POLISH WEEKLY - Feb. 5, 2004
Orchard Lake Schools to award
Fidelitas Medal to Felician Sisters

The Orchard Lake Schools will close its year-long observance of the centennial of the death of its founder, Rev. Joseph Dabrowski, by honoring the order of nuns that he invited from Poland to assist him with his missionary work in the late 1800s and help him establish the Polish parochial school system in the United States.
The Schools will award its highest honor, the Fidelitas Medal, to the Felician Sisters in America on Sunday, Feb. 15, the date of Fr. Dabrowski's death in 1903.
The awarding will take place during the liturgy at 1 p.m. in the Shrine Chapel of Our Lady of Orchard Lake. A reception and dinner on the campus will follow at 2:30 p.m. The day will conclude with a memorial concert at 4 p.m. in the shrine chapel. The public is invited to the dinner; tickets are $40 per person. The concert is free. For information, call (248) 683-0401 or (248) 683-0405.
In making the announcement, Chancellor Fr. Timothy Whalen said: "The award, the 57th since its establishment in 1949, is made to the Felician Sisters in America in recognition of their fidelity in serving God and country through the realization of the religious and cultural ideals of our forefathers."
Sister Mary Raymond Kasprzak, CSSF, the Minister General of the Sisters of St. Felix of Cantalice (Felician Sisters) headquartered in Rome, Italy, will accept the award. A native of
Buffalo, N. Y., she administers the affairs of the international congregation and its membership
of over 2,200 sisters in 12 provinces: seven in the United States, three in Poland, and one each in Canada and Brazil.
During an 11-year career at Villa Maria College in Buffalo, Sister Raymond served as Director of Student Services, Vice President for Student Affairs and Vice President for Academic Affairs. Within the Felician community, she was Provincial Councilor and Director of Education of the Immaculate Heart of Mary Province in Buffalo (1982-1988), Vicar General of the Felician Congregation (1988-1995) and, from 1995 to 2000, the Provincial Minister of the Felician Congregation in Buffalo.

Fr. Joseph Dabrowski: Founder
of the Orchard Lake Schools
Leaving his beloved Poland, Fr. Dabrowski - a newly-ordained priest at the age of 27 - landed in America on New Year's Eve 1869 to minister to Polish immigrants in rural Wisconsin.
Within five years, in November 1874, he welcomed a group of five Felician Sisters from Poland to staff a parochial school. They collaborated in printing three pioneering Polish American textbooks (a reader and geography and mathematics texts), the first of 45 such textbooks between 1877 and 1904.
As larger and larger numbers of immigrants settled in the cities, Fr. Dabrowski moved to Detroit in the early 1880s. Armed with a petition approved by Pope Leo XIII in 1879 to establish a Polish seminary in the United States, he borrowed $5,000 to purchase two acres of land on St. Aubin Avenue between Forest and Garfield streets on Detroit's east side. The cornerstone of the seminary was laid on July 22, 1885.
In addition to its theology department, the seminary also embraced a classics course and a high school, forerunners to the three academic institutions that comprise the Orchard Lake Schools today: SS. Cyril and Methodius Seminary, St. Mary's College and St. Mary's Preparatory. In 1909, the schools moved from Detroit to their current location, the site of the former Michigan Military Academy in Orchard Lake.
Fr. Dabrowski died early in the morning of Sunday, Feb. 15, 1903, of a heart attack he had suffered nine days earlier. He was 61. He is buried at Mt. Elliott Cemetery in Detroit.

Felician Sisters help establish
Polish parochial school system
Three years after their arrival, under the unflagging leadership of Mother Monica
Sybilska, the Felician Sisters opened St. Hyacinth School in LaSalle, Ill., in 1877. A year later, they opened St. Stanislaus School in Bay City, Mich., and a year after that, St. Albertus School in
Detroit. In 1882, the Sisters moved their provincialate from Wisconsin to a motherhouse on
Canfield and St. Aubin on the east side of Detroit, whose construction was supervised by Fr. Dabrowski, who had been appointed chaplain of the Felician Sisters and moved from Wisconsin to Detroit with them.
Fr. Dabrowski is considered the father of Polish parish schools in America, a distinction he shared with Mother Monica. They are credited with establishing the Polish parish school system before 1893 within the American Catholic school system. Of 132 Polish parishes in existence in the last decade of the 1800s, 122 had schools. And of the 122, 47 in 10 states were the result of the faith and work of Fr. Dabrowski and the Felician Sisters.
Over the years, the Sisters have expanded their mission from education to health care and social work. The provinces in the U. S. are located in Livonia, Buffalo, Chicago, Lodi, N. J., Coraopolis, Pa., Enfield, Conn., and Rio Rancho, N. Mex.
Locally, in Livonia, the Felician Sisters sponsor and staff Madonna University, Ladywood High School, St. Mary Mercy Hospital, Montessori Center of Our Lady, Marywood and Marybrook Manor, Senior Clergy Village and the Angela Hospice Care Center.
In Michigan, Ohio and Indiana - the area served by 240 Sisters from the Livonia province - the congregation staffs 15 elementary schools, three high schools, a university, five religious education programs, a Montessori preschool program, and two child care centers. They are also involved in pastoral and youth ministries.

Memorial Concert to
honor Fr. Dabrowski
At 4 p.m. in the campus shrine chapel, tenor David Troiano will present a memorial concert, featuring selections by Polish composers Chopin, Moniuszko and Stojowski, and by
Mozart, Webber, Schubert and Rowley. He will be accompanied by pianist Joseph Gurt and Susan Mutter on the French horn. The concert is free.
Troiano, acclaimed for the beauty of his voice and sensitivity to the text, continues to perform in operatic and operetta roles in the United States and Canada. In 1999, he presented a
recital at the Sacred Music Festival in Warsaw, Poland. Currently a doctoral student at the University of Michigan, Troiano has performed with several community symphonies, chamber ensembles and colleges in Michigan and Canada.
A graduate of the Juilliard School of Music, Gurt has performed in Australia, Canada, Turkey, Israel, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore in addition to the United States. He has played with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, the Lyric Chamber Ensemble and many other professional and community orchestras and chamber music groups.
Mutter, a freelance musician, has performed with the Detroit Symphony, the Michigan Opera Theater Orchestra and the Hong Kong Philharmonic.

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