Jesuit explorer Jacques Marquette, who in 1673 sank his boots into the marsh that would become Chicago, was on a mission for the Roman Catholic Church.
A century later, Jean Baptiste du Sable, Chicago’s first settler, traveled 300 miles through the wilderness so he could marry his Indian bride in a Catholic church.
When Chicagoans voted to incorporate in 1833, Catholics accounted for 130 of the 140 residents.
Today, more than a century and a half later, Catholicism remains as inextricably woven into the fabric of Chicago as it was in the days of Marquette and Du Sable.
Some 2.3 million people in Lake and Cook Counties call themselves Catholics. That amounts to about four of every 10 residents, more than twice as many as any other faith in those areas.
Catholic schools remain a cornerstone of education in Chicago, Catholic hospitals serve the faithful and the not-so-faithful and Catholic charities play a crucial role in the city’s soup kitchens. Chicago, in fact, is known as the most influential archdiocese in the nation.
Yet, for all of its power and glory, the Catholic Church in Chicago faces problems that are every bit as severe as those that plague the global church in Rome.
In the ornate halls of the Vatican, the pope, his bishops and his cardinals may grapple with issues such as birth control, celibacy and abortion on a broad philosophical plane.
But in Chicago, overburdened priests and nuns must deal with equally grave problems in parishes full of Irish, Mexican, German, Polish and Korean Catholics who struggle to keep their faith in an increasingly secular world.
For every bishop in a Vatican library studying theology there’s a Chicago priest who must translate the church’s doctrines for parishioners such as a Far North Side woman whose doctor tells her the baby she carries won’t live outside the womb.
Any catalog of the church’s problems here would speak as much about the church’s future as its past. From the reforms codified in Vatican II to the spate of church closings here in 1990, the Chicago archdiocese has become a barometer of the church’s global health.
Like elsewhere, Catholics here live under one ecclesiastical roof where the rich clash with the poor and the conservatives criticize the liberals, particularly over speculation about new leaders such as who will be the next pope or who will replace Cardinal Joseph Bernardin.
If there is one thing that will unify Catholics the world over, it is a threat to the institutions that drive the church–its schools, hospitals and charities.
And threats to each of these institutions are building in Chicago.
The foundations
The archdiocese runs 324 elementary and high schools. Before his death last month, Bernardin had stabilized the finances of the inner-city schools and begun an aggressive fundraising program known as the Big Shoulders Fund. Yet a basic quandary remains.
In the fast-growing suburbs, there are not enough schools for all the Catholic children whose parents want them to have a religious education. In the city, where most of the Catholic schools are, fewer and fewer of the students are Catholics. Meanwhile, Catholics abound in many Hispanic parishes, but there are insufficient resources to serve them. Fewer and fewer parishes can afford to support a school.
Bernardin promised that the archdiocese would fulfill its city and its suburban missions to educate Catholics and non-Catholics. Even if he had not, the availability of a Catholic education–touted even by Chicago Public Schools chief Paul Vallas–has become an expectation for many in the city.
“The only way to get ahead in America is through education,” said Victoria Contreras, who lives in the Little Village neighborhood. “And the only way to get an education around here is in Catholic school.”
The problems are equally vexing for the church’s hospitals. In an era of bottom-line medicine where serving the indigent is an increasing financial challenge, the church wants to keep Catholic institutions as independent as possible.
But economic pressures for hospitals to consolidate are strong. Bernardin encouraged hospitals in the area to form alliances to achieve economies with other Catholic institutions.
That’s not always possible, though, and the archdiocese discourages other institutional marriages of convenience. Indeed, when the nuns who run St. Elizabeth’s Hospital on the West Side tried to form an economic alliance with a non-Catholic hospital group, Bernardin opposed the merger strongly. The dispute between the nuns and the archdiocese is still continuing. .
Catholic Charities faces different problems. .
Government grants account for much of the $112 million the church spends each year helping children, the elderly and the needy. In fact, the church’s mission coincides nicely with the state’s obligation to provide welfare. Government depends so heavily on this arm of the church to help deliver services that it has become a large part of the safety net. .
“We’d be in deep trouble” without Catholic Charities, said Jess McDonald, head of the state Department of Children and Family Services. “When push comes to shove, they’re one of the most reliable partners we have in terms of delivering high-quality services.”
But as federal funding continues to drop, church leaders wonder whether they will continue to make up the difference.
The successor
All of these troubles pale in comparison to the most immediate problem facing the Chicago archdiocese: the replacment of Bernardin.
More than other faiths, the local Catholic Church historically depends on the direction of a single leader.
