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April 13 , 2008

Holy Name will stay closed until further notice Repairs to roof structure to take longer than anticipated

By Michelle Martin

ASSISTANT EDITOR

With Holy Name Cathedral closed until further notice, organizers of several events are scrambling to find alternate sites, while the clergy and pastoral staff work to maintain service for worshippers in other buildings.

Weekend Masses are being celebrated in the parish center auditorium, with daily Masses in the parish center’s lower level club room. Baptisms are celebrated in the cathedral chapel — which remains open during repairs to the main building — and confessions are being heard in the chapel at Casa Jesus, which occupies a former convent building next door to the cathedral.

Liturgies moved

But not all liturgies can be accommodated on the cathedral campus.

Cathedral staff members so far have helped 20 couples, with weddings scheduled for April and May, to relocate their ceremonies, said Father Dan Mayall, the cathedral’s pastor. Many are going to St. Joseph Church on Orleans, where Cardinal George celebrated the cathedral’s Easter Vigil Mass.

At least four high school graduations have been relocated, and the archdiocese will have to relocate the May 17 ordinations of 14 priests.

The cathedral was closed Feb. 12 after a chunk of wood fell from the decorative ceiling. The wood fell overnight, taking a gouge out of a pew and coming to rest near the sanctuary.

Workers erected scaffolding to allow weekend liturgies to continue in the 133-year-old church while they checked the rest of the wood ceiling. But engineers then discovered a larger problem: the wooden support beams holding up the roof were weakening and in need of support.

On March 11, the main cathedral building was closed while structural engineers worked out a solution. On March 26, archdiocesan officials announced that the cathedral would likely not reopen this spring, as previously hoped.

The details of the repair work have still not been completely nailed down, Mayall said.

“The engineer knows what he’s got to do,” Mayall said. “He just doesn’t know exactly how to fit that into a 133-year-old church.”

Wedding plans in flux

In the meantime, the parish sent letters to all couples who had weddings scheduled through the end of the summer, advising them that they might have to relocate. To give couples time to make arrangements, a final decision for each month will be made about six weeks before. So weddings for April and May have been moved; a decision about the 14 weddings planned for June will be made around April 15.

Lorraine Jo Polinsky Clark is among the brides who knows her wedding ceremony will be moved.

Clark married her husband, Steven D. Clark, in a civil ceremony four years ago as they awaited a final ruling on an annulment. That wedding took place on May 2, also her parents’ wedding anniversary, and Polinsky Clark wanted the same date for her church wedding.

“We did consider postponing it,” she said. “It was a matter of what we wanted more, the location or the date.”

The date won out, and the couple will be married at St. Joseph on Orleans Street.

“I’m sad, because it’s our home church,” she said. “We’ve been getting involved for two years.”

But they had a connection to St. Joseph as well; Steven Clark, who was raised Episcopalian, was received into the Catholic Church at the Easter Vigil there in March.

Steven Clark said it’s good to have the connection, but what really matters is the sacrament.

“To me, what’s most important is celebrating the sacrament of marriage in the church,” he said. “Are we getting 100 percent of what we wanted? No, but the most important thing is the sacrament.”

Attendance is down

The closure hasn’t been good for the cathedral either, as the number of people attending — and the collections — have dropped.

The cathedral parish has about 4,500 registered households — about 70 percent of them households of one person — and last October had an average weekend count of 4,700 worshippers.

Nearly every Mass at the cathedral draws people from four distinct groups: cathedral parishioners, other Catholics from the Archdiocese of Chicago, visitors from other parts of the United States and visitors from around the world.

It’s the second group, Catholics from other parts of Chicago, who have mostly stayed away, Mayall said.

Cathedral parishioners are still coming, and the concierges of downtown hotels have all been notified that Masses are still being celebrated, so traveling Catholics looking for a place to worship are still coming.

But those who have a nearby home church most likely are going there instead of going to Mass in the cathedral auditorium.

Mayall enjoys hosting those visitors, and looks forward to welcoming them back.

“We have our own parish,” he said, “But for all the Catholics in the archdiocese, we’re their other church. We’re everybody’s church.”

Holy Name Cathedral history

  • The Holy Name Cathedral Parish got its start in 1846, as the Chapel of the Holy Name, part of the University of St. Mary of the Lake. The first freestanding chapel was built in 1849; a large, brick church just south of the present cathedral opened in 1854. While not the official cathedral, it hosted most archdiocesan functions because of its size. That church burned down in the Great Chicago Fire in 1871.
  • After three years of worshipping in a boarded up house on Cass Street, now Wabash Avenue, Holy Name parishioners welcomed construction on a new church, designated as the cathedral, in 1874. It was dedicated by Bishop Thomas Foley in 1875.
  • In 1888, the first of several renovations began, as repairs were made to the “sagging” Superior Street side of the building.
  • In 1915, the nave was made 15 feel longer to accommodate more people.
  • From Easter 1968-Christmas 1969, the cathedral was closed for extensive renovation to reflect the changes made in the liturgy by the Second Vatican Council. Source: Holy Name Cathedral Web site

For updates on repairs to the cathedral, visit www.holynamecathedral.org.