On a late winter night, grown cold with the setting of the sun, the 65 pilgrims gathered in the vestibule of their church of Sts. Peter and Paul.
Most were women in their 60s and 70s, old friends who hugged each other to say hello. A chatter of gossip and laughter filled the room. They were bundled up in heavy coats. Some were wearing babushkas.
They had been girls together in this church and in this McKinley Park neighborhood on the Near Southwest Side. They had gone to the parish school together, stood up for one another at weddings and, in these later years, attended one another’s family funerals.
Their roots, not too far back, were in Poland. Their children lived in the suburbs. They had seen much together. They were comfortable with all that they shared.
When the two yellow school buses pulled up on Paulina Street, the vestibule emptied quickly. The pilgrims, some moving with particular care, some using canes, found their seats near friends, and the conversations continued.
The buses pulled out, turned east on 37th Street and then north on Ashland Avenue.
The pilgrims were on their way.
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“We call it a pilgrimage,” Rev. Bob Roll says, “because we push it as a prayer event. We’re praying for what this parish community has been given over the last 100 years and what the future holds.”
Roll is the eighth pastor at Sts. Peter and Paul since its founding in 1895, and the pilgrimage is part of the parish’s centennial celebration this year.
Once each month for eight months, parishioners from Sts. Peter and Paul visit another Catholic church in Chicago. They learn from the pastor or another local priest the church’s history, they celebrate mass together and then they look around, rubber-necking to take in the artistry and the architecture-and the unusual cultural grace notes.
At one church-Holy Innocents at 743 N. Armour St. near the Wicker Park neighborhood-they spotted a stained glass window of the nativity scene in which Joseph, Mary and the others standing around the baby Jesus were dressed in traditional Polish peasant garb.
At Holy Name Cathedral near the Gold Coast, the main church of the Chicago Roman Catholic archdiocese, they stood together counting the decaying red hats hanging high up near the ceiling, one for each of the city’s now-dead cardinal archbishops.
A pilgrimage is a journey, and, for the pilgrims from Sts. Peter and Paul-a tight and somewhat isolated community near the geographic center of Chicago-this is a journey on many levels.
It is, in a literal sense, a journey through Chicago. The churches being visited are on the North Side, the South Side and the West Side. They are in neighborhoods where many parishioners from Sts. Peter and Paul never go, where people from other ethnic groups and races live. So it’s also a journey through the cultural diversity of the city.
It is a journey through architectural wonders of the city and, even more, through the history of the city.
In a unique way, Chicago’s old churches embody the aspirations, delights and faith of those mainly poor people who built them. At the end of the 19th Century and the beginning of the 20th, European immigrants saw the construction of the parish church as means of rooting themselves in a new land of often alien ways.
More than anything else, the church building became the community’s expression of art and beauty. Living in crowded tenements, working long hours at back-breaking jobs, parish members could find respite and pride in the way the church’s spire reached to the sky and in the elegant trappings of a gold-and-marble high altar.
“It’s like going through a book on Catholicism in Chicago, but instead of reading about the churches, you see them,” says Paul Setlak, a Sts. Peter and Paul pilgrim and the former owner of a card store in the community.
“You see the change in the city-how some churches started out German and changed to Polish and changed to Spanish.”
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After a century as a Polish parish, that same sort of change is taking place in the pilgrims’ own neighborhood.
At the end of the 19th Century, the area that became known later as McKinley Park was a bedroom community for some of the better-paid workers at the Union Stock Yards.
“It was almost suburban,” Roll says. “There was something a little grand about it after the muddy streets of the Back of the Yards. The people here were never in desperate straits.”
But, while the Irish residents had their Our Lady of Good Counsel Church and the Germans had their St. Maurice Church, those from Poland had to travel three miles north to St. Adalbert’s, the closest Polish parish, for mass.
Then, in 1895, Archbishop Patrick A. Feehan assigned the newly ordained, Polish-born Rev. Paul P. Rhode to establish the Sts. Peter and Paul parish.
Although services were initially held in a two-story combination church-school, the cornerstone for the parish’s own splendid church on Paulina Street, just north of 38th Street, was laid by Archbishop James E. Quigley in September 1906. And, just nine months later, Quigley dedicated the completed Romanesque structure, built at a cost of $100,000.
“I have pictures of the foundation being dug here by the parishioners themselves,” Roll says, “and, on the corner across the street, you can see the women setting up tables with food and barrels of beer. It was a village event. People sacrificed to build this place.”
And, for successive generations of descendants of those Polish founders, Sts. Peter and Paul was home. But that Polish identity now is fading.
Many Polish parishioners are elderly. Their new neighbors are Mexican families. The 1990 Census found that 40 percent of the people in McKinley Park were Hispanic. In 1980, it had been 16 percent.