In 1844, Bishop William Quarter launched the diocese almost singlehandedly, sometimes digging into his pocket to build 30 churches. Then controversial Bishop James Duggan forced a schism that almost destroyed the diocese before he suffered a mental breakdown in 1869.
Early in this century, Cardinal George Mundelein made the archdiocese a social and political force in the city, but by 1982, Cardinal John Cody had left it dispirited and on the road to bankruptcy.
In bringing Bernardin from Cincinnati to Chicago to replace Cody, Pope John Paul II called on a man who could calm a clergy in open revolt and remove the cloud of financial scandal that had loomed over Cody’s final months.
He also tapped a seasoned administrator whose skills were tested time and again in the years that followed.
Financially, things got worse before they got better under Bernardin. Seven years after he took over, the archdiocese faced an operating deficit of $18.4 million.
Bernardin assembled a staff of financial professionals and a council of Catholic business leaders to advise him. They told him that if he did not act soon, the archdiocese would be the first in the nation to go bankrupt. So Bernardin acted.
In 1990, he announced the merger or closing of 33 parishes and 25 schools, including high-profile institutions such as Quigley South Preparatory Seminary. Bernardin said the closings, which were bitterly criticized, were the most difficult decision of his years in Chicago.
But his strategy ultimately saved the archdiocese more than $4 million a year and allowed Bernardin to return in his final years to themes he had emphasized at the beginning of his term: making mass more lively and welcoming to parishioners and reminding Catholics of what they have in common.
On the surface, Bernardin brought the church here a long way. The archdiocese that survives the cardinal resembles a thriving big business.
Housed in a low office building on East Superior Street that serves as the head of this ecclesiastical octupus, the archdiocese has an operating budget of $667 million, nearly the size of the Chicago Transit Authority’s. It employs more people in the metropolitan area than such corporate behemoths as Sears, Roebuck and Co. or United Airlines.
Its unusual empire includes two golf courses, two landfills and 900 acres of farmland. Though the archdiocese rarely makes headlines, it affects people of all faiths throughout the Chicago area in ways many might not even recognize.
In 1996, the archdiocese created a for-profit food service corporation believed to be the first such operation run by the Catholic Church in America. Named for Ceres, the Roman goddess of agriculture, the enterprise is expected to generate sales of $10 million in its first year, slinging hash and ladling minestrone for, among others, 45 public schools in Chicago.
Catholic Charities formed a non-profit corporation to build low-cost housing. In addition, Catholic Charities offers drug counseling and runs stores supplying participants in the federal Women, Infants and Children program.
“Our basic decision in the agency was, if we can serve clients and there are targets of opportunity and there is money and it helps people, then we ought to do it,” said Jimmy Lago, associate executive director of Catholic Charities.
The beneficiaries of Catholic Charities are often unaware of the connection to the archdiocese. They just like what they see.
Loney Elford, 87, lives at Tolton Manor, a seniors’ residence in the city’s Englewood neighborhood. She is the oldest and certainly one of the most gregarious residents of the home, which was built with federal funds but is administered by Catholic Charities.
More Top Picks Best Gliders For Nurseries
“I’m going to tell you something,” said Elford, who went back and forth from between several homes and shelters before settling at Tolton Manor. “I passed by here when there were just a few bricks on the ground. I said, `I don’t know what’s going to be there, but whatever it is, I’m going to live there.’ “
“There’s an exuberance about this building,” chimed in Alphonso Steward Sr., 62, a retired teacher. “It’s really amazing about the people who have come to live in this building. Just like it was in the plan.”
Now that Bernardin is gone, though, all eyes are on Rome, where the same pope who chose Bernardin will probably name his sucessor sometime in early 1997. His choice will signal the priority the pontiff places on issues in the archdiocese and what direction he foresees for the Chicago archdiocese.
Regardless of who is named by the Vatican, he will face some of the same problems that dogged Bernardin.
If anything, the loss of priests, nuns and monks who have traditionally done the bulk of the church’s work has gotten worse.
By the year 2000, the archdiocese will have less than half the number of priests who were serving parishes in 1975. The shortage not only increases the stress on those who remain but it leaves some parishes without a priest.
At one church, Bernardin appointed a nun to act as administrator, performing virtually all the functions of a rector except saying mass and hearing confessions.
But the shortage of nuns is even more acute than the shortage of priests.
“I think the greatest treasure of the 20th Century was the work of the women religious,” said Monsignor Jack Egan, 80, one of the archdiocese’s leading social activists through the middle of the century. “I think the greatest tragedy of the 20th Century is the loss of the women religious.’
