September 2025
The
COURIER
Official Newspaper of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Winona-Rochester, MN | dowr.org
Breathing New Life Beloved Conference into a Legacy
By MICHELLE GERLACH
�hen I began serving as chancellor for the Diocese
in the fall of 2023, I had never visited a diocesan archives. Learning that moving our archives safely from the Pastoral Center in Winona to the new Chancery in Rochester would be one of the primary responsibilities of my first year, I decided to visit some other diocesan archives and speak with a few archivists to learn what I could about the art of preserving diocesan heritage. I toured the archives of the Diocese of LaCrosse, the Archdiocese of Saint Paul and Minneapolis, and the Archdiocese of Boston. And I began to wonder: where was all our “stuff”? From what I had seen, our archives consisted of what appeared to me to be about 90% or more paper; the archives I had visited contained paintings and vestments and relics and many other items of historical and liturgical import. And then I learned about Fr. Breza and visited the Polish Museum in Winona. And I found our “stuff.” Paul Joseph Breza was born in Winona on June 23, 1937, the son of descendants of Kashubian immigrants from Bytów, Poland. He was educated at Saint Stanislaus Kostka School, Cotter High School, and Saint Mary’s University of Minnesota before completing his seminary training at Saint Paul Seminary. He was ordained a priest of the Diocese June 1, 1963. Father Paul’s love of his Polish heritage came to life
Spend a Day Resting in God's Love THERESA MARTIN, coordinator of the Diocese of Winona-Rochester's upcoming Beloved women's conference (November 1 at St. Ann's Church, Janesville), recently interviewed ELIZABETH LEON, the event's keynote speaker. Share with us a little about who you are.
in the Polish Cultural Institute and Museum, now the Kashubian Cultural Institute and Polish Museum, he founded in Winona in 1979. Anyone who has visited the Museum has seen firsthand its impressive quality and history. Those who have ventured upstairs know that the Museum housed much more than its name implies. What began, according to Father Breza, as dumpster rescues initially stored in barns and other storage spaces donated by people of the Diocese, evolved into an enormous collection of Catholic patrimony from Winona and the surrounding area, that occupied the entire second floor of the Polish Museum, including all of the available wall space and much of the floor and out-of-sight storage areas.
New Life, cont'd on pg. 6
My name is Elizabeth Leon. I am in Northern Virginia. I live here with my husband and the last of our big, blended family of 10 children. I am a Catholic mom, grandma, speaker, writer, grief minister, music minister. I have a lot of different hats that I wear! My husband and I are in our second union; when we married in 2013, I brought along my five children and he his four. And then together we had a beautiful little boy, John Paul Raphael, who lived and died in 2018. And, at the time that I got pregnant, I was in the middle of a pretty intense healing journey. I went through a terrible, horrific divorce in 2010 that just knocked me off my feet and really came out of nowhere and imploded our "perfect" Catholic family. And in the wake of that wreckage, the Lord really invited me on a very beautiful, but painful, healing journey with him. And so I was really in the midst of that still when I got pregnant with John Paul Raphael. And I was in my forties, so that makes it hard, too. The early prenatal testing revealed that he had a
Beloved, cont'd on pg. 11
INSIDE this issue
The Story of a Steeple
IHM Seminary's New Rector page 6
page 7
The Diocesan Synod page 10