All afternoon, the Catolicos shopping for rosaries and crucifixes at the St. Jude Shrine Gift Shop in Pilsen were talking about Archbishop Francis George’s first words to his new diocese–not so much for the quality of those words, but for the language they were in.
This archbishop was speaking to them, fluently and spontaneously, in their own tongue, in Spanish.
“When someone speaks to you in your own language, it is something very emotional,” said Josefina Hernandez, a clerk at the store. “It touches you inside.”
“Hispanics are going to feel closer to him because he speaks Spanish,” she said. “We are going to feel as if we are in our own home.”
In parishes across the archdiocese–from Pilsen to Edgewater, from Lake County to Orland Park–Catholics began praying for their new archbishop Tuesday morning. But they also began watching him, listening to his words.
They were starting to measure the man, to see if they could, after all, turn their hearts over to him as they had to his predecessor.
An arranged marriage, one priest called it during a morning mass on the Far North Side. “And we wonder how it is going to work out,” said the priest, Rev. James McTiernan.
On Tuesday, the new archbishop was still a stranger. Parishioners were forced to sort through labels to find commonality between his reputed conservatism and his social activism.
Is he a listener? Is he strong on the business side?
And no matter how hard they tried, no matter how unfair they knew it was, they could not help but compare him to his predecessor, Cardinal Joseph Bernardin.
Perhaps no group was more heartened by what they heard Tuesday than Hispanic Catholics.
Hispanics now make up about one-third of the 2.3 million Catholics in the archdiocese, which encompasses Lake and Cook Counties. Churches founded decades ago by Czechs, Poles and Italians now have Mexicans, Central Americans and Puerto Ricans filling their pews. With change often comes tensions and misunderstanding.
“We need someone to talk for us,” said Margarita Lopez, director of education at St. Pius V Church in Pilsen.
“There’s no question that a gap of isolation exists between the diocese bureaucracy and Hispanic parishes,” said Rev. Jack Keehan, a priest at St. Ann’s Church, in Pilsen.
“There is always talk about promoting diversity, but Hispanic congregations are kind of off doing things on their own.”
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George comes to Chicago with a history of looking to the needs of Hispanic immigrants and migrant workers, especially when he was bishop in Yakima, Wash.
“We’d better pray for this guy,” Keehan said. “There’s a lot of history to overcome, and he’s going to need a lot of help from God.”
Of course, Hispanics weren’t the only Catholics talking about their new archbishop.
After a Tuesday morning mass at St. Gertrude’s Church in Edgewater, four women gathered in the cool, stone hallway to chat. Old-timers, they are the ones who still go to weekday morning mass.
Margie Hallinan, a fur hat pulled down on her head, said Pope John Paul II had done well to select a former Chicagoan.
“He’s in tune with neighborhood living,” Hallinan said. “Chicago is unique for being set up in neighborhoods, and he understands that already.”
“He knows many languages and has done a lot of traveling,” chimed in Sister Allan, a Franciscan nun. “For Chicago, that would be ideal, because it’s such a hodge-podge.”
“I feel sorry for him, in a way,” said Kay Tansey. “He has a hard act to follow. Cardinal Bernardin was a saint; many people think so.”
As the four women stepped out the door, wrapping scarves around their necks, women a generation younger walked past, pushing baby strollers, headed to their women’s prayer group meeting at the church.
Theresa Isaacson, 37, said she wanted to know about George’s purported conservatism.
“If we have some conservative stomp in here telling us we can’t do things: we can’t dip the host in the wine, I would laugh,” Isaacson said.
But she wouldn’t leave. “My Catholic faith is not dependent on who works downtown,” she said.
No parish was prouder than St. Pascal’s Church, where George had grown up.
“One of our boys made it!” said Dorothy Miller, a parishioner at the Northwest Side church for all but seven of her 79 years.
“We still call him Frannie, but I’m trying to switch over to Bishop George,” said Lorraine Christensen, 67, a childhood friend.
Earlier Tuesday, at Holy Name Cathedral, a small crowd gathered to see the new archbishop arrive.
Yolanda Surath of Chicago took his hand and kissed it, leaving her teary-eyed.
“My heart was so full of joy,” she said. “Those hands give us Jesus. It’s a blessing for me to be here.”
Rev. Wayne Watts, a teacher at Archbishop Quigley Preparatory Seminary, also went to the cathedral to get a glimpse of the new archbishop and to say morning mass with him.
He, too, nearly started to cry, though for different reasons.
“I felt it a little here,” said Watts, 32, tapping his chest. “This makes the archbishop’s passing a little more real. It’s both a joyful day and a little sorrowful.”
Watts said he hoped George would continue Bernardin’s Common Ground initiative, which attempts to bring together Catholicism’s disparate factions.
“I’d like to see him deal with racism and violence in the city,” Watts said. “What we really want to do is stay away from labels. What is important is the man and the compassion.”
At St. Michael’s Church in Orland Park, the largest church in the Chicago Archdiocese, Rev. Edward McLaughlin, the pastor, prayed for George at 9 a.m. mass.
“The Chicago Archdiocese is so big,” he said. “To unite all those people takes a great ability and a great skill.
“We hope the archbishop can pull us all together.”
After mass, Kathie Blanchfield, health educator at St. Michael’s School, said Chicago Catholics need to accept George without passing judgment.
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“The last cardinal transcended the labels,” she said of Bernardin. “It would be nice if this man could start without labels. Just say, `He is Francis George, your new leader.’ “