The Parish That Won in Court Twice — and Still Lost Its Church

A socialist editor's 1961 history just entered our record — and confirmed its hardest finding from the other side of the church door.

Our research program just finished reading a book that was never supposed to agree with us.

Stasys Michelsonas was the longtime editor of Keleivis, the socialist Lithuanian weekly of South Boston — a freethinker, no friend of the clergy, on the opposite side of nearly every question the Catholic parish press cared about. In 1961 he compiled some forty-five years of his newspaper’s archive into a single history, Lietuvių Išeivija Amerikoje, 1868–1961. Our student interns photographed all 493 pages. We extracted every parish fact with a page citation and set his record beside the sources we already hold — including the Catholic compendium of Fr. William Wolkovich-Valkavičius, written from inside the Church. The book itself stays on the shelf, where copyright puts it; only the facts, each with its page number, enter the record.

One case in the book matters most for our record.

In 1893, the Lithuanians of Scranton, Pennsylvania bought land and built a church — St. Joseph’s. Then came the question that runs through our entire record: whose name stands on the deed? This congregation did not fight with padlocks or stones, as other coal towns did. They went to court. The dispute rose to the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania twice — and the parishioners won both times. Both times the bishop was ordered to pay the court costs (Michelsonas 1961, pp. 131–133).

And it did not matter.

The bishop refused to yield the property. The congregation was held under interdict, with threats of excommunication. After two decades of winning and not receiving, a large part of the congregation walked away from the building they had bought and paid for — and built a new church, this time owned by the congregation itself. In 1914, that congregation became the founding parish of the Lithuanian National Catholic Church.

Now, the reason this find matters beyond the story. Michelsonas is a hostile witness to the Catholic hierarchy. Fr. Wolkovich, the priest-historian, is a hostile witness to the National Church. On what happened at Scranton in 1914 — the founding, the place, the reason — they agree. When a socialist editor and a Catholic priest, writing from opposite worlds with opposite sympathies, record the same event the same way, that is as close to bedrock as history offers. Our record now holds fifteen cross-checked overlaps between the two books; where they diverge, we keep both readings and say so.

The chapter this comes from — Michelsonas calls it the church fights — documents the same mechanics across the Pennsylvania coal towns of the 1890s, before Draugas began publishing, before our archive record begins. In Shenandoah, the church Lithuanians built with their own money was deeded away without the parishioners’ knowledge — recorded, worse, as a “Polish Church.” The litigation that followed ended, in Michelsonas’s summary, “visur laimėjo vyskupas” — the bishop won everywhere (p. 32). In Philadelphia, a congregation refused from the pews: “Savo procės kitam neatiduosim” — we will not give our toil to another (p. 34). The bishop closed the church; years of litigation ended with the building sold and the money divided — the one documented case in the whole chapter where the builders’ equity came back out.

If you have read our record of the modern era — 83 parishes, 2008 to today — you already know what Scranton St. Joseph confirms. In 2011, New York’s highest court ended the fight for Manhattan’s Gate of Dawn with a ruling that did not weigh whether the church should close; it decided only who has the right to decide. A hundred and eighteen years apart, the same lesson, now confirmed from both ends of the century and both sides of the church door: civil courts do not decide whether a parish survives. The deed decides — and, as the reversal record shows, the only fight that has ever changed an ending is the one fought inside the Church’s own law, in time.

Every fact from the book is now in the unified registry at SaveOurLithuanianParishes.org, page-cited, joining Draugas, Wolkovich, and the rest of the canon. Two archival targets from the chapter — a Schuylkill County criminal case and a Lackawanna County probate file — are queued for the deep dives. The record grows. That is the promise of this project: every parish in it will, in time, have the research behind it.

Whose name stands on the deed? Scranton asked it in 1893. Detroit is asking it in 2026. The difference is that today a parish does not have to win twice and still lose to learn the answer — the record already holds it, and the window to act on it is before the letter comes. Start at saveourlithuanianparishes.org/start-here.