kern Hall in Shenandoah and a grand church was built in 1907, on the site of the former Grant Mansion at Oak and Chestnut Streets.
That church, a focal point of the Shenandoah skyline, burned in 1980 and three years later, the church we know today was completed.
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