This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Jan. 20, 2013 - Stan Musial, who died Saturday evening, understood that sports, especially baseball, could encourage character formation and help develop networks of loyalty even in dark times. That belief led him to work, very quietly, to help the Catholic Church in his father’s ancestral home of Poland.
He helped Polish Catholics much longer than the 22 years he played baseball.
His love of his Polish heritage, shared by his wife Lillian Susan Labash Musial, led him to a friendship for decades of the late Pope John Paul II. It followed that "The Man,” a devout Catholic, would stand in for St. Louis Catholics in welcoming the pope to St. Louis as an honorary co-chairman of his friend’s 1999 papal pastoral visit to St. Louis.
In the 1960s, Stan and Lillian Musial quietly went to Poland with a small group of prosperous Polish-Americans to see what they could do to help its people. Poles were struggling with every type of freedom issue as well as hunger under the grip of the Soviet Communists. Destruction from the deprivations of the Nazi conquest during World War II was still visible.
The Polish-Americans worked with the American Embassy and with the Catholic Church, and in particular with the cardinal archbishop of Krakow -- Karol Józef Wojtyla.
Another church connection
One Sunday last year, New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan's homily centered on his admiration for Musial.
The Musials went to the heart of historic Krakow to its archdiocese’s curia, an office and residential stone compound surrounding an interior garden. They climbed the grand stone interior staircase to the archbishop's high-ceiling reception room to met Wojtyla.
With the help of a translator, the two men talked about their love of sports and their church. The two hit it off immediately, Lillian Musial said in an interview in the mid-1990s. The church cardinal was exactly six months older than the baseball Cardinal, and they developed an easy friendship.
As a young parish priest the archbishop had taken youth of his parish on camping trips and encouraged them to play sports. His sports outreach was part of encouraging young people’s moral and spiritual life. His “kids” and the children they eventually would have were warmly welcomed to meals at the papal residence, after Wojtyla became pope. Even then, John Paul II's idea of a good break was athletic -- skiing or hiking in the mountains.
At that first meeting, Wojtyla and Musial talked about setting up CYC-like leagues for baseball and other sports in hopes of giving Polish youth an alternative to the rigid Communist Party youth membership programs.
Baseball had the added attraction of being an all-American game, a symbol of democracy. After the meeting with Wojtyla, Musial himself talked to parish sports teachers about the game. He helped the larger Polish-American group raise money and got sports manufacturers to donate equipment. Back home, they dispatched to Poland crates of baseballs, leather gloves, bases, bats and handbooks on the game.
On the Musials’ second visit to the Krakow Curia, the couple was dazzled when Wojtyla walked into his reception room speaking English with some fluency. (In 1998, the Polish nun who had taught the archbishop told me that he was a quick and eager study.) The Musials were among the first English speakers with whom he tried the language. Not needing a translator allowed a stronger friendship to develop.
Musial met with coaches, helped at workshops and encouraged the young players as they tried to swing a bat. They didn’t know much about him or his Cardinal stats, but they took to the friendly, gracious American with his wide smile and his love of good sportsmanship. Over the years, the Musials returned to Krakow as the Polish baseball project expanded.
On one of the Musials’ visits to Krakow, the church cardinal was ill with a bad cold. Instead of canceling on his St. Louis friends, Wojtyla met with them in his private sitting room where, the late Lillian Musial recalled years later, he apologized for receiving them in his bathrobe.
In the fall of 1978 when the Polish cardinal became the first non-Italian pope in more than 400 years, the Musial household exploded with joy, Lillian Musial recalled. However, they rarely talked about the papal connection publicly.
On July 3, 1988 the Musials and their daughters, graduates of Villa Duchesne, were among the more than 500 St. Louisans who attended the canonization Mass of St. Philippine Duchesne at St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. By Vatican count, 11 Catholic cardinals were in attendance near the altar. By St. Louis count, there were 12, Mr. Musial was given a place of honor seated in the crowed, vast church, just a couple rows behind the churchmen.
A decade later, in May 1998, when the announcement came that Pope John Paul would make a pastoral visit to St. Louis the following January, this reporter hurried to phone the Musials for their reaction. If there was one person that the pope associated with St. Louis, it was his friend Mr. Musial.
The joy in the Musials’ voices was spontaneous. A few weeks later, the working chairman of the papal visit, Monsignor Richard Stika, invited Mr. Musial to be honorary co-chair of the visit with then University of Missouri-St. Louis chancellor Blanche Touhill, another member of the Musial’s Annunziata Parish in Ladue.
Included in the honor was the chance for a private visit with his old friend at the archbishop’s residence on the southwest corner of Lindell Boulevard and Taylor Avenue on the afternoon of Jan. 26, 1999.
Stika, later the Musials’ pastor at their Annunziata Parish and now the bishop of the Knoxville, Tenn., diocese, said the funeral Mass for Mrs. Musial last May and will be among those on the altar at Mr. Musial’s funeral Mass. Arrangements are incomplete.
Saturday evening Stika tweeted that he was ‘blessed to call” his former parishioners Stan and Lil his friends and that Stan was “a perfect gentleman.”