Boundless faith

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 17/08/2008 (6281 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

On a rainy Tuesday in northwest Winnipeg, a rabbi is holding court in the house of a priest.

It could be a set-up for a joke, but the mood here isn’t quite jovial. Peretz Weizman, rabbi emeritus at the Etz Chayim Synagogue on Matheson Avenue, is here to recognize a long-ago good, a sacrifice made in 1944 by a priest named Emilian Kowcz.

The home belongs to Kowcz’s grandson, Taras Kowch, a chaplain at Health Sciences Centre and the parish priest of Cook’s Creek, about 40 kilometres northeast of Winnipeg.

Weizman is a Holocaust survivor. Kowch’s grandfather, Father Emilian, was a Ukrainian who baptized over 10,000 Jews during the Second World War. Conversion was not a motive: each person received a baptismal certificate bearing the priest’s seal. For them, it was better than a passport.

For Kowcz, it was a smoking gun: After his ad hoc baptisms were discovered by the Nazis, he was shipped to the Majdanek concentration camp. His family lobbied for his release, but Kowcz demurred, writing, “yesterday they killed 50 persons here. If I were not here, who would help them endure? Except heaven this is the only place I would like to be.” He died in the camp in 1944.

Weizman, 86, who made it out of the Jewish ghetto in Lodz and internment in a Polish concentration camp, says that survivors never expected anyone to help them. Sipping coffee with Kowch’s family, he says, honours the fact that someone did.

“I felt obligated to come and show my respect,” Weizman tells Kowch’s family. “Because I know what it meant at that time to help a Jew.”

Behind Weizman sits a shimmering portrait of Kowch’s grandfather. It’s no mere painting: Drawn in the Byzantine style of Catholic iconography, the image will be blessed today at the Immaculate Conception Church in Kowch’s parish at Cook’s Creek.

Weizman and Kowch lift the painting for a Free Press photographer.

“How beautiful to hold an icon together of a person who brought unity,” Taras Kowch, 56, says later. “When the rabbi came in and started talking about some of his experiences, I was shaking, thinking how hard it must have been for my grandfather and all others to live through those horrific times.“

It’s not every man that can say his grandfather is a saint, but Kowch can come close: Pope John Paul II beatified the elder Kowcz as an official martyr of the Catholic Church in 2001. He’s now a single miracle short of sainthood.

At 11:30 this morning, Kowcz’s legacy will be honoured at the Immaculate Conception Church’s annual religious pilgrimage. But church organizer Darcia Senft believes that his story, rooted in Manitoba through a grandson, extends beyond religious boundaries.

To prove this point, Senft invited the Jewish Federation of Winnipeg to this morning’s ceremony. The proposition caused a brief stir among her fellow parishioners.

“When someone pointed out that we’d need to get kosher food, the elder babas were standing there going, ‘What’s wrong with our food?'” laughs Senft.

Old World cultures blend into the new.

When Kowch was installed as the priest at Immaculate Conception in 1998, he brought his family’s lore with him. But he was arriving into a community already swimming in tradition, starting with the church itself.

Called the “prairie cathedral,” the church’s seven domes rise suddenly on the horizon, their sand-coloured walls incongruous with flat green fields. Erected by parishioners, the church began life in 1930, and was completed 22 years later. A 1943 blueprint apologizes for the delay, noting that the voluntary workforce was mostly “poorer farmers” subsisting on 10 to 60 acres of land, “often very sandy.”

What stands now is a testament to those poor Ukrainian farmers’ perseverance. The church was declared a provincial heritage site in 1987 and a national historic site in 2004. It has survived crumbling stairs (replaced in 2006 at a cost of $100,000), primitive insulation that forced Kowch to hold winter mass in the basement (“The babas tell me that the original walls were stuffed with rags,” says Senft), and a rash of vandalism in the mid-’80s that prompted parishioners to erect a chain-link fence around the site.

It has also survived drastic changes in rural Manitoba. The church was built to accommodate up to 1,000 in a standing-room pinch; over 7,000 came to its consecration in 1952. On modern Sundays, about 100 worshippers come to mass. Where Cook’s Creek was once a hardscrabble farming outpost, today it is more of a bedroom community, sporting hobby farms and pleasure ranches.

Still, some touches seem authentic. Across the road from the church, the board fa ßade of the Cook’s Creek General Store looks as if it’s been untouched since its 1939 construction. The building has actually been painstakingly restored (the ceiling, for instance, was salvaged from Winnipeg’s demolished McIntyre block), but it still looks like the kind of rustic country shop that writers build novels around.

You can buy fireworks here. You can buy ceramic flower pots here. But the history lessons come for free.

“All the families had volunteer duties when they were building the church,” says owner Gloria Romaniuk, who tends the store counter on weekends. “If a family couldn’t meet their responsibility, then they did it in kind. They bought a window, or sold a cow to help pay for wood.”

Romaniuk, who moved to Cook’s Creek in 1976, is an amateur historian of French-born Father Phillipe Ruh, the priest who, with no architectural training, built 40 internationally renowned cathedrals between Alberta and Ontario. The dramatic structure at Cook’s Creek is one of his masterpieces.

“This style is described as heaven bound,” Romaniuk explains, “because you can’t look at it without feeling something.”

There are other curiosities of history swirling around the church. In 1954, Ruh and the Catholic fraternal organization Knights of Columbus started construction on the daunting medieval-style grotto, inspired by similar structures in France’s holy Lourdes area.

To connect the Our Lady of Lourdes grotto to its Old World namesake, the Knights wrote to the church in Lourdes, asking for a stone to place at Cook’s Creek. A stone was sent and lost in transit. So again the Knights wrote to Lourdes, and again a stone was sent.

This one arrived in Manitoba in 1958. But the grotto was not yet complete, and one of the Knights kept the stone for safe-keeping. Ruh died in 1962, and construction on the grotto stalled; it wouldn’t be completed until 1970. Then the man holding the stone died. And nobody who saw it could remember what it was for.

Recognizing its potential value, the late man’s family gave the stone to the Knights, who held it in a glass case until 2006 when Ed Swiecicki and John Zborowsky, who had worked on the grotto in the 1950s, recognized it as the vanished token of Lourdes. The stone was finally delivered to its Cook’s Creek destination in 2006, almost 50 years after it left France.

Now, it is one more curiosity in a church that, through faith or family, finds itself at the centre of so many stories. And it is another reason that Kowch hopes that Manitobans of all faiths will come out to explore the history of the place — a history that reaches across geography and grandfathers, continents and cultures, and weaves them together in southern Manitoba.

After all, Emilian Kowcz would have wanted nothing less.

“My vision is to someday be able to bring hundreds of thousands of people to this place,” Kowch says. “To make it somewhere where people could be together, people of all faiths and nations. To break the borders, like my grandfather did.”

For more information on the church and its history, visit www.immaculate.ca. The unveiling and blessing of the official icon of Father Emilian Kowch takes place at 11:30 this morning, with a lunch to follow. All are invited to attend.

melissa.martin@freepress.mb.ca