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Finding the faith beneath the grime If God is in the details, then the Almighty is present in the work of Jose Hernandez, Bob Bennett, Jason Howell and Frank Peppler. None of the men would use the word “ministry” to describe his work. But they have had a hand in repairing and renovating 75 archdiocesan churches since 1993, along with several Protestant churches in the Chicago area. The four have a combined 33 years with Fortune & Associates. When the company takes on the task of painting or restoring the interior of a church, one of them will be there, supervising and working alongside a crew of five to 10 other men, doing the painstaking work of making the old new again, and ready to welcome worshippers. The painters also take time to share their work with pastors, archdiocesan inspectors and the toughest audience of all, parishioners who have a lifetime of memories invested in their churches. “When we go into a church, it’s like we’re entering an arena,” said Tom Fortune, who began the company with his brothers, Peter and Robert, to earn tuition money when they were all in school. “There are a lot of spectators.” The important thing, the painters say, is to be respectful. They must respect the church as the house of God, keeping themselves and their work area clean, despite doing a job that is messy and disruptive. They must respect the memories of parishioners, taking care not to sweep them away with the half-inch of dust that sometimes accumulates on a church’s upper fixtures. Sometimes that means finding a way to keep building old, and sometimes memorable, artwork—even if the project’s budget might require that artwork to be painted over. For Jose Hernandez, it meant saving the portraits of the evangelists on the ceiling of the chancel of Our Lady of Tepeyac Church—portraits that Hernandez gazed on as a boy when he attended the church, then named St. Casimir. “I knew what my mother would say,” Hernandez said, recalling when she would attend the church with him. When he climbed the scaffolding to the 80-foot ceiling, he found the paintings were not frescoes, painted on the plaster. They were painted on canvas and tacked up. Hernandez and his crew took them down, painted new blue backgrounds behind them, and reinstalled them. “We would be destroying someone else’s hard work,” said Bennett, who also worked on Our Lady of Tepeyac. “To destroy that would be ungodly. These are things I’m going to pass on to my children.” Asked if they consider their work prayer, the painters hesitated before saying they feel God’s presence when they work—especially when they’re 60 feet up on a scaffold. “I definitely feel closer to God,” Hernandez said. “You’re cutting in a line, and everything’s just right—you definitely feel the presence of God.” “When you’re working, it’s all quiet, and thoughts go on in your head,” said Jason Howell, who began working for Fortune as a 17-year-old Weber High School graduate five years ago. “That’s somebody’s worship space, and you want it to be perfect.” Bennett recruited Howell, and Peppler was his first foreman. “I didn’t even pick up a brush for the first few weeks, but little by little I learned so much,” said Howell, who is already a supervisor himself. Peppler worked with Bennett and Howell on a repair job at Our Lady of Victory in 1996. The job—repairing water-damaged plaster and paint in 176 places in the church—meant matching new surfaces and new paint to 40-year-old finishes. “For each spot, we had to mix totally different colors,” Peppler said. Now someone standing on the church floor can’t tell which parts are new and which are old. Peppler and Bennett both have worked for Fortune for about 10 years, and both have seen over and over again how much a painting crew’s demeanor matters to parishioners. Of course, respect sometimes is in the eye of the beholder. An elderly parishioner once chased Peppler down the aisle of St. Peter Church on Madison Street because he was wearing his painting hat. The hat didn’t bother the friars, who found the incident amusing. “You can have a contractor come in and do a fine job, but if they didn’t respect the church, they won’t be invited back,” Peppler said.
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