a biography of the Prince Gallitzen, a Russian nobleman who became a Catholic priest and worked in the rough lands of central Pennsylvania in the early 1800's...LINK more HERE. and PBS transcript HERE.
comic book HERE.
and the local state park is named after him, but most folks know it as "Glendale lake".... I took the kids there many times.
church photo from Terry's blog of unique places. and the blog also has photos of the "Peace Garden" in the old Schwab estate nearby. We also used to go there to view the flowers and goldfish.
This church and Prince Gallitzen's grave is still there, and is beautiful: The bad news is that when we lived there, the modernist clergy types in Altoona were threatening to make it ugly so that it would "correspond to (their idea of ) Vatican II...
This was an area full of stubborn Polish coalminers with "bathtub madonnas" in their yards (see below), and they didn't like the newfangled changes.
Between fights to "modernize" churches and the fight to close (half-filled and redundant) ethnic churches made lots of folks got angry and some simply switched to local Polish Catholic or Orthodox churches... and other churches were saved because they were listed as artistic treasures by the cities involved.
Not only was the bishop unpopular for the church renovation fiasco, but the main reason was because of the pedophilia, the scandal of gay friendly priests, and having our kids taught modern heresies in the Catholic schools... don't know what's going on right now, under the new bishop...I will have to ask my gay friends in Pittsburgh if the priests are still regular visitors at the local bars.
And no, I didn't worry about my boys, since they usually went to confession to the young priest who ran around on a motor cycle ( and later disappeared and married one of the catechists who helped in the church).
yup...the good, the bad and the ugly...if I remain catholic, it's because I've worked with many very good priests, whose deeds outshine the hypocrites and sinners.
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