At the dawn of the Great Depression, on soil that had been known as Kransz’s Farm, Irish and German immigrants raised a Gothic church, taller than any other around, and the women of the parish slipped off their wedding rings to be melted into a gold chalice.
Over the decades of Sundays since, parishioners have swept across the stone steps, as regular as the tides, pulled by their faith.
The families have not changed that much–they go to work in the morning, say their prayers and drop their offerings into the collection baskets. Still, the ghosts of the Brennans and the Bornhofens might not recognize their legacy in those who climbed the steps on a recent Sunday: the men who were priests and are now married, the women who find it absurd that a man in Rome says they should not use birth control or the African-American granddaughter of the founder of a Baptist church.
These are Catholics who, on special occasions, still pull out that old gold chalice.
In what was once a city of parishes, St. Gertrude on the Far North Side might not be the most typical congregation.
But the forces coursing through it on this sunny Sunday morning are the same that trouble and enliven every Catholic parish in Chicago and America.
On the world stage, these currents have collided with politics and economics and have transformed cultures. Here, they are playing out in flesh and blood in the orderly blocks of a neighborhood that, in its blend of tradition and growing diversity, represents challenges that will continue in the Chicago archdiocese for decades.
It is a place that understands that it cannot sit back and idly wonder how to serve up Catholicism in a secular age.
God is not stuck on one track at St. Gert’s. This is a multiple-choice church.
If it can’t be a priest dispensing the holy duties, then it will be laity. If the ancient rhythms of the mass do not inspire a sense of the sacred among the laypeople, then they will gather in the gym or one another’s front rooms and hash out the Holy Scripture and life’s daily puzzles.
The northwest corner of Granville and Glenwood Avenues in Edgewater is far from Rome, far from the bureaucracy and theological squabbles of the Catholic Church. As Rev. Bill Kenneally, the St. Gert’s pastor who can be witty and wise, bookish and shy, put it, “This is where the tire meets the street.”
Twenty minutes before the 8 a.m. mass, parishioners began arriving at the grayed limestone church with its squared-off tower. They filed in through the medieval oak doors, past the confession boxes that are now used as closets for dusty Christmas decorations, and took their seats–many in the same pew where they have sat mass after mass, year after year.
In the sacristy, an oak-paneled room off the sanctuary, Kenneally scrambled into his long linen alb and flowing green chasuble. He knows he is too rushed, right before a mass. The kneeler, an invitation for a quiet and prayerful moment, is nothing but a doorstop.
On this day, Kenneally believed that the homily he was going to deliver was not his finest and that he had no wisdom for a woman who had just called, distraught that her son had left his wife.
He was unaware, however, of yet another earthly imperfection.
Dorothy Godfrey, the woman who unlocks the church each morning and launders all the altar cloths, pointed toward his feet. “Your left pant leg is caught on your sock,” she told him.
The priest grinned–a slight underbite making his smile all uppers on his round face– untucked his pant leg from his sock and dashed toward the altar.
In the vestibule, Ginger Williams set up shop–unfolding her card table, positioning her steaming mug of tea and setting down two books of entertainment coupons she was trying to sell.
Williams, 45, was raising money to help refurbish the kitchen in the social hall across from church. The kitchen had been a sorry sight.
“I saw that as a metaphor for the parish. Things were in danger of dying out that were most basic to us, our relationships with others were not being nourished,” she said.
Williams’ reasons for wanting to restore the place run deep.
Six years ago, she was pregnant with triplets and was in danger of losing them. Her doctor confined her to bed for six months.
One parishioner brought a hot lunch each day. Another came over and offered to do anything, even scrub toilets. Another brought her library books.
After the triplets were born, it didn’t get easier.
“I had three babies crying at once. I couldn’t do it. I made one call to an old-timer in the parish, and by that afternoon, there was a whole crew of women who came in. They’d bottle-feed once in the morning, once in the late afternoon, rocked the babies, whatever they needed. They made a schedule from September to December.
“And another woman, Rosemarie, got a schedule of people to donate meals three times a week, really nice meals, for five months. I’m still finding dishes that aren’t mine,” Williams said.
In the vaulted chapel, Sally Walsh had slid into the back pew with the second youngest of her 11 children at her side.
