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1888 — present
The Hungarians built their world one street west of downtown: Hungarian immigrants — many of them German-speaking — worshipped first at St. Patrick's and St. Mary's, shepherded from 1888 by St. Mary's pastor, Father Peter Johannes. In 1900 Father Michael J. Biro of Holy Cross organized St. Stephen's (Magyar) Church for a community of about sixty Hungarian families; the congregation bought the Milburn Memorial Chapel on 3 July 1900 and settled at 1102 West Thomas Street. The growth was rapid: the diocesan history of 1907 counted 321 Hungarian families, 2,166 souls, at St. Stephen's. The community's defining crisis came in 1911, a controversy over the pastor's handling of the church property's title, and it split the Hungarian world three ways: a Hungarian Episcopalian congregation formed on West Colfax Avenue, and a body of families withdrew to found the Sacred Heart Independent Hungarian Catholic Church, dedicated on 8 September 1912 — the South Bend Tribune, reporting the dedication the next day, called it the first Independent Hungarian Catholic Church in America — which aligned with Bishop Francis Hodur's Polish National Catholic Church. From that congregation grew St. Mary's of the Holy Rosary, the Polish National parish organized in the Hungarian Hall on Chapin Street in November 1913, told in the Polish entry above; the Hungarian Hall itself, and the still-missing society president the 1917 Magyar Hall fire left behind, stand in the mysteries and wars files of this history.
The Roman obedience answered the schism with a mission: a little church built on South Catalpa Street to serve the Hungarians of the south side. Its beginning is carried here in its two reckonings: the parish's compiled history dates the mission church to about 1910 and says it was built to counteract the schism, its records kept at St. Stephen's; the diocese, marking the parish's centennial in 2016, reckoned the community's beginning to 1916; and the parish's sacramental records run from 1912. In 1921 Bishop Alerding erected the mission as a parish, Our Lady of Hungary, and sent Father Geza Gyorfy, who arrived that December, bought land on West Calvert Street, moved the little church there, and built rectory, school and convent around it; the parish church rose in 1923, the school in 1927, and the present church in 1949 under Monsignor John Sabo, who served the parish from 1930 to 1980, forty-five of those years as pastor. Families who fled Hungary after the 1956 revolution joined the parish in the next decade, and the community's census trace — 3,605 residents of Hungarian ancestry in 2000, 3.3 percent of the city — made South Bend one of the more Hungarian small cities in America. The century closed in consolidation, as it did for the Poles: St. Stephen's closed on 31 May 2003, its people divided between St. Casimir's and St. Adalbert's, and the Thomas Street church was afterward ordered razed by the diocese. Our Lady of Hungary carries the community now as a parish of two immigrations: its July festival serves Hungarian and Mexican food under both cultures' music, and its school, opened in 1927, still teaches on Calvert Street.
Sources:
- Alerding, History of the Catholic Church in the Diocese of Fort Wayne (1907) — St. Stephen's families and souls; St. Mary of the Assumption
- Our Lady of Hungary parish — compiled parish history (mission church c. 1910; parish erected 1921); Diocese of Fort Wayne–South Bend, centennial account (2016), and "Our Lady of Hungary Parish Flourishes," Today's Catholic, 2017
- South Bend Tribune — dedication of Sacred Heart Hungarian Independent Catholic Church, 9 September 1912; St. Stephen's closing and merger, 2003
- National Register nomination — St. Casimir Parish Historic District (St. Mary's of the Holy Rosary, 1601 West Sample Street)
- Population & Demographics, this history (Census 2000 Hungarian ancestry, 3,605) — banked fragment