Because nuns have traditionally been the teachers, nurses and caretakers in Catholic institutions, their loss precipitated a crisis throughout the archdiocese as institutions tried to find and pay laypeople to replace them.
And then there is the dissent that wracks the church here and elsewhere. Disagreement over the direction of the church is nothing new in Chicago.
Mundelein, the builder
The early decades of Catholicism here are peppered with stories of conflict, even violence, as different waves of immigrants vied to establish their faith and their cultures.
In 1858, the clash between the Irish bishop and the French parishioners of St. Louis Church ended with the Loop church jacked 4 feet off the ground so no one could use it. In 1869, Germans and Poles at St. Boniface Church began brawling in the center aisle during a Sunday mass.
As late as 1906, a dispute over control of a Lithuanian parish ended in riot as police surrounded the rector while angry parishioners pelted him with paving stones and stabbed at the police with hatpins, according to newspaper accounts.
That changed with the arrival of Mundelein, a prodigy of German ancestry. Brooklyn-born and educated in Rome, he was determined to Americanize the church.
Under his leadership, the archdiocese began to flex its muscles in the city, sometimes in gaudy fashion.
Chauffeured around in a limousine that had scarlet wheel struts, Mundelein made no small plans. He built 250 churches and St. Mary of the Lake Seminary in the village that now bears his name.
Mundelein helped the church spread through the everyday life of the city, giving it the central influence it has today–even if its leaders no longer hobnob with presidents and dictate to mayors.
According to scholar Edward Kantowicz, Mundelein at one point had final approval over the hiring of Catholic city workers. He got laws passed in Springfield and eventually became an emissary for President Franklin Roosevelt.
Mundelein was made “the first cardinal of the West” in 1924. But it was in 1926, when the archdiocese was host for the worldwide Eucharistic Congress, that Mundelein’s vision of American Catholicism truly came of age.
Mundelein chartered a special train, its 15 cars painted scarlet, to bring the 15 attending cardinals to Chicago.
Jack Egan was in 5th grade at the time, a year too young to join the tens of thousands of students dismissed from Catholic schools in Chicago to attend an enormous mass at Soldier Field.
But even at that tender age, the significance of the Eucharistic Congress–held in the city that loves world’s fairs and national political conventions–was not lost on Egan, who decided a few years later to join the priesthood.
“The Eucharistic Congress marks the point where the (Catholic) church became not just parishes but a force to be reckoned with in the city,” Egan said.
During the decades that followed, peaking shortly before Vatican II, the archdiocese built a momentum for change that made it the talk of the Catholic Church in the U.S. and even overseas.
Monsignor Reynold Hillenbrand, the rector chosen by Mundelein for his new seminary, pioneered changes in the liturgy and a more active role for the church socially and politically.
Auxiliary Bishop Bernard Sheil joined boxing and Christianity in the Catholic Youth Organization, then went on to found a school for adult education, a radio station and a bookstore.
Then-Rev. Egan was the first director of Cana, an experimental marriage-education program that spread through the archdiocese, around the nation and eventually overseas. He went on to fight for the poor of the inner city as part of an interfaith organization.
“I would say that our archdiocese was ready for Vatican II more than any other place in the world, liturgically, socially,” Egan said.
But the momentum for change got lost in the turmoil that followed Vatican II, and the pendulum gradually swung back to the less dramatic but more pervasive form of dissent evident in Chicago today.
New and different voices
Call to Action, perhaps the most prominent voice for progressive Catholics in the nation, is headquartered in Chicago.
Yet the city also is home to the first American parish run by Opus Dei, a worldwide society of Catholics who are highly traditional and deeply loyal to Pope John Paul II and his hard-line stances.
Bernardin was beloved by Chicago progressives, yet he also assigned the parish to Opus Dei. In his search for common ground, Bernardin carefully walked a line between sympathy for Catholic reformers and loyalty to church teachings.
Now that he is gone, some local Catholics worry that the rifts among them will spread.
On Dec. 8 at St. Edmund’s Church in Oak Park, 50 members of a new local chapter of Call to Action were greeted by about two dozen shouting, sign-carrying conservative Catholic protesters in a confrontation that some believe is an indication of growing intolerance in the archdiocese.
“I didn’t think this would happen quite so quickly,” said Deirdre O’Neal, a Call to Action member from Naperville who attended the meeting. “But I think this is symptomatic of what is happening all over the country.”
And, O’Neal added, it seems to be getting worse, not better.
