From the Redemptorist Archives

Here’s a political hot potato for you. Let’s dip into a confrere’s personnel file for a “February” item. I want to talk about “illegal immigrants” (all I can think of lately!) and I want the Redemptorists and their friends to know that they had many in their own ranks. Here’s the story of one. 

An “Illegal” At Esopus

On February 13, 1979, the bells of Mt. St. Alphonsus tolled for the Baltimore Province’s senior Brother, Rudolph Dzurdzik, who had been stationed there since 1918. For 62 years he fed the students and staff at Esopus until the last few months of his life. Industrious all throughout his ministry, he was known as the butcher brother—the meat carver in the kitchen ice box. But he was also faithful at meditation and could be found in chapel regularly. He tended the orchards with care, grafting new varieties of apple, peach, and plum trees. He could fashion cane-backed furniture. He lived simply. Confreres reported that he had almost nothing in his room for all his days. 

He was an “illegal alien” living in their midst. 

Brother Rudolph was born George Andrew Dzurdzik in Marikova, in what was Slovakia, in 1890. At age 20 he was drafted into the Austro- Hungarian army, but an opportunity arose to escape to Prussia, ostensibly to work as a farm hand. He did not have a passport or other documentation freeing him from military service, but once inside Prussia he walked off the job with his first month’s pay check and made his way to Hanover. There he paid cash for a ticket to America. Armed only with his baptismal certificate, he crossed into New York Harbor and made his way to a little hamlet in the West Virginia hills, where a settlement of Slovaks had put down roots. He took a job making pipe and began to think about a possible vocation to religious life. Just then a Redemptorist, Father Wenceslaus Melichar, gave a parish mission, in Slovak, and so impressed the young man that afterward he opened his heart to him about his plans. The Redemptorist directed him to apply to the order and he was immediately accepted as a candidate brother. 
We have no evidence that Brother Rudolph ever became an American citizen. He lived in the open, but under the radar. No one called for his expulsion. No one denied his contributions. No one challenged his right to flourish, either as a religious or as a man.