Religion: Priest Picketed

Day after day, night after night last week in the small mining town of Vulcan, Mich., 50 pickets marched up & down before a small brick rectory. Every eight hours the guard was changed. Placidly in the rectory remained the picketee: Vulcan’s Roman Catholic priest, Rev. Simon Borkowski. Father Simon, in charge of St. Barbara’s church for 13 years, three weeks ago was ordered by his superiors to go elsewhere. Then the pickets — miners, farmers, housewives — took a hand, mewed him up in his rectory. At week’s end, despite the concern it was causing to a bishop, an archbishop, the Apostolic Delegation in Washington and the head of a religious order in Rome, the picketing went on.

Father Borkowski, ordained in the Society of the Divine Saviour (Salvatorian), was attached to its seminary in St. Nazianz, Wis. In 1925 the diocese of Marquette, Mich. needed a priest to rally the Poles in Vulcan who were slipping away from the Church. Lent to St. Barbara’s, Father Simon brought the Poles back into the fold. When the church burned down, the husky, genial priest and his people did most of the work of building a new one, saved $32,000 of its cost. So well-beloved did Father Simon become that last spring, when they learned he was to be transferred, his parishioners picketed a little to persuade Bishop Joseph Casimir Plagens to rescind the transfer.

Last week, however, Bishop Plagens again ordered Father Simon to pack up, declined to discuss the matter with Vulcan Catholics or the press. Nor did he change his mind when, through the Apostolic Delegation (the Vatican’s representative in the U. S.), the Superior General of the Salvatorians offered Father Simon unconditionally to the Marquette diocese. Pickets attempted to telephone Archbishop Edward Mooney of Detroit, but he declined to talk. Father Simon’s appointed successor arrived at St. Barbara’s, was menaced by the pickets, departed. Said a picket: “We love Father Simon and defy the church authorities. He is one of us because the sweat of his brow has mingled with our own. He bore the burden with us.”