“My vow must be kept so long as this church stands. Let those seven lights be lighted today, … and I charge you to keep them burning until time has erased this house of God.”
Rev. Arnold Damen, Founder of Holy Family Church.
Neither time nor urban decay have erased the 137-year West Side church nor snuffed out the seven lights burning in its sanctuary.
Saved from the wrecking ball seven years ago, the Victorian Gothic church at 1080 W. Roosevelt Rd. will rededicate its now-famous shrine to Our Lady of Perpetual Help during a ceremony at 1 p.m. Sunday. The ceremony will be preceded by an open house at 11 a.m.
The celebration comes almost seven years to the day that a dedicated group of parishioners and preservationists raised the last of more than $1 million in a two-year campaign to keep Damen’s candles aglow.
The lights, ignited at the shrine by Damen to thank God for sparing the church from the Great Chicago Fire, have burned continually ever since.
“It’s been a long and inspiring journey to save this church, but we’re in the home stretch now, and we are delighted to be able to celebrate this historic moment and to share it with the people who made it possible,” said Rev. George A. Lane, who led the restoration effort.
“We’ve believed all along that we were saving the past to serve the future.”
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Holy Family’s past began in 1857 when Damen, a Jesuit missionary, arrived in Chicago and began building a church in a then-desolate area with the nickels and dimes of the area’s Irish and German immigrants.
The church eventually grew to 25,000 members, making it for a time, the largest in the country.
In 1871, Damen was in New York on a fundraising mission when he received word that a fire was raging back home and appeared to be closing in on his beloved church. Dropping to his knees on the spot, he prayed for a miracle, promising to keep seven candles lit in perpetuity if the church was spared.
It was. And Damen later placed the candles in the east transept of the church at the shrine to Our Lady of Perpetual Help.
In later years, the candles were replaced by gas jets, then by electric candles.
By the mid-1980s, urban rot and suburban flight left Holy Family in disrepair. The Jesuits closed the church in 1984 and announced plans to tear it down, though Damen’s seven lights stayed lit.
Although the number of parishioners had dwindled to a mere 250 by then, they embarked on a remarkable campaign to raise the millions needed to restore their sanctuary, an effort that captured nationwide attention.
To date, they have raised nearly $4 million, which has paid for improvements such as a new roof, tuckpointing the building and upgrading the heating system. More impressive, though, the donations paved the way for a breathtaking renaissance of the interior of the church.
A decade ago, a century’s worth of grime coated Holy Family’s sanctuary walls, caked its 150 statues and darkened its magnificent oil paintings.
“It was cold, dark and gloomy,” recalled Bill Reidy, chairman of the Holy Family Preservation Society.
But under the direction of restoration architect John Vinci, a group of artisans and crafts people warmed, brightened and enlivened the sanctuary.
Using a 97-year-old photograph and scientific analysis, they replaced the exact shades of rose, beige and gold paint used on the sanctuary’s three-foot thick walls. Then, with the aid of a hand drawn stencil pattern, they replicated a gold ban of intricate ornamental work along those walls.
Crafts people repaired and repainted each of the church’s 150 hand carved wooden statues. All, that is, except for the gold-leafed statue of St. Patrick, which is undergoing more extensive restoration.
The stained glass windows, some of the oldest in the Chicago area, were cleaned and brightened.
Finally, nearly 20 oil paintings, including the 19th-Century works depicting the Stations of the Cross and an 1860 copy of Murillo’s portrait of the Holy Family, were treated and restored by a team from the Art Institute of Chicago.
The Shrine of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, which consists of a 127-year-old statue and two oil paintings, also has been restored.
“It’s been a labor of love for many of us,” Reidy said earlier this week. “Now it’s time to celebrate that labor of love.”