I HAVE BEEN WRITING CHURCH NOTES for twenty-three years, which is to say I have been writing the same column for twenty-three years with different names at the top and different casseroles listed at the bottom, and what I have learned in twenty-three years is this: the notes do not matter as much as what the notes are trying to do, which is tell people that there is a place to be, and that someone will be there, and that there will be food.
This is the first Church Notes column for this town, and the first thing I want to say is that St. Casimir’s Catholic Church is already a community in all the ways that matter. I say this not because the building is beautiful (it is, the oak woodwork is remarkable, the Blessed Mother window is simple and excellent) but because the people who have filled it on these first Sundays have come to it the way people come to a thing they need: with some relief in them, some recognition, some sense of having found something they did not realize they were looking for until it was there.
Father Borowski said, at last Sunday’s first Mass, that he had been a parish priest for eighteen years and had never opened a church before. “I have inherited parishes,” he said. “I have taken over from priests who left and priests who were transferred. I have never walked into a building and said: this one is new, these people are new, we are beginning. I want to be honest about how strange that is and how grateful I am for it.”
He said this during a homily about beginning, which was about the appropriate gospel passage for a first Sunday, which I will let you read for yourself if you have the Bible to hand and which I will summarize, for the non-Catholic readers who Rod Black tells me will constitute “a meaningful percentage of this column’s readership,” as follows: God asks people to begin things. The people are afraid. They begin anyway. It generally turns out to have been the right call.
Father Borowski has been “cautiously delighted” with his new parish, which is his phrase and which I have printed with his permission. I asked him why “cautiously.” He said: “Because delight without caution is just enthusiasm, and enthusiasm without caution tends to produce potlucks where nobody brings a vegetable.” He has, in other words, been doing this long enough to know about the potluck problem.
“A town without potlucks is just addresses. We are more than our addresses.”
Marge Kuczynski, Church Notes & Potluck CornerThe potluck problem is: when you ask people to bring dishes to share, a certain number of them will bring what they want to eat, which tends to be things that are not vegetables. At St. Casimir’s Pierogi & Kielbasa Feed, the menu is structured, which means the potluck problem is not, strictly speaking, applicable. You bring a dish to share. The dish can be anything. But the primary foods — the pierogi and the kielbasa — are provided, and they are provided according to recipes that the parish’s founding families have brought with them, and some of those recipes are not being printed in this column.
I want to address the question of the cheese filling directly, since I have received three inquiries about it in the past week. No, I am not printing the recipe. The cheese filling for the pierogi I will be bringing on Saturday is adapted from my grandmother’s recipe, which is adapted from her mother’s recipe, which was written down in a way that assumes the reader already knows what they’re doing and includes measurements like “enough” and “until it smells right.” I have spent twenty-five years learning what “enough” and “until it smells right” mean in practice. I am not putting that in the newspaper. If you want the recipe, come to the feed and ask me in person. I will tell you the general principle and you will have to work the rest out for yourself. That is how these things are done.
The feed is Saturday, September 13, at 5 p.m. in the parish hall at St. Casimir’s Catholic Church, 88 Maple Avenue. All are welcome. All denominations, all backgrounds, all people who are hungry in the straightforward sense and the less straightforward sense. Father Borowski asks that attendees leave “internet devices in the car, as a courtesy to the food.” This is a firm request. It is not enforced but it is meant. He has been clear about this.
Separately: there will be a Saturday morning Mass at 8 a.m. and a Sunday Mass at 9 a.m. and 11 a.m., continuing through the month. Father Borowski will be available for confession Fridays from 3–5 p.m. and by appointment. The rectory telephone is 555-0122. The rectory answering machine was installed last week and is, according to Father Borowski, “working, as far as I can tell.”