Walsh has walked out of church crying in the middle of a mass.
On previous Sundays when a nun read the Gospel, Walsh shot up from her seat in the front pew and shouted, “By canon law, you are not to be doing this!”
When St. Gert’s allowed girls to serve with altar boys before it was sanctioned by the archdiocese, Walsh pulled her sons out of serving.
“You know change is going to happen. It’s inevitable,” said Walsh, 56. “But there’s a way to go about change–sometimes I think they take the shorter path.
“I’m not mad at Father Kenneally. It’s Father Kenneally’s parish. He runs his parish as he sees fit. He will answer to God.”
There has, however, been a trickle out the door after each of several controversies since Kenneally arrived 12 years ago.
In 1994, seven parish schools were combined that year into four campuses called the Northside Catholic Academy. Although St. Gert’s got one of the campuses, many blamed Kenneally for pushing for the consolidation, which he defended as driven by economics and declining enrollment.
Even those most loyal to Kenneally joke that everyone at St. Gert’s loves him because he has driven everyone else away.
At the altar, Kenneally was saying mass, spinning out some lit-crit on Matthew’s parable of the 10 bridesmaids.
Kenneally is known for hauling a pile of books,–Emily Dickinson, J.D. Salinger, a collection of feminist poets–to the pulpit, and he goes at the Gospel as if it were a story he can’t wait to get into.
His is, he says, the theology of conversation.
“A lot of this isn’t St. Thomas Aquinas,” he said. “A lot of this is Studs Terkel.”
At age 61, Kenneally has settled into contentment. When he was ordained 35 years ago, he squirmed in the trappings of priesthood. Now, he pretty much leaves the trappings behind, wearing rugby shirts and wide-wale cords–under his vestments too. With his Roman collar unfastened and flapping, he walks Buddy, his cocker spaniel, a dog that bites, through the nave and out into the streets.
“The priest pastor now is kind of a guy who’s on a ship trying to find its course–and it’s leaking quite a bit,” he said. “You follow the stars, whatever, to find out where you’re going. I find that fascinating.”
The loneliness that haunts his religious brothers has never wormed its way into him, he says. But he is alone, living by himself in the cavernous rectory that once had seven priests and quarters for live-in housekeepers and cooks.
His is the bedroom door with the pictures taped to it like a junior high school kid’s. The faces there are a telling trinity: Cardinal Joseph Bernardin; Kenneally’s mother, Mary; and Michael Jordan. The other rooms are empty because the flow of priests from the seminary is drying up.
“It’s over,” he said. “Something went sour.”
There are too many masses for one priest. An answering machine in the rectory takes calls a priest once would have picked up.
About a year ago, Kenneally made a decision that he knew could cause a crisis: He would begin using some of the 17 former priests in the parish, many of whom are married, to say mass. Not exactly heresy, but close.
A parishioner wise to Kenneally’s plan wrote a letter not to the archdiocese but to Mother Teresa in Calcutta.
Not long after, the parishioner got a reply, pecked out on a manual typewriter and peppered with crossouts signed by Mother Teresa. It said the Lord does not want this to happen. Call the chancery, she urged.
The next morning, a letter from Bernardin was delivered to St. Gert’s rectory, threatening Kenneally with suspension. Kenneally backed down.
Tending to the scorned
A few blocks away on this morning, through streets of two-flats and turn-of-the-century houses with enough bedrooms for kids by the dozen, one St. Gertrude family was down with the flu and would miss mass.
The family, much like the thousands of St. Gertrude’s families past and present and yet so different, had moved into the parish in 1994 after shopping for a home for some time.
The couple, an attorney and a certified public accountant, wanted a strong parish, but also one where they would be accepted as gay parents. The men also needed a neighborhood where their children, two adopted boys of different races, would feel at home.
Opposed to abortion, they believe they have an obligation to help unwanted babies: in their case, a Peruvian, now 4, and an African-American from Georgia, now 3.
“(We) see our role as filling the gap, taking the kids people don’t want,” said the 36-year-old CPA who, like his partner, asked that their names not be used.
The neighborhood around St. Gert’s is a virtual United Nations, an urban stew which, the local joke goes, has someone from every continent except Australia–that guy just left.
