It’s a fact of life: Parishes are born, grow and, sometimes, they die. This reality—affecting believers at four Chicago parishes this year—is painful, even life-changing for the people who endure it.

A parish, after all, as the accompanying stories attest, can be a deep-rooted part of their past and surely part of their present. And when there is no future, the pain is real.

Nor will that pain be lessened knowing that parish and school closings (stories, Page 16) are relatively common in the Archdiocese of Chicago and elsewhere, given growth, population shifts and other changes.

The Official Directory of the Archdiocese of Chicago lists hundreds of parishes, schools and other institutions that once served the people of God here but which have closed or consolidated since the archdiocese was born in 1844. The canonical process of closing a parish is not a simple one; there are financial, personnel, legal (church and civil) considerations. Consultations are made with the community and the local episcopal vicar before a recommendation is made to the cardinal.

But the process ultimately affects those who worship in that community.

Sacramental life is vital to those calling themselves Catholic. When and where we experienced the touch of God and his church are cherished memories. They surely will be also for those who have called St. Laurence, St. Gelasius, St. Leo and Assumption BVM/St. Catherine of Genoa home. The stories here—by staff writer Michelle Martin—tell of the past and the present, but also a little of the future since, though parishes close, faith and the church go on.

Three of the parishes close June 30; their stories appear below. Assumption BVM/St. Catherine of Genoa closed April 7. A report appeared in a previous issue of The Catholic New World.



Information on parishes, schools and other institutions which have closed in the Archdiocese of Chicago is available in the Official Archdiocesan Directory. To purchase a copy, call (312) 655-7777.

St. Gelasius
6415 S. Woodlawn Ave., Chicago



For John Woodford and Etta Williams, St. Gelasius Parish, 6415 S. Woodlawn, has become a place where they are needed.

Woodford, a Tolton Award winner, a Knight of St. Peter Claver and a eucharistic minister, gave the parish its name when it was created from the consolidation of Holy Cross and St. Clara/St. Cyril parishes in 1990. Then Woodford, previously a member of Holy Cross Parish, lobbied Cardinal George to find a relic of St. Gelasius, a fifth century black African pope, for the church.

Williams came to the parish, then known as St. Clara’s in 1962, and sent her children first to St. Clara School and then to St. Clara/St. Cyril. Raised a Baptist, it was their Catholic education that brought her to the faith.

“I got a lot of growth out of the parish,” said Williams. “Being so close to it, and so involved, it allowed me to question things.”

Through both mergers, the old St. Clara Church remained open, Williams said, and she never felt like she was losing her parish.

The closure of St. Gelasius will mean the end of the last Catholic parish in Woodlawn, said Carmelite Father Michael Mulhall, pastor for the past 10 years. But St. Gelasius will retain a presence with its food pantry, which will remain open and continue to provide supplies to hungry families from St. Gelasius rectory.

St. Gelasius is the only one of the four parishes to be closed that still has a functioning school. That, too, closes in June. Sharing parishes and donors contributed $100,000 to create a scholarship fund to help fifth- through seventh-graders pay their way at St. Philip Neri School next year.

Despite active and generous sharing parishes—especially St. Anne in Barrington—and parishioners who give nearly $20 per person in their Sunday envelopes, the small congregation could not sustain the parish and maintain the buildings, especially the church and school. While Woodlawn is being redeveloped, it won’t happen fast enough, Mulhall said.

“St. Gelasius is an island,” Woodford said. “They tore down everything around it.”

Still, the church will be “mothballed,” Mulhall said, in hopes that it can serve a new Catholic community in the future.

The closing liturgy will be the 10 a.m. Mass June 16, Mulhall said, to give him time to clean up and move before the end of the fiscal year. After the Mass, there willbe a catered party, so none of the parishioners has to work.

Mulhall hopes many of the 120 regular worshippers will attend St. Thomas of Apostle, where he has also been serving as pastor since March. But just as he had difficulty getting people from Hyde Park to worship in Woodlawn over the years, he doesn’t know how many St. Gelasius parishioners will come to St. Thomas.

“There’s a friendliness here, and a wonderful gospel liturgy,” he said. While the parish welcomes white people, “it’s a very African-American oriented experience.”

St. Thomas the Apostle, on the other hand, counts about one-third white, one-third black and one third Asian among its 1,600 families.

Woodford, for one, intends to follow Mulhall to St. Thomas. The former sheriff department deputy is no stranger to new experiences, having approached then-Archbishop George after his first Christmas liturgy at the Cook County Jail, and asked to go to Rome for his elevation to cardinal. Two months later, he went as the cardinal’s guest.

While in Rome, he learned of another St. Gelasius Church—one that was founded two years after Woodford’s home parish. It’s a shame, he said, that the first St. Gelasius Church in the world, as far as he knows, must close.

As for him, Woodford said, he’ll be “just another parishioner” at St. Thomas.

