Interview - Catholics weave together the fabric of Chicago

Ellen Skerrett, known as a “social historian” of Chicago, has been interested in the history of Catholics in Chicago since she was a college student in the late 1960s and early ’70s. But her Catholic roots go beyond that. Baptized at St. Dorothy Parish in the South Side, she grew up in St. Christina Parish and now counts herself as a member of St. Cajetan—identifying herself as generations of Chicagoans have, by parish community. More than 30 years of research into the fabric of Chicago communities has given Skerrett an intense appreciation of the role the church has played in the life of Chicago and its residents.

The Catholic New World: How did you get interested in Chicago Catholic history?

Ellen Skerrett: It was when I was a reporter for the Southtown Economist. That was how I worked my way through college, in the summer. I was covering the South Side and racial issues, and at night I was reading James T. Farrell’s novels—Studs Lonigan and the Danny O’Neal novels—and it was really there that I saw how much the parish was just a part of the fabric of urban life for the first time. He was talking about St. Anselm’s, and the parish was really the center of the world for Irish people in a very diverse Washington Park neighborhood. This was a world that I knew, because I lived it and so did my parents, and here it was in literature.

As I went on at the University of Chicago, I never really lost this interest in looking at the city through a parochial lens, because that’s how most Catholics experience it. I never found it in any of the literature, which mystified me, and continues to mystify me, in a city where the physical Catholic presence is so great. You can’t go very far in the city without encountering a Catholic church, a school, a hospital, and this was invisible in the history that had been written about Chicago.

TCNW: Why do you think the academics missed it?

ES: Generally, they don’t look at religion to begin with, unless the religion is seen as exotic or unnatural. But that’s not the lived experience. Continually, in my work, I’ve been looking for “How do people live?” and Catholics’ conception of city life is so different from Jews’ and Protestants’.

One way to look at it as a historian is look at parishes, and the way the city is mapped out into parishes, and the way people really did internalize parish boundaries. Sometimes this is portrayed as a bad thing, that Catholics are parochial. It depends on your perspective. If you read the literature in the 1920s, when Protestant ministers were very concerned about the explosion of steam-heat apartment buildings in urban neighborhoods, they thought they weren’t going to be able to keep congregations together. Not so for Catholics. In fact, if you look at the development, you’ll find that the concentration of so many families in a neighborhood like Austin or Washington Park made it easier to build a church and a school right from the start, and it strengthened those links between parish and neighborhood.

TCNW: When did Catholics become a presence in Chicago?

ES: One of the things I’m working on now is an exhibit on Catholic Chicago for the Chicago Historical Society (scheduled to open in 2007)—Rosemary Adams is the other co-curator—and we found a wonderful 1857 map, the Palmatary Map, and you can see clearly that Catholic churches are already landmarks on the urban landscape. …

The Catholic Church grew up with Chicago. It was here right from the beginning, from 1833 on. It wasn’t just churches; it was hospitals and charitable institutions and the building we’re sitting in right now (Catholic Charities’ St. Vincent Center, 721 N. LaSalle St.) was the foundling hospital for the entire city in the 1880s. It wasn’t a ghetto Catholicism. Catholics in the city were fully engaged with the larger city.

TCNW: How does the Catholic nature of the city make Chicago different?

ES: There’s always been a component of social activism here, looking out for the poor, looking out for the needy. Education has been one of the great achievements of this diocese. Even before the third Baltimore Council of 1884, which mandated “a parochial school in every parish,” the system was already in place in Chicago. Chicago has been so ahead of the curve in so many things. Look at the national movements that came out of Chicago: the Cana movement, many of the novenas that took on national recognition. Just last Friday I was at the dedication of the monument to Msgr. (Jack) Egan (See Page 16), right out there on the corner in the DePaul neighborhood, and there have been Catholic movers and shakers here who have really made a difference in terms of the sensibility of the city. It’s not just building walls around Catholics. It’s what’s good for the entire city.

TCNW: How important was the church building to a parish?

ES: It was a great marker of identity. Bricks and mortar have mattered. The larger city couldn’t ignore it. It was right there. It was in your face. The Palmatary Map that I mentioned earlier shows Holy Name Cathedral overshadowing St. James Episcopal. There it is, larger than life. The tensions that went on—in 1857, the Tribune did a thing saying it was fine for middle class Protestants to build beautiful churches. That was the natural order of things. For impoverished Catholics, the Tribune was very insistent that they should not be spending money on these churches. What the Tribune suggested was to turn Holy Name Cathedral into a workshop for the unemployed, where “the hum of satisfied industry would replace lavish religious ceremonies.”

Catholics did both. They were never just building churches to build churches. It was part of their faith, their experience. The churches were open seven days a week. When I was growing up in the city in the 1950s, churches were open. Kids stopped in all the time; so did adults.

TCNW: Why was it worth it to Catholics to spend their money on beautiful churches?