“We’re changing to accommodate them,” Setlak says. “You have to make adjustments or you die, and, as you do, you pick up things from their culture you didn’t know about.
“It’s happening all over. It’s not just us.”
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The buses pulled up outside Our Lady of Sorrows Basilica at 3121 W. Jackson Blvd., and the pilgrims walked up the long staircase to the front door and entered.
Inside, they found themselves within a vast space, brightly lit, ornately ornamented, yet majestically simple.
Ahead, at the far end of the nave, past the rows and rows of pews, was the white marble altar.
Overhead, 80 feet up, was the immense barrel-vault ceiling, weightless as the sky, its grandeur heightened by a simple grid pattern of squares, each of which-all 1,100-featured a golden rosette.
In the front pews, the pilgrims sat down and were greeted by Rev. Joe Chamblain, a member of the Servite religious order that established Our Lady of Sorrows parish more than a century ago.
“The parish of Our Lady of Sorrows was founded in 1874,” Chamblain said, “and it started out when three Servite priests gave a mission for Italian Catholics. It was in the basement of Old St. Patrick’s. The Italians had to meet in the basement because they weren’t Irish.”
The pilgrims smiled at this reminder of the ethnic separatism that characterized Chicago a century ago. As, of course, in many ways, it still does.
There was an additional edge to the humor. Although the Servites had come from Wisconsin to minister to Italian immigrants, the parish they were permitted to establish was quickly dominated instead by the Irish.
It was still heavily Irish in January 1937 when Rev. James Keane, the local prior, introduced the Perpetual Novena of Our Sorrowful Mother in a basement chapel. And within a year, Our Lady of Sorrows was a church for the entire city-indeed, for the entire country.
Still weighed down with the fears and worries of the Depression, Catholics in Chicago felt a special kinship with the sufferings of the mother of Jesus, and attendance at the novena, a devotion of nine days, skyrocketed.
Each Friday, 70,000 or more people would crowd the church and the sidewalks outside. So many people came that 38 services had to be held, one right after the other. And, with World War II, the devotion further intensified.
The Sorrowful Mother Novena so promoted veneration of Mary throughout the U.S. that, on May 4, 1956, Pope Pius XII designated Our Lady of Sorrows as a basilica-a church of high religious or architectural importance-and called it the “foremost church in America.”
But, even as that honor was bestowed, Our Lady of Sorrows was on the verge of great change.
The children of the Irish began leaving for other neighborhoods to the west and for the suburbs. African-Americans, long contained inside well-defined, overcrowded neighborhoods, began moving in. In 1950, blacks made up 16 percent of the population of the East Garfield Park community. By 1960, the figure was 62 percent. And by 1970 it was 98 percent.
Unlike the European immigrants, few blacks were Catholic, so the parish membership at Our Lady of Sorrows began falling. Then, in 1984, a fire destroyed one of the basilica’s two distinctive towers.
“There are about 210 households in the parish,” Chamblain told the pilgrims. “Our grade school has about 280 students. Most of them are not Catholic. It’s part of our ministry to the neighborhood.”
Chamblain pointed out the colorful banners around the sanctuary, bearing Swahili words, and explained that, as part of Black History Month, the parish was celebrating Kwanzaa, an African-American cultural holiday normally held in December.
Then it was time for mass.
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After mass, the pilgrims had a half-hour to look around the church. Some moved immediately to light one of the candles in dark blue glass holders, tiered in tight rows in front of a statue of Mary on the right side of the transept.
Therese Berkowicz was waiting her turn and remembering when she used to come to Our Lady of Sorrows for the novena. “It still seems like the same place, but you’re so used to the big crowds that would wait outside,” she recalled. “We used to wait for hours.”
And she didn’t wait alone. “I went here with my husband-when he wasn’t my husband,” she said, a twinkle in her eyes as she thought back on those long-ago dates.
There was a touch of sadness there as well: Peter Berkowicz, her partner at the novena, died 19 years ago at age 59.
Joan Trasz stood just outside the sanctuary with friends, looking at the white-marble altar and recalling her one visit to the church.
It was the late 1930s, and she was about 8 years old.
“I remember it was very large, and there were many statues, and it was much more ornate and bigger than our church,” she said. “I was recalling the altar before coming here today. I remembered it was white, and, yes, indeed, it was as I remembered. But there were hundreds of people.
“I was a little girl. I was awestruck.”
It was time to go. But no one wanted to leave.
The pilgrims straggled down the main aisle, trying to get a look at one more statue or one more station of the cross. One member of the group, afraid the buses would leave without everyone, nagged at them to keep moving.
Off to the right, as the final cluster of pilgrims headed for the door, Joan Trasz knelt at a side altar to pray.
Then she, too, was out the door and into the bus, and heading home.
