St. Thomas Aquinas, the greatest of the medieval theologians, offered five proofs of God`s existence. Here, direct from Humboldt Park, is a tale that might be added to the good saint`s list.
On California Avenue there sits a little red-brick church that looks out on the park that lends its name to this Northwest Side neighborhood.
The church is topped off with an onion-shaped dome that is the hallmark of an Orthodox Christian congregation. It backs up on another building where the words ”Parish Hall” are inscribed in stone over a doorway.
This used to be a common architectural form in immigrant neighborhoods, and Humboldt Park has always been that. Years ago, Slavs and Jews lived here. Now it`s a Puerto Rican community.
That floor plan-a sanctuary in front, a meeting hall in back-made a church the focal point of the ethnic group it served. It provided parishioners a place to pray in their native language, as well as the space to host weddings and christening parties, dances and banquets, according to the traditions of their homeland.
The church still carries a plaque identifying it as Holy Trinity Russian Orthodox Cathedral, though it has been shuttered and empty for months. Gone are its gilt icons and baroque altar. All that is left to mark its sanctuary as a house of worship are some wall paintings depicting biblical stories.
But these buildings long hosted a curious experiment in ideological co-existence. Historians and sociologists observe that modern society is notable for its philosophical schizophrenia: Many people remain believers and churchgoers; others think religion an outmoded superstition.
For four decades, that split ran right down the middle of that little church overlooking Humboldt Park.
In its sanctuary, a Russian-speaking congregation sang God`s praises according to the ancient chants of the Eastern Christian rite. But its meeting hall was a rendezvous for a group of atheists firmly convinced that Marx was right on target when he labeled religion ”the opium of the people.”
”Some people from the church group would never set foot in the social hall,” explains June Meka, 73, a veteran of the social hall. ”Many who met in the social hall never even peeked into the sanctuary to see what went on there.”
All of this began in 1952, when a group of political dissenters went looking for a quiet haven from the witchhunts of the McCarthy era, when anything that smacked of the Soviet Union was denounced as subversive.
It was a time of loyalty oaths and blacklists that forced all those whose politics were left of center to duck for cover, including the Chicago chapter of the Russian National Mutual Aid Society.
Previously, the group had its headquarters in a restaurant and meeting hall it operated on nearby Division Street. Its members were socialists and communists, anarchists and free-thinkers, who argued politics, literature and art over endless glasses of tea, just as their parents had in Russia.
But debates over Tolstoy and Trotsky seemed equally suspicious to Cold War zealots. So when a buyer wanted to acquire its Division Street property, the Russian-speaking group found a less public meeting place, the California Avenue buildings, which stood empty.
Its members could see the irony of moving into a church.
”We had a young-adults atheists club that held picnics in the forest preserves,” Meka recalls.
The leftists transferred their meetings to the church`s parish hall but had no use for the sanctuary. So they let an Orthodox congregation hold services there, and the two groups, believers and scoffers, settled down to a live-and-let-live accommodation.
”We spent $5,000 to have a cupola built on the roof, so it would look Russian,” recalls William Molozaiy, 83.
”In the social hall, we had folk dance groups, and visiting troupes from the Soviet Union, like the Kirov Ballet,” recalls Anna Dowgun, 90. ”Just before a performance, my husband died in that hall.”
Fear of McCarthyites
To outsiders, it might seem strange that Christians would accept the largess of Marxist and atheist landlords. But the Cold War was also fought on an ecclesiastical front. With McCarthyites suggesting all things Russian were subversive, many Orthodox clergy members in America declared their independence of the patriarch of Moscow, the traditional head of the Russian church.
But to a few pious Russian-Americans, it was anathema to attend a church whose pastor didn`t recognize the patriarch. They flocked to Holy Trinity because its priest gave spiritual allegiance to Moscow.
The California Avenue congregation became known in Chicago`s Russian colony as the ”Red” church. A competing Russian Orthodox congregation on nearby Kedzie Avenue was known as the ”White” church, and thus political divisions born in the Russian Revolution were perpetuated in Humboldt Park`s religious infighting.
Once, the priest from Holy Trinity and the priest from the Kedzie Avenue church, accompanied by their respective followings, were blessing graves in Elmwood Cemetery. The White priest`s congregation caught sight of the Red priest`s parishioners, and started to say hello. But the White priest gave them a stern look, and they lowered their eyes.
When the Red priest went into a mausoleum, one of the White church members furtively followed him into the building.
