February Services
+ Feb. 2: The Presentation of our Lord in the Temple.

Theophany House Blessings
If you would still like to have your home blessed this year, please make an appointment with Father before the end of February.

Akathist & Bible Study
With Lent fast approaching, this will be the last month for Bible Study until May.  We will try to complete Gen. 20-21.  Whether or not we begin with an Akathist will depend on when Popadija goes into labor (Father dares not try to sing by himself), but at the very least there will be Bible Study.  When Lent begins, we will instead celebrate the Divine Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts each Wednesday evening at 5 pm, followed by a Lenten potluck and a series of short documentaries about the contemporary life of Orthodox Serbs in Kosovo.

Parish Council
Thanks to all for a fruitful Annual Meeting.  There will be a blessing of all Parish Council members at the conclusion of Divine Liturgy on the 17th, and our first meeting of the new year is scheduled for Tuesday the 19th from 5-6 pm.

Thanksgiving Prayers
Father has been asked to request that parishioners please participate in the Prayers of Thanksgiving for Holy Communion, by at least keeping their voices down so that these prayers can be heard.  Readers are occasionally drowned out by conversation, which should not happen.

Lampadas
Donations of olive oil are once again needed for the vigil lamps.  Please leave your offering of bottles beside the baptismal font.

Slavas
Thanks to the Budisavljevic’s for hosting such a wonderful Slava in honor of their patron St. Stefan the Protomartyr.  If you are interested in establishing or re-establishing a Slava for your household, please speak with Father.

From the Archives: Laying the Foundation (1896-1899)
Among the few artifacts remaining from the earliest period in our parish history is a decorative ribbon bearing the following inscription: “Grecko Kat. Spolok Sv. Michala Arch. Pueblo, Colo. Zalozeny 16.Feb.1896 Cis. 89.”, which being translated means “Greek Catholic Union St. Archangel Michael, Pueblo, CO. Established on 16.Feb.1896 Chapter #89.”  The Greek Catholic Union is a Fraternal Benefits Society founded in 1892 by immigrants from the Carpathian region of modern Slovakia, Poland and Ukraine.  What this ribbon points to is the fact that St. Michael’s Orthodox Church was originally established as a Greek Catholic community whose existence in Pueblo can be traced back to at least 1896.

Greek Catholics, or Uniates, are communities of former Orthodox Christians who accepted union with Rome in their recent history, but were permitted to retain the Divine Liturgy and many externals of Orthodoxy.  There are 21 Uniate churches of various sizes, the largest being the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, created in 1596 when many Orthodox bishops accepted papal supremacy at a false council in Brest-Litovsk.  Most of the Orthodox communities who accepted union were under the dominion of Catholic powers at the time, and their unions with Rome were often either forced, or came in exchange for improved social and economic status that was denied them as Orthodox Christians.  In Romania in 1700, for example:

“conversion to the new [Uniate] church offered the prospect of material and political benefits to the Orthodox clergy.  The [Austro-Hungarian] Emperor […] guaranteed the Orthodox clergy equal rights with the Roman Catholic clergy in Transylvania, if they agreed to join the new church.  To the Orthodox priests and high priest, who lived as the peasants did, tilling the land, paying tithes to a landlord, without the right to own property or collect money, or even build churches, this was truly a tempting offer.  This was why the Bishop of Transylvania and the majority of the clergy accepted the Union with Rome though the laity were very much opposed to it at the beginning.” (Fiona Tupper-Carey, "The Post-Revolution Conflict Between the Orthodox and Eastern Rite Catholics in Romania," In Towards a New Community: Culture and Politics in Post Totalitarian Europe, Edited by Peter Duncan, (Munster: School of Slavonic and East European Studies, 1993), 94.)
 
When Uniates arrived in America, they were often mistreated by established Roman Catholic clergy and hierarchs, who viewed them as suspect.  This snubbing, together with the fact that Uniatism no longer conferred any tangible benefits, led many Greek Catholics in America to revert to the Orthodox faith of their forefathers.  Saint Alexis Toth was the most notable personification of this return to Orthodoxy, which would also affect Pueblo.

Parishioner Profile: The Kuzmiaks

At a recent Slava celebration, John Kuzmiak looked around at all the new faces in attendance and commented that he could remember when he and Gabrielle were the youngest couple in the parish.  Though they are still youthful enough, there’s no question the Kuzmiaks have been members of St. Michael’s long enough to be considered part of the glue that has held this parish together.

John was born in 1954 in Philipsburg, New Jersey, to parents John and Beatrice.  His father came from a region of Slovakia near the Polish border, while his mother was of German ancestry and converted to Orthodoxy when she married.  Saint John the Baptist Orthodox Church in Alpha, NJ, was John’s spiritual home from the time of his baptism.  There he served as an altar boy, often causing trouble that our altar boys would never dream of getting into (overabundant zapivka jugs were involved).  It is no surprise that he has also been serving as a reader from the time he was eight-years-old.  It was the practice in his parish for the Creed to be recited by readers rather than sung by the choir, and John recalls how, when he would make a mistake in church, he would have to practice the Creed over and over again once he got home.

