Buffalo Rising: Why Saving St. Ann’s Church and Shrine Matters

(Sep 5, 2013 Posted by ) Last weekend, when I stopped by the WNY German-American Heritage Festival in Cheektowaga, one of the first things that caught my eye was a table spread with recent issues of the German Citizen.  The Summer, 2013 issue has an article entitled, “Why Saving St. Ann’s Church and Shrine Matters,” by Martin Ederer.  Martin Ederer is a professor of history at Buffalo State, and co-chair of the St. Ann’s Church and Shrine Revitalization Committee.  A decade ago, he also wrote the great Buffalo’s Catholic Churches: Ethnic Communities and the Architectural Legacy, a go-to source for historic research.

It turns out that the German Citizen, “a newspaper serving the German-Americans of of Upstate New York,” is published by the organizer of the heritage festival, Herbert Schmidt III.  I talked with Herbert Schmidt and his marketing director, Gregory Witul, and got permission to reprint Ederer’s article here, for which I’m grateful.  I also found out that free copies of the German Citizen are distributed to all the public libraries in Buffalo, four times a year (also available by subscription).  Schmidt and Witul also told me that they will soon be increasing their publishing frequency to every other month.  See this fun buzz item about the debut of the German Citizen, by Mary Kunz Goldman, whose grandparents, if I’m not mistaken, were married at St. Ann’s.

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