Creating
a Future for all the Tomorrows
Because of communist occupation of Lithuania, Petras Azubalis was forced to flee his native land to Czechoslovakia where he was ordained as a Roman Catholic priest, 1942. At the invitation of Cardinal McGuigan of Toronto, he immigrated to Canada, becoming, in 1948, Pastor of St. John the Baptist, a Lithuanian parish in Toronto. Devoted to the many cultural and charitable activities of the Lithuanian community of greater Toronto, Rev. Azubalis organized a Lithuanian Saturday School for children, established Caritas, a Lithuanian welfare organization, and founded a Lithuanian children’s summer camp at Wasaga Beach, Ontario. A man of great energy, by 1959 he had embarked upon a project that would consume the rest of his life – the establishment of a cultural centre for Lithuanians of all religious faiths. Today, this centre in Mississauga, Ontario, is comprised of St. John’s Lithuanian Cemetery (established, 1960); facilities for the Lithuanian weekly paper Teviskesz iburiai; a large banquet/concert hall and an exhibition hall (built in 1972); the Lithuanian Martyrs' Roman Catholic Church (erected in 1978); and the Lithuanian Museum-Archives of Canada (completed after his death in 1989). This whole complex was given the name Anapilis, which means, in Lithuanian, “a city beyond.” Rev. Petras Azubalis, in this view, breaks ground for Mississauga’s Lithuanian Martyrs’ R.C. Church in the early 1970s. [Photo, courtesy Rev. Jonas Staskevicius]
The
Dynamics of an Electrical Engineer
