Memories of the Mother Church

It was 1917. Pauline Williams went to a playground near her home at 45th and Dearborn. She wore her Sunday best, but she didn’t go home that way. An older girl bullied Williams, ripping the tie from her dress.

“It was just like she raised the red flag in front of a bull,” said Williams, now silver-haired, remembering the incident.

“I put my head down and rammed her,” she said. “I had never fought before, but I did that day. And I’ve been fighting ever since.”

Talking to this feisty octogenarian in her home in Evanston, it’s clear there’s a lot of fight left in her.

The battle Williams is currently waging questions how history is remembered. It also shows the sharp contrast between then and now over how the Catholic Church in Chicago has ministered to its black Catholics.

That playground scuffle led to Williams’ enrollment in St. Monica, home of the first black Catholic church and school in the Archdiocese of Chicago, a congregation that grew out of Tolton’s work at Old St. Mary’s.

Operated by the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, the religious order founded by Blessed Mother Katherine Drexel, Williams attended St. Monica School until it closed and officially “merged” into St. Elizabeth Parish in 1924.

Along with what Williams learned, she said she also appreciates what she wasn’t taught.

“I can say now I didn’t know what ‘black’ meant in terms of segregation while I was there. You were taught that you were a good person and if you kept God’s commandments, God would take care of you,” said Williams.

Of the sisters of Drexel’s order, who specialized in ministry to African-Americans and Native Americans, Williams said, “They built up your hope and your faith and created an attitude inside you where you looked for the better angels in others.”

After skipping seventh grade to graduate with St. Monica’s last class, Williams lived in her native Kentucky before resettling in Evanston in 1927.
When she returned, she said, “One of the first things I did was walk down to St. Mary Church to let the pastor know I was Catholic and new to the area,” said Williams.

The response, she recalls, was icy.

“He gave me such a down feeling, I came out of there thinking ‘to hell with you white folks.’ I don’t have to go where nobody appreciates me or wants me,” said Williams.

Even a fighter understands the value of picking battles. Williams did not return to St. Mary’s.

She didn’t return to any Catholic Church for over 65 years.

Only later did she learn what she called the “sad facts” of church in Chicago at that time.

“I didn’t realize that we could belong to our church (St. Monica) but if we went to a white church, we could receive the sacraments, but we couldn’t be a part of it.”

In 1917, when Archbishop George Mundelein entrusted St. Monica to the Divine Word Fathers, he also bestowed upon the parish a double-edged blessing.

In a letter in the Nov. 2, 1917, issue of The New World, St. Monica was officially deemed the mother church for black Catholics. Mundelein wrote: “… I desire St. Monica’s to be reserved entirely for the colored Catholics of Chicago, and particularly of the South Side ….”

Then, as now, not all black Catholics lived in one of area of the city. Williams happened to live about a mile from the newly named “mother church.” What on its face was an honor, in hindsight, she now views as an official act of archdiocesan segregation.

“That still makes me mad,” she said.

She said delegations of St. Monica parishioners—black and white—unsuccessfully implored Mundelein to change his mind.

Today, Williams has begun waging a two-front fight to keep the memory of St. Monica alive.

The first stage is to return the name of the all-but-forgotten St. Monica to the present-day St. Elizabeth Parish. When Williams discovered the name—St. Monica—had been assigned to a North Side church, she was not happy. “I wonder if they know that they’re named after a black saint,” she said. Monica was born in northern Africa.

The second stage, no less personal, is to reclaim the rightful place of recognition for the parish that began in the basement of Old St. Mary’s Church (then at 9th and Wabash), the parish that welcomed Tolton as pastor and place where Williams was baptized and made her first Communion.

“I called Cardinal George to meet with him,” said Williams, who caught his ear briefly at Mass last December, celebrating the 75th anniversary of St. Monica’s merger into St. Elizabeth.

Cardinal George did meet with Williams, according to Daughter of the Heart of Mary Sister Anita Baird, who served as the cardinal’s executive assistant before her appointment as director of the newly created Office for Racial Justice in June.

Baird said she has, in fact, “encouraged” Williams regarding her desire to see St. Elizabeth renamed St. Monica or St. Monica-St. Elizabeth, acknowledging such a change would need to be initiated by its parishioners.

Such a process would have to be formally requested by its pastor to Auxiliary Bishop Joseph Perry. If the bishop agrees, he would present it to the cardinal.

In the meantime, there is another memory to honor: Williams will join St. Elizabeth’s Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament in Rome to witness the Oct. 1 canonization of Mother Drexel.

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