I appreciate the feedback on this thread. I personally pray for actual reunion between the two churches. When the PNCC broke with the RC, I think the main rift was pastoral insensitivity at the parish and diocesan level, especially by RC local officials of non-Polish ethnicity. At present ethnicity is much less of a factor both for Poles and others. (I personally am Polish American RC). The PNCC is quietly dropping the “P” in some of their literature.
The danger here is theological drift. The Protestant churches originally retained what they considered the core beliefs of Catholic doctrine and morals, but gradually drifted away. The liberal Protestant churches are rapidly moving away in the past 40 years from doctrinal and moral positions the grandfathers would have considered crucial.
This is less true in the PNCC but even the PNCC has recently adopted a few positions (such as acceptance of contraception) that I suspect the founders would have considered unthinkable in the early years. The pressure to conform to the secular society can be overwhelming, and history shows denominations keep re-defining - or shrinking - the core beliefs, in order to accomodate more people. That is how denominations that once thought abortion murder now support it as a right.
The danger is that grudges tend to take on a momentum of their own, even after the original abuse that caused it has passed. The longer the PNCC (or NCC) stays apart from the RC, the less it will be guided by the original Polish Catholic tradition, and the more it will be shaped by American secularism. It is tempting to argue that just because this drift happened to the Episcopals, Methodists, and Presbyterians, it won’t happen to us. Try to project ahead to where the NCC might be in the future. You might argue that the NCC is different, it is a “Catholic” church, but remember many Anglicans, Lutherans, and others all considered themselves Catholic for at least their denomination’s first 100 years or so - some still consider themselves Catholic today. They never intended to become Protestant, that is simply what they - and perhaps eventually the NCC - became, by a very gradual process, apart from the Magisterium. Read what Luther, Calvin, Wesley, and the other reformers taught about Mary, the Eucharist, or other topics, and you will be shocked at the difference between what the founders preached, and what their successors now believe.
(Try the fish fry at Buffalo’s PNCC cathedral - no compromise there, all the original ingredients.)
