{"id":2278,"date":"2007-04-02T08:48:46","date_gmt":"2007-04-02T08:48:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2007\/04\/the-sisters-of-slavic-village.html"},"modified":"2007-04-02T08:48:46","modified_gmt":"2007-04-02T08:48:46","slug":"the-sisters-of-slavic-village","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/04\/the-sisters-of-slavic-village.html","title":{"rendered":"The Sisters of Slavic Village"},"content":{"rendered":"

From the Cleveland Plain-Dealer:<\/a><\/p>\n

\n
\n

For the past 31 years, the Sisters Servants of Mary Immaculate, a Polish order founded in 1878, have ministered to the ethnic elderly of Cleveland – the shut-ins, the abandoned, the ailing and lonely. <\/p>\n

Each weekday, five sisters of the group make their rounds to meet the spiritual, emotional, psychological and sometimes basic survival needs of more than 200 people. <\/p>\n

The group was originally invited here by former Bishop James Hickey to serve the Eastern European immigrants of Slavic Village. <\/p>\n

The sisters also are on call during weekends for their mostly Polish-speaking or Eastern European clients, though neither a person’s religion nor ethnicity is a requisite for aid. <\/p>\n

Some clients have outlived the days when they could rely on a close-knit community of merchants and professionals who shared their language and customs but moved out of the neighborhood over the years, according to Kaszuba, program director of the sisters’ Special Ministry to the Aged based at the Immaculate Heart of Mary Church. <\/p>\n

So the sisters fill the gaps, helping these people shop, obtain needed medical and social services, arrange legal affairs, translate or transport. <\/p>\n

And sometimes they are just there for companionship and comfort. <\/p>\n

"It’s unbelievable work and a very needed service that the sisters are performing," said Gene Bak, executive director of the Polish American Cultural Center in Slavic Village. <\/p>\n

"The community is getting older and a lot of the younger people have moved to the suburbs," he added. <\/p>\n

"But the older people still stay in the area because the churches and halls are here, and the sisters serve a very important function by helping them do that." <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From the Cleveland Plain-Dealer: For the past 31 years, the Sisters Servants of Mary Immaculate, a Polish order founded in 1878, have ministered to the ethnic elderly of Cleveland – the shut-ins, the abandoned, the ailing and lonely. Each weekday, five sisters of the group make their rounds to meet the spiritual, emotional, psychological and…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2278","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Sisters of Slavic Village - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/04\/the-sisters-of-slavic-village.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Sisters of Slavic Village - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"From the Cleveland Plain-Dealer: For the past 31 years, the Sisters Servants of Mary Immaculate, a Polish order founded in 1878, have ministered to the ethnic elderly of Cleveland – the shut-ins, the abandoned, the ailing and lonely. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2278","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2278"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2278\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2278"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2278"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2278"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}