“I’ll be like a lost golf ball in high weeds,” he said.

Williams said she might look for another parish to avoid that feeling. “I prefer a smaller parish,” she said. “I’ll be comfortable, but not as comfortable. I’ll always be the new kid on the block.”

St. Laurence
7140 S. Dorchester Ave., Chicago



When Richard Knight first attended St. Laurence Parish, 7140 S. Dorchester Ave., in 1986, he “met no strangers,” he said.

Invited to the parish by his mother-in-law, Knight found a friendly, welcoming community, and he never left.

Evelyn Tibbs tells much the same story. She came to St. Laurence about four years ago, and felt so welcome she became a member, and soon began volunteering in the parish office three days a week—even though she has to take two buses to get there.

“The people in the parish are so friendly, so warm,” she said. “They give me lifts.”

But Knight, Tibbs and the rest of the parish’s more than 150 regular worshippers will have to find new spiritual homes after the parish closes its doors Mass June 30.

Father Gerald O’Reilly, pastor for 10 years, has encouraged members to attend St. Philip Neri Parish. At less than a mile away, it’s the nearest Catholic church, and it has the added advantage of being led by Father Lawrence Duris, who previously served as pastor of St. Laurence. St. Laurence, St. Philip Neri and Our Lady of Peace have often come together as a “tri-parish” for programs and activities over the past 10 years, O’Reilly said.

While there will be no official “closing” Mass June 30 (“After the 10:30 Mass we’ll just close up the tent,” O’Reilly said.) parishioners gathered with Cardinal George to celebrate the last First Communion Mass June 2 (first communicants Akilah Lee and Angelique Greer are shown on the cover) and then had a banquet at the Martinique in Evergreen Park.

News of the closing was not officially announced until March, but parishioners were notified by Bishop Joseph Perry, episcopal vicar of Vicariate VI towards the end of last year. Knight said it came as a shock to the small but stable community that had recently pledged more than $100,000 to “Sharing Christ’s Gifts,” the archdiocesan millennium campaign designed to raise capital funds for parishes and other needs.

O’Reilly said the parish had not received a grant from the archdiocese in four years, but it had more than $106,000 in debt and buildings in need of repair. The school building left vacant after the school closed in 1994 was a concern, and the parish could not find anyone to lease it.

For Knight, part of the shock came from parishioners’ belief that they were in no danger of being closed, after Bishop Perry was invited to visit and hear about the millennium campaign’s success last summer.

“In six or eight months, what changed?” Knight said.

That disbelief led him and a group of other parishioners to protest in front of Holy Name Cathedral in January. But as the months have passed, the protest committee became a transition committee. Knight plans to attend St. Philip Neri, with, he hopes, most of the members of his faith family from St. Laurence.

“I’m sad to say now that I’m at the place where I want it to hurry up and be over, to end the hurting,” Knight said at the end of May. “But there’s a part of me … I still want this miracle.”

St. Leo the Great
7747 S. Emerald Ave., Chicago



At the end of May, Edward Moses was still playing the lottery, hoping to strike it rich. “If I hit it, St. Leo’s will be out of trouble,” Moses said, laughing. “You live on hope.”

Moses and his wife, Dorothy, have been members of St. Leo the Great Parish, 7747 S. Emerald Ave., since 1964, and they still have friends there who have been members as long as they have.

It’s those people, and others he has met through the years, that he will miss most once St. Leo shuts its doors following the closing Mass at 9 a.m. June 30. The Mass will be followed by a potluck lunch.

Despite hoping against hope that the church where he saw his grandson baptized will not be closed, Moses looks at it philosophically.

“There are adjustments that have to be made, and you just have to live with it,” said Moses, who plans to attend St. Kilian Parish following the closing of St. Leo.

Pastor Father Michael Furlan held a meeting with parishioners May 25 to discuss their future church plans, but by that time, many of the 200 regular worshippers had left.

The parish was notified in November 2001 that it would close at the end of the fiscal year, at a time when its leaders were trying to figure out how to make the parish work after the closing of its school the previous summer.

Losing the school meant losing some of the school families, Furlan said,

“We were trying to regroup and redirect our energies, and then we found out that the parish would close at the end of the year,” Furlan said.

The parish had operated at a deficit for several years, but the deficit was slowly getting smaller. Where five years ago, it needed money from the archdiocese to meet payroll and pay bills, this year it was only unable to meet its archdiocesan commitments.

“It was kind of a big turnaround,” he said. “But we ran out of time before we ran out of deficit.”

The parish had built up a debt of more than $1 million, and had no money for significant capital needs.

Moses said the welcoming, friendly relationship between the parishioners, the programs they devised and the community involvement of the parish will be missed most.

He served on evangelization teams that tried to bring former parishioners back and draw new people to St. Leo, but that was always difficult, he said.

“People don’t want to be told what to do,” he said. “You just have to try to do what you can do by example. That’s what my wife and I have always done.”