Ironically, the one man in a position to unite Catholics here and elsewhere, Pope John Paul II, seems to be the lightning rod for dissent, splitting Catholics according to their reaction to him.
Just 17 years ago, thousands of people lined Milwaukee Avenue to catch a glimpse of Pope John Paul II’s motorcade as it made its way into the heart of the city on Oct. 4. The next day, about 100,000 people crowded into a chilly Grant Park to attend an open-air mass celebrated by the charismatic leader who was giving new life to the church worldwide.
Today, the pope is no longer a rallying point for the city, but a symbol of the divisions in the church that often appear most vividly in Chicago.
Some Catholics welcome his attacks on modern culture and his demands for adherence to tradition. But in the Chicago archdiocese, with its tradition of innovation and reform, many see the pope as a throwback to a church they have outgrown.
Egan and others hope that the outpouring of affection and respect that marked Bernardin’s death might be the signal for a new beginning for Catholics in Chicago.
The lines of mourners that stretched around the 20th Century gothic grandeur of Holy Name Cathedral and the thousands who lined city streets to pay their respects to Bernardin spoke worlds about the positive influence the cardinal had on Catholics and non-Catholics.
But Bernardin also left behind the pioneer spirit that marked the first days of the archdiocese in the person of Catholics such as Austin Alex Eiland, a boy who is a vessel of the hope and optimism that has helped the church survive for centuries
One Sunday last month, Eiland, swaddled in white satin, awoke with a startle. Someone was splashing water on his forehead.
As he blinked and squirmed, his eyes quickly lit on the 10,000-gallon immersion pool of St. Benedict the African Church, 340 W. 66th St. The pool is perhaps the largest Roman Catholic baptismal font in the world.
Even in the unpredictable world of Chicago Catholicism, a room-sized sacramental basin walled in by boulders rates a double take. Architecturally, doctrinally and emotionally, this is not the familiar Catholic church of musty chants and Irish brogues.
Gently evocative of an African hut, the circular nave of St. Benedict the African is part of an innovative construction project undertaken in the landmark year of 1990, even as the archdiocese closed or merged 33 other parishes.
St. Benedict the African was a hybrid of five defunct parishes, centered in a rundown section of Englewood. The Catholics who remained in the neighborhood wanted a church of their own, a setting that reflected their roots in Africa and America, a congenial place to celebrate the Roman liturgy to a gospel backbeat. They found a champion in Bernardin, who pledged that the archdiocese would pay for a new building if parishioners could raise $500,000.
That process, according to Austin Alex’s grandfather, energized St. Benedict the African.
“Previously, we were sort of a passive membership. We came to church and we followed the schedule, but we had little or no input,” said Arthur Eiland, 72, a member of South Side parishes for half a century. “Life was simple because you didn’t have to worry about it.”
More Top Picks Best Propane Patio Heaters
“Now, there’s an ownership here. We feel this is our church.”
The style is entirely different but the enthusiasm is the same in the Lake County village of Gurnee, where the newest suburban parish, St. Paul the Apostle, meets each Sunday in a public school building.
St. Paul the Apostle was created by the archdiocese four years ago. At the first meeting of the parish, 165 people showed up.
The parish now numbers 1,500 families, who crowd into folding chairs for mass, while 740 CCD students are strewn through the corridors of the school on a Sunday morning.
Rev. Philip Nessinger, one of two Carmelite priests who were asked to come to Chicago to launch the parish, said that if the quarters are cramped, the rewards of working with a new parish are refreshing.
“There’s an awful lot of spirit. You develop liturgy that speaks to people. You develop music that moves people,” he said. “Kids are wandering around all the time. It’s wonderful. This is the church they are going to be married in some day.”
That, archdiocesan officials say, is the substance they need to focus on. Rev. Michael Place, a theologian and one of Bernardin’s key advisers, maintains that if church leaders concentrate on the substance of worshiping, the rest–attendance, money, politics–will fall into place.
“People want to be drawn into a dream,” he said, “not a problem.”
———-
THE SERIES
DAY 1: The Vatican’s global challenge.
DAY 2: Protestant inroads in Latin America.
DAY 3: Africa offers opportunity.
DAY 4: Recruiting and keeping new priests.
DAY 5: Poland and the limits of church power.
DAY 6: The changing American church.
DAY 7: Inside the Chicago archdiocese.
DAY 8: Life and doubt at the seminary.
DAY 9: The lop-sided world of Catholic schools.
DAY 10: Catholic hospitals’ spiritual battle.
DAY 11: Stories of dissent and departure.
DAY 12: The changing face of one parish.