The Carpathian community: the parish that left, and came back

1916 – PRESENT

Mishawaka's smallest complete community kept its own name for itself: St. Michael the Archangel parish, at 712 East Lawrence Street, was founded in 1916 — and in its own 110th-anniversary writing, published by the parish in 2026, the founders are named as the founders named themselves: "Hungarian Greek Catholics," Greek Catholics from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, from the Carpathian mountain country of what is today Ukraine and Slovakia. They planted an Eastern-rite parish in the middle of one of the most densely Latin-Catholic towns in Indiana — a church Byzantine in rite, in full communion with Rome, and not under the local diocese at all: St. Michael's belongs to the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Eparchy of St. Nicholas in Chicago, a jurisdiction that takes in Indiana, Michigan and every state west to Hawaii. The religion file carries the parish congregation by congregation; what belongs here is the community's extraordinary course, which the parish itself tells. Early in its history St. Michael's left the Catholic Church for one of the Eastern Orthodox churches — one of dozens of Greek Catholic parishes in America that did the same in those decades — and then, in the mid-1960s, its parishioners perceived a call to return to full communion, and did, at what the parish calls great personal sacrifice on the part of families still active in it, the Cacarabs named among them. A community that seceded and returned on its own conviction, and kept its church through both, is a community in the full sense: founded by a named stream, held together by a rite and a language of worship, and coherent across a century.

Its present state is the best-dated in this section. The parish opened the celebration of its 110th anniversary on 1 November 2026 with a Hierarchical Divine Liturgy attended by Bishop Benedict Aleksiychuk, Eparch of St. Nicholas, followed by an open house on 7 November and the feast-day liturgy on 8 November, with Father Herman Majkrzak as pastor; its Divine Liturgy is celebrated Sundays at 10:00 a.m., predominantly in English with some Ukrainian. This article is also where Mishawaka's Hungarian-named record actually lives: the founders' own self-name is the only Hungarian institution-name the town's record carries, as the test in the next article states.

Sources

1. St. Michael's parish, "Parish Life at St. Michael's, Part 1: 'A Different Way of Being Catholic'" (stmichaelsmishawaka.org, 2026) — the 1916 founding, the founders' self-name "Hungarian Greek Catholics," the Austro-Hungarian origin, the early departure into an Orthodox church and the mid-1960s return, the Cacarabs family.
2. Religion file of this record — the parish at 712 East Lawrence Street, the Carpathian founding, the Eparchy of St. Nicholas, the 110th anniversary opening of 1 November 2026 and Bishop Aleksiychuk's liturgy, the present schedule.
3. "Mishawaka Eastern Rite church reaches out to fellow Catholics," Today's Catholic, 5 April 2017 — the 1916 establishment and the Eparchy of Chicago affiliation.