By Michelle Martin
Staff writer

As a boy, Auxiliary Bishop-designate Gustavo Garcia-Siller imagined that Chicago must be just across the border with his native Mexico.

After all, Chicago was the U.S. destination of choice for people from his home city of San Luis Potosi.

“People would always talk about going to see their cousin or their uncle in Chicago,” said Bishop Garcia-Siller, visiting the archdiocese in February to make preparations for his move here. “It wasn’t until I got older that I learned Chicago is far from Mexico.”

So far that Bishop Garcia-Siller, a Missionary of the Holy Spirit, had spent very little time here until he got a call from Archbishop Gabriel Montalvo, the apostolic pro-nuncio to the United States, telling him that he had been named to lead the church of Chicago as a bishop. Still, close enough that his parents learned of his appointment from neighbors with relatives in Chicago before he called them.

Bishop Garcia-Siller got his call less than two weeks after he became his order’s first provincial for the United States and Mexico, a position he assumed when the order created its first north-of-the-border province.

Until then, Bishop Garcia-Siller said, he had visited Chicago only twice, to offer missions, and had no opportunity to see anything but the airports and the mission sites.

The Jan. 14 call came as such a surprise Bishop Garcia-Siller said he at first thought it was a joke.

“The nuncio said, ‘Don’t be afraid. The pope is inviting you to help the church in Chicago,’” Garcia-Siller recalled a month after the phone call. “The place didn’t say much to me, except that so many people from my hometown are here, and that I worked with Cardinal George in Portland. …

“I had no idea. I never thought (about being a bishop), not even in my dreams. There are some priests who dream of these things, especially young priests who think ‘Someday, I will become a bishop,’ but usually it comes more easily to diocesan priests, because they work more with bishops in the seminary and so on. For me, it’s totally new. But I am all for it. This gives me the security of knowing that God wants me here.”

Bishop Garcia-Siller might be new to Chicago, but he isn’t new to the United States. His order sent him to minister to workers in California for the first time in 1980, four years before he was ordained, and he spent most of his priestly life on the West Coast.

“In 1980, when I was asked by my order to come to the U.S., they said, ‘We want you to go there for good and get rooted in the U.S.,’” he said. “It wasn’t temporary.”

Being both bilingual and bicultural probably helped draw the notice of the hierarchy when they were looking for priests to be made bishops, Garcia-Siller said.

His other strengths include the seven years he spent in the leadership of his order, his pastoral ministry, especially with immigrants in California and the Pacific Northwest and his supportive ministry to priests in giving them support and helping them to be good priests.

“I think that’s what called attention to me,” he said. “And I’m very people-oriented. I’m not shy.”

Garcia-Siller could hardly be shy, as the oldest of 15 children in a family that owned furniture stores in the industrial city of San Luis Potosi. While the family has ensconced itself comfortably in the middle-class, with members active both in politics and the local social scene, his father started by sweeping floors in the first furniture store he ended up owning.

His parents intended for their oldest boy to follow suit, and he worked with his father from the time he was 7 until he was 16, also starting by sweeping floors and washing windows before taking on more responsibility.

“It was a very, very religious family, but my feeling was that they were not encouraging me to become a priest,” Bishop Garcia-Siller said. But he knew he was called to the priesthood even as a young child.

“I knew from when I was 6 years old that I wanted to be a priest, since I received my first Holy Communion,” he said. “Since then, I have been going to Mass every day of my life.”

He is not the only child his parents have given to the church; a sister belongs to the women’s Missionaries of the Holy Spirit congregation and a brother is a diocesan priest in San Luis Potosi. The rest of his siblings have finished university and married, except the youngest, a 23-year-old brother, and he has 25 nieces and nephews—he thinks. Two of his brothers still work with his father.

When he joined his order in 1973, at age 16, the separation was hard on his family, Bishop Garcia-Siller said, although they visited him once a month. He has seen them less frequently since moving to the United States, he said, so the added distance of moving to Chicago will not make a big difference.

“At the beginning, it was difficult for them more than for me,” he said. “But with the years, I have seen that they love me more and I love them more.”

