Thursday, April 9, 2015

About That Choice of Church


It may seem an innocuous choice, that decision by the bride of Wilbur G. Lasko—or perhaps her parents—to hold the ceremony at Emmanuel Baptist Church, but I can’t help but see it as pregnant with clues.

Granted, as Wendy mentioned in a comment yesterday, tradition holds that it is the bride and her family that choose the location of the church, not the groom. If it were merely the case of which Protestant church—Baptist versus, say, Lutheran—to select for facilitation of the matrimonial vows, perhaps my hypersensitive sixth sense would have had no cause for the alert. And, indeed, if the Plocher-Lasko wedding location was selected to be close to the reception venue—the Hotel Granada in Brooklyn—perhaps (if it is one and the same as the Emmanuel Baptist Church currently located in Brooklyn) it was a matter of logistics that brought about the selection.

However, in the case of this Polish Laskowski family’s son—at least, this is what I am presuming—we are talking about a groom who grew up in a Catholic family. While I am not, myself, a Catholic, I have known enough Catholics—and researched enough Catholic family members—to know that, for Catholics, marriage was not so much concerned with the spiritual state of the spouse-to-be as with the state of the future children of the proposed union. In other words, certain obligations needing to be fulfilled on behalf of the children often were weighty enough to sway a practicing Catholic to prefer to be married within his or her own church. After all, marriage, for a Catholic, is one of their sacraments.

So now, we have a son of a (supposedly) Catholic family marrying outside the faith—not only that, but outside the realm of the very church which would sanctify the union.

The simple answer, you may be thinking, would be that Wilbur’s parents likely weren’t practicing Catholics, themselves. Let’s think about that. Wilbur’s dad, the former Miczislaus Laskowski, son of Anton and Marianna, arrived in this country from his native Poland in 1889. At the time of his arrival, he was four years of age.

Granted, between the time he arrived in New York City and the time he surfaced as Michael Lasko in the 1915 New York State census, he himself may have chosen to marry a non-Catholic. Perhaps. I have yet to discover anything more about Mary W. Hecker’s origins than to note that she was born to a German father in New York about 1885. Would that have been a Lutheran German? Or a Catholic one?

On the other hand, there may be a different possibility—one the current generation of our family has pondered, as we mull over the several hints left behind by that preceding, silent generation.

Perhaps the immigrant generation Laskowskis weren’t Catholic, themselves. Perhaps they had a different reason for leaving their homeland.



Above: "La Discussion Politique" by French artist, Émile Friant; courtesy Wikipedia; in the public domain.

9 comments:

  1. I probably should have said more yesterday. I don't have the facts, but it seems to me at one time the Catholic Church wanted the non-Catholic to convert. Maybe the bride was not comfortable in doing that and the groom didn't care. What were the political and social attitudes toward Catholics at the time? Remember how controversial John Kennedy was -- oooh he's Catholic! Then Mitt Romney -- ooh he's Mormon! Maybe that's where we're going on that subject tomorrow??

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    1. While I'm no expert on the Catholic religion--hey, I'm not even Catholic, myself!--it's my understanding that, at least before the changes in the 1960s, if a Catholic were married outside the Catholic Church, his or her union was not even considered a marriage. It took the Church to validate the marriage. Thus, if one wanted his or her children to be baptised as Catholics, the parents' marriage needed to be officiated in the Catholic Church.

      In this case, we can safely assume that either the groom didn't care--or perhaps the groom wasn't even Catholic, himself. I'm beginning to wonder...

      However, Wendy, you do bring up another important point: the perspective of how socially acceptable Catholics might have been perceived to be during that time period--although I suspect the "ooh, he's Catholic" attitude about President Kennedy might have been more of an issue outside the realm of such urban areas as Boston or New York, which were, already, full of immigrants from traditionally Catholic countries.

      Whether for this reason, or a multitude of others, this is just one token of several areas in which this family's story just doesn't seem to connect the dots.

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  2. It is a topic of great sensitivity. Marriage outside the Catholic faith was not undertaken lightly by the devout. While I know of one very long lasting Lutheran - Catholic marriage (and the wife had two sisters that were lifelong nuns), I imagine they caused at least her parents great anguish.

    And Wendy is right, the social attitude of the 1960s and 1970s was ... shall we say, something one might hard to quite understand today.

    The region the Laskowski family came from in Germany/Poland/Russia was rife with violence in the "name of religion" for centuries - Catholic and Jewish and probably other faiths as well, have never seemed to "get along" even though their faith says that "they ought to..." It is a great human failing and a great shame.

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    1. You are right about the unsettled territory where the Laskowskis originated in Poland, Iggy. There must have been a lot of tension there, judging from what history of the area I've been able to glean--which, of course, makes that yet another great area to have been "from."

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  3. At least they were married in a church:)

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    1. Yes! At least in that aspect, times were quite different than they are now.

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  4. Ah, in the Brooklyn Eagle is an article that says the bride's father, Charles served on the Church's board of trustees.

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    1. That's an interesting discovery, Iggy! Thanks for mentioning that. Isn't that searchable newspaper archive just grand?

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