ES: The thing that strikes you over and over again is that in these working class neighborhoods, the church was the most beautiful place. You had several churches in close proximity, and each was different. The social scientists, and some Catholics, would say, “Why did they need so many churches? Couldn’t everybody get along and go to one place?” But when you look at the interiors of these different churches, you see how the different groups really put their imprint on them. For instance, you go to a Polish church like St. Adalbert’s, and there is a huge shrine to Our Lady of Czestochowa. But very close by is a huge shrine to Our Lady of Guadalupe, and you know that something very important has happened not only in the parish, but also in the surrounding neighborhood, and that change is reflected in the interior of the church.

TCNW: Why was art—stained glass windows and statues and paintings—so important?

ES: Catholics sometimes don’t understand how special their experience has been in terms of the visual arts, in terms of the paintings in Catholic classrooms or the churches or other beautiful places. There were statues and altars and stained glass windows that showed women in them. This was not the norm for Protestant churches or Jewish synagogues. …

The poorest (Catholic) church in Chicago still had marks of refinement.

The other thing that was important was that working class people paid for them themselves. The bazaars, the fairs, 10 cents a vote—here in parishes in the 19th century, you have women voting, 10 cents a votre for the most popular girl or young man. It was great practice for citizenship, although I’m not sure the reformers saw it that way. This connected people to their place. It wasn’t some philanthropist creating this for them. It was theirs, and that’s an important difference.

The signals a beautiful church sent to the people in the pews, about dignity, about their worth as human beings, no matter how poor, that when they came to church, they were surrounded by beauty. Talk about the preferential option for the poor. It played a huge role, and it wasn’t just charity.

TCNW: How else has the church changed the metropolitan area?

ES: Certainly I can’t say enough about the difference education has made in this city … the parochial schools, the high schools, the colleges. It really helped working class kids become middle class. That’s a marvelous accomplishment, and it crosses racial and ethnic boundaries. Yet we don’t know much of that story. I don’t know why historians don’t find it interesting and fascinating, but it’s very clear. Even someone like James T. Farrell, it was his eighth grade teacher who suggested that he might want to be a writer, that he had this gift. It was nurtured by the Carmelites at Mount Carmel, and he went off to the University of Chicago, and some would say lost his faith. But he continued to write about this Catholic experience. You can’t get much more powerful than that in terms of influence.

In terms of women and influence, teaching, like housework, is taken so for granted. Yet it makes a very real difference in the lives of ordinary people. I mourn the fact that the stories of women religious are not better known. We need to understand what nuns were able to do, even behind convent walls. Nuns became visible marching in Selma, but in this city, they were on the front lines in the classrooms, in the black belt, from 1912 on. One of the things Sue Ellen Hoy has discovered in her research is that the women from Mother Katharine Drexel’s order, who worked entirely in black parishes, were themselves working class, many of them Irish immigrants and the daughters of Irish immigrants. They were much closer to the people they were serving than Protestant settlement workers, who did not cross racial lines. They didn’t live in the black neighborhoods. Catholics have to write their history. They really do. That’s part of the problem.

TCNW: How much of an impact did nuns have?

ES: On the issue of women in the city—talk about sins of omission in the standard histories of Chicago—the nuns didn’t write their histories, and it’s so very sad. Generally, nuns are not included in women’s history, and yet in the 1800s in Chicago, they were buying and selling property, they were battling with bishops, they were incorporating their institutions—this at a time when Protestant women, philanthropists, had to rely on their husbands to accomplish these same things. We don’t know this history. It’s really a shame.

TCNW: You seem to emphasize the ways the church has worked to bridge racial divisions, but while most Chicago histories look at the way parishes divided racial and ethnic groups. Does religion get a bad rap here?

ES: The quieter stuff isn’t as interesting. But look at a parish like St. Anselm’s. This was the parish that was going to keep the neighborhood white. That’s what the Irish pastor certainly hoped would happen. It didn’t. It was built for all the wrong reasons, and yet it became one of the central institutions for African-American Catholics on the South Side of Chicago. It’s now the old neighborhood parish for many African Americans, who, like the Irish, moved up and on and out. When they come back, this is the parish that they remember as children. It’s a sacred space, and it has functioned as sacred space for two very different groups of people, and I find that quite remarkable.

Yes, there were tensions around racial change and changing neighborhoods, but for most part, Catholics kept those doors open and welcomed in new groups.

There’s so much Catholics have in common because of their Catholic backgrounds. Catholic parishes have been special places, but they often change over time and become special places for new groups. We need to know more about that.

Often, it’s more a story of cooperation than competition or conflict, Often, historians will look at conflict, and oftentimes the stories end there. I’m more interested in what are the connections between groups, the way that Catholic culture could break down barriers between groups. For instance, Cardinal George’s grandparents—his grandmother was from Holy Family (on Roosevelt Road) and his grandfather was from the German parish of St. Francis of Assisi right down the block. I would argue that Catholic ritual and experience gave them a basis. When you look at religion and the difference it makes, you get a different narrative.

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