Parish closings: A year later

The Sunday after St. Gelasius Parish closed last summer, nearby St. Thomas the Apostle Parish in Hyde Park opened its doors and its arms to the parishioners.

Only a little over a mile away and led by the same pastor, it seemed a good fit for many of the roughly 120 Catholics who worshipped at St. Gelasius most weeks. To welcome them, Carmelite Father Michael Mulhall asked the St. Gelasius parishioners to walk in procession into the center aisle, as St. Thomas the Apostle parishioners stretched out welcoming hands and drew them into the pews.

Following the liturgy, a picnic organized by members of both parish hospitality committees offered a chance for parishioners to get to know one another.

At another South Side parish, St. Helena of the Cross, members threw a big party to welcome former members of Assumption B.V.M./St. Catherine of Genoa Parish, which closed just after Easter, 2002. About 60 of the 75 to 80 parishioners originally made the move, and most have stayed, said St. Helena pastor Father Thomas Kaminski.

“When they came, I thought they would just be extra parishioners, which would be nice to have,” Kaminski said. “But these folks have had a tremendous impact. They have brought in some new enthusiasm, new ministries. They’ve blended into everything. They are lectors, Communion ministers, commentators. They brought over the Knights and Ladies of St. Peter Claver, which we never had before, and some of our ladies have joined them, and they have joined our ladies’ group. They restarted the Sunday school program. … I consider their coming here a tremendous blessing.”

That was how it was supposed to work when the archdiocese announced plans to close four South Side parishes in the spring and summer of 2002. The parishes, all in Vicariate VI, suffered from low attendance, staggering debt and crushing capital needs to repair or maintain churches that had been built for larger congregations 80 to 100 years ago.

They were selected with the input of the Parishes Task Force of the Black Catholic Convocation, with the idea that their parishioners would move in large groups and strengthen other, more viable South Side black parishes.

A year later, Mulhall—who assumed the pastor’s duties at St. Thomas the Apostle between finding out that St. Gelasius was to close and its actual closing—said he regularly sees about 50 former St. Gelasius parishioners at St. Thomas, including Deacon James P. Morgan, and that another group moved en masse to Our Lady of Peace Parish, 7851 S. Jeffery, to start a chapter of the Knights and Ladies of St. Peter Claver.

Others he keeps in touch with at funerals and through other parishioners. While most seem to have found spiritual homes, many still harbor feelings of ambivalence and anger about what happened.

After all, St. Gelasius, like Assumption B.V.M./St. Catherine of Genoa, had been created by merging older parishes only a dozen years earlier, and these closures uprooted many longtime parishioners for a second time, and left them with a sense of insecurity. That has been exacerbated for residents of the Woodlawn neighborhood around St. Gelasius as the archdiocese has moved to demolish the 80-year-old church, despite what parishioners have said was the understanding that the building would be kept with possibility of reopening if more Catholics move into the redeveloping neighborhood.

As the Catholic New World went to press, the city of Chicago had halted demolition work because preservationists protested that the permits gave the wrong address, but city officials said they could not stop the process indefinitely.

“When they closed Holy Cross, people were sad,” said Jewell Lee, who went from Holy Child to St. Gelasius in 1990 and then from St. Gelasius to Our Lady of Peace. “When they closed St. Gelasius, people were angry. It was the only Catholic Church in that neighborhood, and people are angry that they didn’t do more to keep that place open. This was the time everybody sort of scattered.”

Lee said many in the group of about 20 who moved to Our Lady of Peace were attracted by the invitation to bring their chapter of the Knights and Ladies of St. Peter Claver, and by the fact that the non-resident pastor, Father Lawrence Duris, had led them at Holy Cross long ago. Duris also serves as pastor at St. Philip Neri Parish, which welcomed parishioners from St. Leo the Great and St. Laurence, also closed last summer.

While Our Lady of Peace parishioners have been gracious, she said, she still doesn’t feel quite at home. The Mass schedule is different—“They have 8:30 and 11:30, and I’m used to 10,” Lee said—and she has yet to join anything. She knows of several parishioners who have stopped attending Catholic churches in favor of various Protestant and evangelical congregations in Woodlawn.

“They want to go where they know it won’t close,” she said.

For Dorothy West and her husband, Tommy, a deacon, who moved from Assumption B.V.M./St. Catherine to St. Helena, it’s been a different story.

“The people were loving, beautiful, caring. They threw a big party for us that first Sunday, really big,” said Dorothy West, who volunteers in St. Helena’s Ministry of Care, helped started Sunday school and remains active in Ladies of St. Peter Claver.

Kaminski set the tone, and the parish opened itself up, she said.

“Father Kaminski really wanted to work with the people, to help us become what God wants us to be, to feel that we are growing in spirit and in wisdom,” she said. “The people … to me it was a loving group, a family group, a prayerful group. Everybody there wants to be church.”

Deacon Tommy West started his ministry at St. Catherine after being ordained in 1982, and his one question is why they couldn’t have brought the two parishes together at St. Catherine, which had a larger church in a more prominent location.

“The pastor has done everything he can, and the people are open-hearted,” he said. “If other churches are going to merge, this is the way to do it. It’s people getting together and working together.”

Mulhall sees glimmers of that at St. Thomas the Apostle, but he hasn’t found it so easy to combine his two communities. While St. Thomas’ integrated Hyde Park, home to the University of Chicago, and St. Gelasius’ Woodlawn neighborhood bump into one another, they don’t blend, and the cultures of the parishes are different, he said.

“There are some things you cannot take with you, no matter how precious and beautiful they are,” Mulhall said. That includes St. Gelasius’ warm sense of hospitality and its lively, gospel music-style liturgy. “It’s been hard to integrate it into what we’ve been doing here. … I try to be a continuous link to what was good at the old parish, but you can’t simply add everything from the past to the present.”