There is even a mosque just a block away.
Drawn by this diversity, the men bought an old stucco house and rehabbed it inside and out. Peruvian toys are stashed in the closet for when the little ones are older.
The 39-year-old attorney, raised Catholic, and his partner, a convert who grew up Baptist, have found Catholicism–at least as it is practiced in places such as St. Gertrude’s–to be inclusive and accommodating enough.
Almost immediately after they arrived in the parish, the attorney was asked to serve on the parish council, which is run by an African-American woman. “I think I was put on the parish council as a statement about diversity,” he said.
It was the attorney’s Catholic faith and his discussions with some Jesuit priests that helped him get through one of the most trying times of his life–coming to terms with the fact that he is gay.
“It is ironic, based on what you hear from Rome, that it is the Catholic Church that pulled me through,” he said.
On Dec. 1, 1990, a Jesuit priest presided over a ceremony in a North Side apartment where the two men made a formal lifelong commitment to each other.
“I don’t look to Rome as dictating my life,” the attorney said. “I think the pope is a very nice man, but what did they just do? They just admitted that Galileo was right or some such thing. I don’t think they understand how their stands on issues are alienating people.”
Another person missing from mass was Joe Cosby. He was spending this Sunday behind the register of a McDonald’s in the Loop–a part-time job that he called the first legitimate money-making enterprise of his life.
Cosby, 29, came to St. Gert’s on an October night.
He saw the light on in the rectory, rang the bell, sat down and poured out his heart to Kenneally. Cosby said he had just been let out of prison for the fourth time and wanted to turn his life around.
Kenneally, who will shut the rectory door on someone if he smells alcohol or senses duplicity, pulled out his wallet, gave Cosby a $5 bill and a room in the old, empty convent.
So far, this time out of prison has been different for Cosby.
“I always had a master plan, how to make a lot of money really fast,” he said. “It was never anything constructive or legal. Sooner or later, I got picked up again.”
A month after his first day at the McDonald’s register, Cosby traded up to a full-time job at a bagel shop and was taking a humanities course at Truman College. He is hoping to be in his own apartment by Christmas.
Attendance questions
Back at mass, Ray Seitz and the other ushers stood behind the last pew as Kenneally said the prayers of the faithful before the offering. The ushers were leaning on their long-handled collection baskets like hockey players waiting for the end of the national anthem.
When the priest finished, Seitz, 71, moved around the church, smiling and winking as he wielded the basket.
His wife, Elizabeth, was born in St. Gertrude parish 67 years ago. She remembers running down the alley each day to mass, then running back home for breakfast because you could not take communion if you had eaten after midnight.
Seitz grew up in a nearby parish, one not as prestigious, and he surely never thought that he would marry a girl from St. Gert’s. But at a 1946 dance, when he was just back from the service and Elizabeth Conlin was 17, they met.
They married and raised seven children–at one time they had five in St. Gertrude’s school, a three-story brick hive that once buzzed with almost 1,000 children but now has 310.
Despite the Catholic schooling, the Seitz children did not inherit their parents’ faith. Now, just two of their daughters go to church.
“It especially hurts my wife,” Ray Seitz said.
“I have totally given up on them,” Elizabeth Seitz said. “That is the very basis of life–to have children and have them believe in Jesus.”
She shook her head. “But all of our friends have the same thing,” she said.
On any Sunday, less than a quarter of the Chicago archdiocese’s members are going to church. At St. Gert’s, it’s a notch better: nearly a third.
At the end of the mass, a woman stood at the back of the church, dabbing away tears as she spoke with Peter Buttitta, a layman with a title: pastoral associate. That says more about the church than many are comfortable with.
Not too many years ago, the woman, who had just been diagnosed with cancer, would likely have been talking to a priest. Today, more than a third of the parishes in the archdiocese have only one priest and the laity is taking on more responsibilities.
Working for Kenneally, Buttitta–42, married, with three little girls–has found himself at the leading edge of that trend, a source of some controversy in the parish. One parishioner calls him “a necessary evil.”
Each week, one of the daily morning masses at St. Gertrude is substituted with a communion service often given by Buttitta. Technically, it cannot be called a mass because Buttitta is not a priest. By church dictum, he can give communion if the bread and wine have been blessed by a priest.
