Janet was raised in Pennsylvania. Her father was Polish National Catholic and her mother Lutheran. From a young age she was devoted to the church but she also had many question about the faith. When she was a teenager she began to rebel and bought into some of the lies of the “me generation”. In college, church was not a part of her life. One of the seeds of her conversion was planted when she saw Pope St. John Paul II when he visited Philadelphia in 1979. When she met and married Tom, who at the time was a nominal Catholic, they were married in the Catholic Church, even though they were both far from God. After moving to California and working in a pharmacy in a Catholic hospital more seeds were planted in her heart by the witness of faithful Catholics. Upon moving to Washington, Janet was received into full-communion with the Catholic Church. Janet’s and Tom’s faith in Jesus Christ and his Church was strengthened and deepened though the process of raising their sons in the Catholic faith.
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The split between the Roman Catholic Church and the Polish National Catholic Church has nothing to do with papal infallibility. It is a split that should have never happened. There were two main issues: 1) lack of Polish priests, and lack of respect by fellow clergy for Polish priests; and 2) ownership of parish property. Of the two the second was more important.
When the Polish immigrants came over, they built the churches they worshipped in, so they believed the people of the parish should own the property. Unfortunately the issue was considered settled in the US after the trusteeism controversy. One thing led to another and Fr. Hodur led a number of Polish Catholics in Scranton, PA out of the Catholic Church. A number of Polish immigrants in other American cities joined them. Realizing that they needed a bishop and the need for the bishop to have a legitimate apostolic succession, Fr. Hodur turned to the Old Catholic Church to be ordained bishop.
The sad thing is that if the Irish and German bishops would have been more sensitive to Eastern European Catholics and if there was such a thing as parish councils back in the 1890s, it is quite possible that the split would have never happened. The split was never over any doctrinal issues.