Ministry behind bars: 20 years of Kolbe House

By Michelle Martin
Staff writer

When Gilda Wagner first walked into the women’s division of the Cook County Jail as a volunteer 11 years ago, she did not feel scared or intimidated.

Despite the security, the staff members who admitted her and Deacon Jack Malone for a Sunday morning Communion service were courteous, even cordial.

But when she looked around at the women who gathered to share the Eucharist and their stories, she thought they must somehow be different from her.

After the service, as she listened to the stories of the detainees, her ears and her heart were opened.

“The people I was listening to were just regular human beings like myself,” said Wagner, now a part-time lay minister on the staff of Kolbe House, the archdiocesan ministry to detainees in the Cook and Lake County correctional institutions. “The stereotype that floats out there in society is that these people are different, that they must be lacking in something the rest of us have. … At first, I wondered, ‘How did they end up here?’ Then I realized that if I had their experiences, I might have ended up there too.”

Wagner and other members of the Kolbe House community celebrated the ministry’s 20th anniversary and the 100th anniversary of Assumption B.V.M. Parish—Kolbe House’s home base—with a procession, Mass celebrated by Cardinal George and picnic Aug. 10.

Father Lawrence Craig, Assumption’s pastor and Kolbe House’s director, recalled how he started the jail ministry with the blessing of Cardinal Joseph Bernardin and not much else.

Craig had been involved in jail chaplaincy since working at the Audy Home, Cook County’s juvenile detention center, as a seminarian, he said. When Cardinal Bernardin came to the archdiocese and asked the priests for ideas, Craig suggested a ministry to prisoners—one that would be an archdiocesan agency, but based in a parish that could become a kind of surrogate family to those who needed support.

“I thought, ‘What can the Catholic Church offer uniquely to the problem of the criminal justice system?’” Craig said. “What the Catholic Church can offer uniquely is community, the idea that God is incarnate in the community, the Body of Christ. With a parish-based criminal justice program, we would welcome the sinners to that community. … You can’t usually work with the average family of someone who’s locked up. It’s too late for that. But you can work to form the parish into that community that could be a safe, loving place. ”

Cardinal Bernardin liked the idea, but the pastor of Assumption Parish—located only two blocks from the Cook County Jail complex—didn’t, and neither did many of his parishioners.

“They had visions of convicts running around in striped suits,” Craig said.”

So Craig started the ministry in a vacant Catholic Charities building several miles away, with, he said, “no budget, no staff and no plan.”

But about a year later, he found himself pastor of Assumption Parish. In one way, that allowed him to move the jail ministry forward, but as pastor, he also had to find a way to solidify the parish base.

Now Assumption offers five Masses every weekend, including two in Spanish and one bilingual. The parish had fewer than 200 registered families when Craig arrived and now has 745 families that claim it as their spiritual home. Kolbe House has three full-time and seven part-time staff members, as well as a dedicated volunteer corps whose members do everything from one-to-one pastoral visits to offering Bible discussion groups.

At the same time, the number of people served by Kolbe House has grown exponentially. In 1975, Craig said, the Cook County Jail system had “a couple of thousand men” locked up on the average day, with far fewer, maybe a couple of hundred, women locked up. Now the average day sees about 12,000 men and 1,500 women confined in the jail complexes, either awaiting trial or serving sentences of less than a year. Over the course of a year, 25,000 to 30,000 people move through the system. Of those, more than a quarter are at least nominally Catholic.

Kolbe House provides direct service to them, as well as to those who have loved ones locked up and those who have been locked up or are at risk of being locked up in the future. For that reason, Craig has run a summer program for neighborhood youth every year since he arrived. (“My feeling is that all the young people in this neighborhood are at some risk of being locked up,” he said.)

“Sometimes we’re dealing in material needs,” Craig said. “It’s as crude and basic as socks and underwear, because you wear what you came in with unless you have money to buy something from the county commissary.”

Jail ministers also try to distribute Christmas and Mother’s Day cards, along with stamps, paper and pens, for inmates to send greetings to their families. Chaplains help jail staff by talking with them, as well as with the detainees, and by taking on tasks such as confirming deaths in detainees’ families.

For the family members, Kolbe House operates a small food pantry and clothes closet and in the past has done things like host a peer support group for people who had loved ones locked up.

“When that happens, they have to jump in and find out about things like court dates, visitation, etc., in a moment,” he said. “At the same time, it’s like having a death in the family, and their grieving, but it’s also a social stigma. People treat them like they did something wrong. … What we’re trying to do with this parish is make it a place where people feel like if they’re in trouble, they belong here.”

For Wagner, who came to Kolbe House as a volunteer after having her information management job moved out of state, it has become a place where she not only belongs, but finds fulfillment and satisfaction.

“This is where you come face to face with the poor, the marginalized, the people Jesus hung around with,” she said. “If he were alive today, this is where he’d be.”

 

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