Marek Bozek Arrives at St Stanislaus

New pastor arrives at St. Stanislaus
By Tim Townsend
ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
12/21/2005

The day after he pulled into town, the Rev. Marek Bozek, the new pastor of St. Stanislaus Kostka church, introduced himself to the St. Louis media. Literally.

Minutes before a news conference at the church hall Wednesday, Bozek walked around the room and shook hands with every reporter, photographer and cameraman.

Bozek plans to celebrate his first Mass as St. Stanislaus' pastor on Christmas Eve. He has been declared excommunicated, along with the six members of the church board, by St. Louis Archbishop Raymond Burke.

His voice breaking with nerves, Bozek read a statement saying that he had received more than 200 letters, from both supporters and opponents. He said he had received "hate letters filled with insult and malice, accusing me of things I've never heard of, accusing me of being a heretic, a pedophile, a womanizer and a promiscuous homosexual."
. . .
Bozek said he had come to St. Stanislaus Kostka, "in order to be a parish priest and nothing else" and that he wants St. Stanislaus to be a normal Roman Catholic parish. "I will laugh with them when they laugh and I will cry with them when they cry," he said.

The priest will sit on the St. Stanislaus board, but he said he would not be occupied with parish finances. "I'm not a businessman, I'm a priest," he said. "A priest doesn't have to have all the answers."

Church law requires each parish to have a finance council to assist the pastor.

In his newspaper column, Burke said he will be obliged to "suppress" St. Stanislaus, meaning it will no longer be a parish in the St. Louis archdiocese, nor even Roman Catholic. Tony Huenneke, a spokesman for the St. Louis Archdiocese, said Wednesday that, as far as he knew, the archbishop had not yet signed the decree of suppression.

Bozek acknowledged he was scared by the excommunication, which he called "the death penalty of the Catholic church." But in making his decision to come to St. Stanislaus, he said, he listened only to "vox populi, vox dei," - that is, the voice of the people, the voice of God.

He listened to the voice of whom? How can he be certain? Maybe that 10 years of theology?
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