During his time in the United States, Bishop Garcia-Siller said, he has been struck by how—and how much—Americans value their families.

“In the Mexican culture, the family gives you identity,” he said. “In the American culture, the family gives you group support, but you find your own identity—which has a beautiful side effect. In America, if there is a family gathering, say for Thanksgiving, people will fly across the country to be there, no question. But you don’t have to see each other every day. My parents are still cooking three meals a day for 17 people—and we are all out of the house. But my brothers and sisters all live within about 10 minutes of my parents, and some stop by with their children for breakfast, some for lunch, some for dinner. It’s a different concept of family.”

On first arriving in the United States, he also noticed the diversity of churches—something that didn’t exist in San Luis Potosi when he left.

“On the way from the airport to the rectory, I saw a lot of churches, and I said there must be a lot of Catholic people here,” he said. “The priest who was driving me said, ‘None of those churches you saw was Catholic.’ I my hometown, when I left, there were maybe one and a half million people there, and there was only one Protestant church at that time. To know that Catholics are not the majority, I thought that ministry must be different, and I have to think differently.”

He also has found that Americans tend to look at time and efficiency differently, which probably stems from the cultural value Americans place on the individual.

“There is a different sense of individual responsibility and accountability,” he said. “In Mexico, we are hard workers, but the way of being responsible and accountable here is different. Everything is much more clear-cut.”

While Garcia-Siller feels comfortable in American culture, he knows he still has much to learn about the particular culture of Chicago and of the archdiocese. An architecture buff, he plans to spend time walking around the city. To help him get his bearings, Cardinal George gave him a book about Chicago history when he came for the announcement of his appointment in January.

That was the first he had heard of the Great Chicago Fire of 1871—and of the spirit of the people who rebuilt the city bigger and better. The topic so fascinates him that he incorporated flames into his bishop’s coat of arms—flames that symbolize both his congregation, the Missionaries of the Holy Spirit, and the spirit of the people of Chicago.

Coming from the West Coast, he also was surprised to learn that Chicago isn’t considered an eastern city.

“Now I find it is the gate of the West,” he said. “You know what it is to live on a frontier, and you became a key in the development of the country. I feel very much identified with that.”

He also has spent a lot of time with the archdiocesan directory, just to understand the conversations that go on around him at meetings where the names of people and parishes fly across the table.

Being the new kid in the archdiocese means he will face challenges foreign to his ordination-mates, both Chicago born and bred.

“For me, everything is new,” he said. “It takes longer to process things. When people mention names or parishes, I have to go and look in the directory. I have homework before and after every meeting.”

He learned in late February that he will take leadership of Vicariate V, the Southwest Side of the city and the Southwest suburbs, in May. The directory will tell him he has 77 parishes, 19 of which offer regular Masses in Spanish, 14 in Polish and others in six other languages. Retiring Auxiliary Bishop John Gorman has pointed out that the Catholic community in Vicariate V is bigger and more diverse than the vast majority of U.S. dioceses.

But Father Lawrence Dowling, pastor of St. Denis Parish and one of the deans, said he thinks the people of Vicariate V will welcome their new bishop.

“He can get a good flavor of Chicago here,” he said. “I think the hidden treasure is the people, and the generosity of the people. I find people here to be very honest. They are willing to challenge and willing to affirm, and I find that to be a gift.”

Garcia-Siller also will serve as the official liaison to Hispanic ministry for the whole archdiocese, but that will not restrict his ministry to others, he said.

“I’m not coming to work for the Hispanics only,” he said. “I am coming to work for all of the people of God in Chicago. … My hope is that people will be patient. My hope is to get to know all the parishes in my vicariate, at least to visit them.”

In those visits, he wants to meet and get to know the people, he said. “I can place seeds of hope in different hearts. I that hope my years here will spread as many seeds of hope as possible. For that, I need to listen a lot, to hear stories, to put faces to stories. I don’t want to hear only about the church. Give me faces. I don’t want to hear about the workers. Give me a face. Then that is one seed of hope I can plant.”