Bringing faith, history and hope into restorations

This week, Catholic New World staff writer Michelle Martin talks with Father Robert Kyfes, pastor of St. Bride Parish, 7811 S. Coles Ave.

	The Interview, a regular feature of The Catholic New World, is an in-depth conversation with a person whose words, actions or ideas affect today’s Catholic. It may be affirming of faith or confrontational. But it will always be stimulating.

Over four months in the summer of 1999, St. Bride parishioners transformed their 90-year-old church from a dark space filled with peeling paint and falling decals to a light, intimate worship space designed to encourage the active participation of the congregation. The restoration brought the South Side church closer to its original design and played up its most striking features, including German stained glass windows, all for about $135,000. The pastor, Father Robert Kyfes, gave a presentation about renovating churches on a tight budget July 3 at “Form/Reform: The National Conference on Environment and Art for Catholic Worship.” Beforehand, he talked with The Catholic New World.



The Catholic New World: Why did you decide you needed to renovate or restore the church?

Father Robert Kyfes: Well, nothing had been done in the church for about 45 years—no paint, no decorating of any kind, just some small, minor work to create gathering space in the back. We had these star decals, and the stars were literally falling from the ceiling. When they would fall, I would just leave them in place, so people would realize, like Chicken Little, that the sky was falling and we needed to do something.

When I arrived here in ’92, I learned that staff members had already been talking in the mid-’80s about doing some kind of restoration or renovation. I knew the 90th anniversary of the church itself was coming up. It seemed to me if anything was going to be done, we couldn’t wait for the centennial of the church, because all of the stars would have fallen by then.



TCNW: What did you decide needed to be done, and how much did you decide you could afford?

FRK: We aimed higher than what we thought we would get. We aimed for $175,000, and with that we could have done everything that we really wanted to do.

We had two goals. The first was to bring the church to a point where it was a beautiful space for liturgy, and we knew that for that, we needed intimacy and light. It was very dark inside. The lighting was not adequate. But we also knew that because people treasured the church so much, we couldn’t do anything drastic, and we didn’t want to. We were fortunate to find photographs from the 1920s, which revealed to us that the original design was very simple, compared with the elaborate poor art that had been added down through the years. We set a goal of restoring the space to closer to what it first looked like, then renovating to make it a space worthy of worship.



TCNW: You set your goal at $175,000. What did you end up with?

FRK: We ended up with $135,000, which meant that we couldn’t do the pool extension for the baptismal font or the screen to enclose the eucharistic chapel space. But that’s OK, because we can go back when we come up with the other $50,000 or so.



TCNW: Is one of the tricks to renovating on a budget being able to drop things from your plan?

FRK: Being able to drop things out, and also being able to reuse materials that were already in the church and getting volunteers to do some of the work, where possible.

The new sanctuary platform base was built by parishioners from one of our sharing parishes and some of our own parishioners. We saved about $6,000 doing that. The new altar was created by cutting off the front table portions of the side altars, and putting them together. That saved about $5,000. Our maintenance man tore out the old confessionals [one confessional remains], including cutting out the old electrical wiring that was no longer in use in that area, and that saved another bit of money.

Instead of carpeting the church, which we really didn’t want to do, we found that underneath the old carpeting was a layer of linoleum, and underneath that was a solid maple floor, the original floor. We were able to strip and restore that at a lower cost than installing new carpeting. … We re-used our old pews, solid oak benches that were in perfect condition.



TCNW: What did you do while the church was under construction?

FRK: During those four months, we moved Mass down into our church hall in the basement and shut the church down entirely. And because we were radically reconfiguring the assembly space, we were able to set up chairs and the sanctuary furnishings just the way they would be in the reconfigured space. We went from just a standard, straight-on configuration to a U-shape.



TCNW: Why?

FRK: The goal of intimacy. We have a small community, but a very, very close community. There was really a desire among parishioners to feel closer together. With the previous seating, we could hold 400 people, but we didn’t need that much space. With the new seating, we can comfortably hold about 250, and it brings everybody closer together around the tables of Word and Eucharist.



TCNW: What other advice will you share?

FRK: To find a design studio that you feel comfortable with. Find a studio that will listen to the needs of the community, and be flexible enough, both artistically and financially, to respond to those needs. Also, I would encourage other parishes to find volunteers who can do some of the work. They can help in many small ways to lower costs. There’s always a liability concern, of course, but there are things people are willing to do and have the skills to do.



TCNW: Where did the money come from?

FRK: About 80 percent from parishioners, about five percent from former parishioners and alumni of our school, and the other 15 percent from friends of mine from previous parishes and Chicago priests. But for a parish of only 180 families, $85,000 is a good amount of money. The biggest single donation was $7,000, and the next one down was $5,000. Most of the donations were in the $1,000 range. Over a two-year period, that’s a lot. And at the same time people were giving to the restoration fund, our Sunday collections went up 10 percent, and after the renovated church opened, collections went up 5 percent the next year. That went up another five percent this last year. So the restoration seems to have had a really a positive effect on people’s desire to give, because they appreciate the space they have in which to worship.

The key to having this project so well accepted by the community was giving people the assurance that we were not going to throw anything out. We weren’t going to come in and get rid of the statues, or anything that people had a real attachment to—nothing that was meant to be there from the beginning. The poor artwork and the decals that were up on the walls and the ceiling were not part of the original intention of the designers.