”Can I pray with you for a few minutes, Father?” she whispered.
Joining the mainstream
At the California Avenue church, the average age of both groups, the one in the sanctuary and the one in the meeting hall, steadily crept up. As the neighborhood became Spanish-speaking, the believers` children moved out to the suburbs. Seeing what their parents went through during the McCarthy era, some of the leftists` children slipped quietly into the mainstream.
The meeting-hall group, though, gained a few members from among Russians who were made refugees and wound up in Chicago.
”When I found this center, I felt like I was reborn,” says Galina Wiklak, 66. ”Here I was able to speak my language again.”
The ranks of the believers thus thinned faster than those of the leftists, prompting some to look into the sanctuary. When the church choir ran short of sopranos and baritones, some who had sung in meeting-hall performances began singing at services too.
”We Russians are an emotional people,” they explained to their astonished friends. ”Our souls respond to all kinds of music.”
About seven years ago, the church group faced a crisis. Its longtime priest died at age 90, and it didn`t seem likely a replacement could be found. The congregation had been reduced to a few dozen pensioners who could scarcely put anything on the collection plate. The late priest had supplemented his wages by doubling as an elevator operator in the Loop.
The believers` predicament triggered the sympathy of their meeting-hall counterparts, who told the religious group they would see what they could do through a few friends they still had in Moscow. When one of the leftists visited the Soviet Union, he went to see a Kremlin bureaucrat and explained the plight of the Humboldt Park believers.
Reassigned to Chicago
The bureaucrat phoned someone he knew in the offices of the patriarch of Moscow, and Holy Trinity got another priest. Rev. Vladimir Kondratenko, then posted to a church in Tashkent, in Central Asia, was reassigned to Chicago`s Northwest Side.
Kondratenko was in his middle 50s when he made that cross-cultural pilgrimage. His wife couldn`t make the adjustment and returned to Russia after a year in Humboldt Park. Kondratenko, though, was a deeply spiritual man. Even the atheists recall the way he had of cocking his head skyward, as if listening hard to hear God`s word. He was genuinely moved by the challenge of his strange, new flock: half of them, believers; the other half . . .
To tell the truth, neither he nor they knew what to call themselves any longer. Lifelong rationalists were by now referring to Holy Trinity as ”our church.” Second-generation atheists were buttonholing other old leftists, asking them to join and not accepting lack of faith as an excuse.
”That`s not the point,” meeting-hall proselytizers would say. ”It`s important to keep the church going.”
As Kondratenko didn`t drive, some of his non-believing congregants took him on shopping expeditions. Others would come by for tea, to ease the loneliness of the rectory after his wife left. Concerned that he was isolated for not speaking English, they enrolled him in a bilingual class at a nearby community center.
”The other pupils would ask the teacher a question in Spanish,” Meka recalls. ”He would reply in English and I`d translate that into Russian for Father Vladimir.”
When Kondratenko`s three-year assignment was up, neither he nor his congregation was ready to let go. So his followers begged and got him an extension. When it ran out last June, Kondratenko`s ecclesiastical superiors ordered him to return home.
Revival under way
Because of the religious revival under way in Russia, every available clergyman is needed to staff its churches. A priest can hardly be spared for a congregation on the other side of the Earth, half of whose handful of members don`t even believe in God.
After putting Kondratenko on an airplane, his non-believing followers told their pious counterparts it was time to face the inevitable. The leftists were by then in their 80s and no more capable of maintaining the church property than their religious counterparts. There was no choice: Holy Trinity had to be sold.
But before turning the key over to the church`s buyer, they carefully disassembled the iconostasis, the elaborate altar screen behind which Kondratenko and his predecessors had celebrated so many Christmases. They packed it and the church`s icons, and paid a shipping company $10,000 to have them sent to Russia, in care of the patriarch of Moscow.
A few weeks ago, the patriarch visited New York City. So Meka and Dusia Droma were delegated to go to the bank and draw out proceeds from the church`s sale.
They traveled to New York, got an audience with the patriarch and presented him with a check for $88,000. They asked it be used for medical treatment for Russian children made ill by the Chernobyl nuclear-reactor disaster.
Alexei II, patriarch of Moscow and all Russia, thanked the women, saying he had good news for his friends in Humboldt Park: Their icons and altar arrived safely and will shortly be installed in a church in the Russian capital.
”So we won`t say that Holy Trinity has been closed,” the patriarch said. ”We will simply consider its address has been changed, from Chicago to Moscow.”