As with many East Coast Orthodox kids in those days, John spent his summers at the St. Tikhon’s Seminary summer camp.  Being rowed around the lake by Fr. Joe Swaiko (now Metropolitan Herman) is one of John’s most remarkable memories of camp – that and being punished with whacks from a whiffle-ball bat when he was unruly.

After high school, John wanted to go somewhere far away for college because “the town I grew up in, most people stayed there.”  He settled on UC Boulder, where he majored in geography.  With no Orthodox parish then in Boulder, John drifted somewhat from the church, although he did attend Holy Transfiguration from time to time.  After graduation, and a few years back in Jersey, John went to work as a hydrologist for the US Geological Survey office in Phoenix, AZ, where an Antiochian parish was his home for a time.  In 1985, he transferred to the Pueblo office.  It was here that he met Gabrielle.

Janet (Gabrielle) was born and raised in Rye, the daughter of Robert and Catherine Garoutte of French and Wyandotte Indian extraction.  Her father was a rancher, so Gabrielle “grew up with cows, rocks, streams and horses,” which explains her continued love for the outdoors.  After graduating from Rye High School, Gabrielle attended USC (now CSU Pueblo), where she earned a degree in Nursing.  After working in that field for 13 years at Parkview, St. Mary-Corwin, and other institutions, Gabrielle realized a change was needed, so she went back to school and earned a Management degree.  In 1994, she went to work for the Colorado Division of Water Resources, where she is now a groundwater well commissioner, “which is better than being a ‘sick’ commissioner,” she joked (it took me a minute to get it).

As a student worker, she met John at his workplace.  Both were previously married – Gabrielle with two children, Michelle and Greg.  Their courtship was slow and gradual (and neither seems quite sure how it started).  She remembers that John took her on a hike for their first date, which shouldn’t surprise anyone who knows John!  Some time during their 3-year courtship, he also invited her to church.  Having been baptized and raised a Baptist, Gabrielle had become a Methodist by this time.  Her first experience of Orthodox worship left a favorable impression.  “I could tell it was very old, and it felt very warm,” she recalls.  Still, there were quirks.  “I thought it was unusual that they had a bar,” she adds with a chuckle.

When the couple decided to marry, Gabrielle became a catechumen and was instructed in the faith by Fr. Peter Isaac.  She gained a particular love for icons during this period, as well as for the service of Vespers.  When it came time to enter the church, Gabrielle was baptized in the Arkansas River.  A week later, she and John were married.  That was in 1996.

Asked about the future of the parish, Gabrielle hopes for continued growth and John for more converts in particular, from whom he feels he has learned a lot about his own faith.

December Treasurer’s Report                       

Recommended Reading
When a living saint sets out to write about the life of another saint who has already gone to his eternal reward, we can expect to be edified and greatly inspired by the result.  This is precisely what you will experience through reading The Life of St. Sava, by Nikolai Velimirovic ($13 in the bookstore).  The greatest saint of Orthodox Serbia did not win a crown of victory through any military conquest, but rather through forsaking all wealth and power in order to follow Christ.  Rastko was the son of an earthly king, yet the desire to serve his heavenly father led him to run away from the court and be tonsured a monk on Mount Athos under the name Sava.  When the king learned of his son’s act, inexplicable from a worldly standpoint, he was initially displeased.  Yet he himself would eventually abdicate the throne and follow his son Sava into monastic life.  Together, they set an example for a dynasty that would produce an inordinate number of saints.

As a monk, the former prince was enabled to accomplish far more for the spiritual and even temporal welfare of his people than he could have as a secular leader.  Recognizing that an autocephalous Serbian Orthodox Church would greatly aid the struggle for the soul of the Serbian people in the face of inroads by Rome and by Gnostic heresies, Sava won that independence from the Ecumenical Patriarch and became the first Archbishop of the Serbian Orthodox Church.  As Archbishop, Sava brought peace between his brothers, who were warring over succession to the throne.  He also battled heretics and schismatics with the Gospel rather than by military might, inspiring many to freely return from Romanism and Bogomilism.  Through his personal sanctity, he maintained peace between Serbia and her neighbors.  Together with his father, he built magnificent temples in which to worship God, including Hilandar, the Serbian monastery on Athos.  As a pilgrim, he traveled to the Holy Land, Egypt and even Baghdad, where he gave alms for the welfare of the Christian flocks struggling under Muslim rule.  Finally, Sava established Serbia’s first schools, for which he remains today a patron of education.  All these deeds and more are presented in St. Nikolai’s book, written in an easily comprehensible style with short chapters that make it amenable to daily reading…if you can put it down.

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