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March 2, 2008

A city built with lots of faithExhibit looks at how Catholics influenced Chicago

By Michelle Martin

ASSISTANT EDITOR

In June of 1926, more than a million Catholics came to Soldier Field and the University of St. Mary of the Lake in Mundelein for the 28th International Eucharistic Congress. The Catholic school children that made up the choir for the opening Mass alone numbered 60,000.

The event was “a very public attempt to blend Catholic and American cultures, and it was a statement about the coming of age of an immigrant church,” according to the Oct. 17, 1999, edition of the Catholic New World.

Cardinal George Mundelein planned the Congress to be the largest religious gathering in history up to that point, according to the article by Sean Scanlon, who was writing a dissertation on it.

In Chicago, the Catholic Church and its members were not to be ignored or pushed aside. Catholics—from Jean Pointe Baptiste du Sable, a Haitian Catholic who was the first settler on the shores of Lake Michigan, to the 2.3 million Catholics who call the Archdiocese of Chicago home today, have been intimately involved with the growth of Chicago.

So when the Chicago History museum decided to mount an exhibit on “Catholic Chicago,” researchers and curators had a lot of material to work with.

The exhibit opens March 8 and will run through Jan. 4, 2009, with sections on the historical role of parishes in the city, the role Catholic schools have played, how Catholic communities support their members, worship in the city and changes in the church since the 1960s.

It’s the first of a planned series of exhibits about various religious communities that have contributed to the city’s traditions and its evolution as a major urban center.

“Catholic Chicago is the logical place for our series to begin since the Catholic community had has an ongoing presence in Chicago since the seventeenth century,” said Gary T. Johnson, the museum’s president, in a statement. “The biggest challenge is how to do justice to this expansive subject in just one exhibition.”

More than 30 individuals and organizations, including the Archdiocese of Chicago, religious congregations and various parishes, have contributed or loaned artifacts to the museum, said curator Jill Thomas Grannan.

Visitors will see Mother Frances Cabrini’s rocking chair and shoes—sec- ond-class relics of the saint—and a gold vestment from the Eucharistic Congress, on loan from DePaul University.

“There are a ton of fabrics in this exhibit,” Grannan said, from the vestments to an old-style habit worn by a Mercy sister to baptismal and First Communion dresses. But the point is not only to display the treasures of the local church; it is to show how the church is woven into the fabric of the city.

“It’s in the people, in the physical appearance, the geography, everything,” she said. “Chicagoans have made these traditions their own.”

Contemporary schools are a part of the story, with a bulletin board display that will rotate among 10 schools. Catholic universities will be represented as well, Grannan said, with a college recruitingstyle bulletin board.

Catholic voices will be heard throughout the exhibits with excerpts from an oral history project done by teenagers. The young people interviewed everyone from Cardinal George to Sun-Times columnist Laura Washington to a history museum staff member about what it meant to grow up Catholic in Chicago.

Cardinal George and various members of the staff of the archdiocese provided resources and expertise for the exhibit, but the archdiocese did not—and was not asked to—support the project financially.

The display on worship will center on a reproduction of a stained glass window from the former Resurrection Church, showing a priest elevating the Eucharist under an image of the Last Supper. The room where it is displayed will have an audio component, with excerpts from the traditional Latin Mass, the Novus Ordo in various languages and sacred choral music.

It will also include a new liturgical crucifix designed and created by Chicago iconographer Meltem Aktas, whose work can be seen in several churches in the archdiocese.

“We don’t want people to feel like they are in church, but we do want them to sit quietly and take in the sound and think about what it means,” said Grannan.

If you go:

Catholic Chicago exhibit

  • Chicago History Museum 1601 N. Clark St.
  • March 8, 2008-Jan. 4, 2009
  • $14 for adults, with audio tour; $12 seniors and students, with audio tour; children 12 and younger free. General admission free on Mondays.
  • Parking one block north at Clark and LaSalle streets. Enter on Stockton Drive.
  • (312) 642-4600 or www.chicagohistory.org
  • Audio tours of the exhibit will be available in English, Spanish and Polish.

Did you know?

Catholic women ran a settlement at Hull House before Jane Addams

Social reformer Jane Addams transformed the Hull House settlement at Halsted and Polk Streets into a revolutionary institution for immigrants at the turn of the twentieth century. But did you know that the Little Sisters of the Poor, a Catholic order of nuns, served the elderly poor at the same location some thirteen years earlier? In 1878, the Chicago Times reported on this “admirable and devoted sisterhood” and asked, “The work begun – shall it be completed? An appeal to Chicago!” The Little Sisters of the Poor relied solely on donations to rent Charles Hull’s mansion for forty dollars a month. By the time Jane Addams and her colleague Ellen Gates Starr arrived in 1889, the Little Sisters of the Poor had left for a larger building to serve the poor on the Near West Side.

Mrs. O’Leary’s church survived the Great Chicago Fire

Catherine and Patrick O’Leary, an Irish Immigrant couple of very modest means, were parishioners of Holy Family Church who lived several blocks away on DeKoven Street. In October 1871, the Great Chicago Fire started in their barn when a cow supposedly kicked over a lantern. Father Damen was out of town when he heard the news. He started a vigil and prayed to Our Lady of Perpetual Help that if she would save the church, seven candles would forever burn there in her name. The fire spread east and north, sparing both the O’Leary’s home and their church, which has kept seven lights on ever since.

A unique prayer service drew 30,000 people to Our Lady of Sorrows Basilica

Seeking solace from the hardships of the Great Depression and on the eve of the Second World War, the pastor of a large West Side parish created a new prayer and publicized it in such a way that within weeks it had taken the Catholic world by storm. In 1937, father James Keane established the only perpetual novena devoted to Mary as Our Lady of Sorrows (for whom the parish was founded in 1874) and broadcast it on the radio. A novena is a series of nine prayers said over a consecutive period, believed to be more powerful when performed with a large group singing and praying as one. Time magazine reported on its popularity two weeks after its debut, and prayer books were published in more than six languages. The media surrounding the phenomenon was tremendous, and on one day 30,000 people attended the prayer service. The novena is still celebrated every week.

“Chapels on wheels” rolled across the United States

In 1905, Detroit priest Francis Kelley was so moved by the conditions of the rural poor in the United States that he founded a mission funded entirely by donations to support small remote parishes and churches. Kelley brought his mission to Chicago, and from 1907 to 1930, his network of priests and laypeople extended their social missions through railcar and trucks known as “chapels on wheels.” This was the launch of the Catholic Extension Church Society, which has been based in Chicago for more than 100 years and continues to raise funds and awareness of social issues by publishing parish calendars and a popular national magazine, Extension. To date, Catholic Extension has provided more than $450 million in aid across the country.

Catholics sheltered Chicago’s homeless children

Catholic priests, nuns and laypeople made it their mission to care for orphaned children, whose “only entrance fee,” in the words of Bishop Bernard Shell (c.1932), “was absolute poverty.” Catholic charitable institutions attempted to stand apart from other charities by offering more personal and friendly service. Some of the early institutions received public funds in recognition of the service they provided to all Chicagoans.

The Germans were among the most active laypeople who funded child-welfare causes. They are responsible for St. Vincent de Paul Orphan Asylum and Founding Hospital, now occupied by the Catholic Charities headquarters, and Angel Guardian, an orphanage that at its founding in 1865 it was the city’s largest. It was surpassed in 1882 by St. Mary’s Training School for Boys, which Cook County juvenile courts depended on for education and rehabilitation.