Many of the old-timers who attend daily mass stay away from these services.
Some days, Buttitta wears a black mock turtleneck to create a clerical look.
With Kenneally approaching retirement, there is talk of something that not long ago would have been unheard of: a layman taking over St. Gert’s.
“He would like me to be prepared,” Buttitta said.
On Sundays, Buttitta is limited to making sure microphones work, doors are unlocked, lights are on. “Officially, I have no role,” he said.
Before the mass had ended, Gail Smith sneaked out of a pew, leaving her daughter, Margaret, a 4th grader, and her husband, Paul.
She had to run across the street to the social hall to start setting up for a coffee, passing beneath an angel in a stained-glass window that her daughter had, for reasons sad and sweet, once pointed to and said, “That’s Elizabeth.”
Ten years ago, Gail and Paul were married at St. Gertrude’s, though she wasn’t then a member there or anywhere. She just knew someone who knew the priest.
She had been steeped in Catholicism at Our Lady Gate of Heaven on Chicago’s Southeast Side. But in the 1960s, her family joined virtually all the other white families in the parish who were fleeing to the suburbs.
The suburban parish, in Hinsdale, was never quite the same to her.
After she and Paul were married, they began talking about going back to church.
After a first mass at St. Gertrude, they went to a coffee and began talking with some of the older couples who spun yarns about the parish 25 and 30 years ago. It reminded her of what a parish could be–and had once been for her.
“From then on, we never thought about `Do we want to go?’ ” said Smith, 44. “We always wanted to go.”
Seven years ago when Margaret was 1 1/2, Gail Smith was pregnant again. But tests showed that the fetus, though alive, was not viable. Her midwife advised her to terminate the pregnancy.
Smith called her parents and her sister-in-law. She also called Kenneally.
The Smiths went to the rectory on a Sunday evening and began a conversation with Kenneally that would go on for months. Rather than telling them that terminating the pregnancy would amount to abortion, the priest simply allowed them to find their truth.
They decided to carry on with the pregnancy, and after 7 1/2 months, the child, who they named Elizabeth, was stillborn.
Then one day last year at mass, Margaret picked out one of the angels in the Nativity window and named it for her sister.
“I think the church, at its best, can help us deal with those dark times and see the grace in them,” Gail Smith said.
Beyond regular mass
After the mass, the church doors opened and the families poured out and onto the steps, across the street and into the social hall basement. Little hands grabbed for oranges cut into wedges, blueberry crumb cakes cut into squares, pumpkin bread in foil.
Theresa Isaacson tried to keep her three kids ages 5, 3 and 1 from scattering like billiard balls, but it was no use.
And besides, she was the one bumping into everyone–mostly the women who are her soulmates, the women she prays and laughs with each Tuesday morning in the old convent. They call themselves the Women’s Spirituality Group, but they joke that they’re the Sanity Group for Young Mothers.
St. Gert’s has many of these “small faith groups,” some of which have been meeting in the same kitchens or living rooms for more than 25 years.
Sometimes what these women bring into the room is not what you would expect in an old convent. Say, birth control–which comes up often. No one thought much of it until a few months ago. One morning, some were joking about vasectomies–“Did you make the call?”–when a newer member of the group said she was shocked to hear such talk among Catholic women.
But most of the women, like many Catholics, consider family planning nobody else’s business. “The majority thinks Rome can’t tell us what to do,” Isaacson said.
The women’s connection goes beyond Tuesdays.
As a woman’s due date approaches, they hold a ritual of their own invention, one they call the baby blessing. After dinner, when children are tucked in bed, they meet in someone’s home, sip wine, laugh, read prayers, lay their hands on the stretched belly and sing “Hush Little Baby.”
They did that for the last of Isaacson’s babies.
At one of the folding tables in the social hall, Mary Heidkamp sat with some of her friends, Styrofoam cups of coffee in front of them. Four years ago, the parish rallied for her family.
In June 1992, her mother, Aileen D’Elia, was in the alley behind her house. A 27-year-old former convict had just robbed a liquor store on nearby Broadway and was sprinting down the alley. He bumped into the 79-year-old retired nurse and grandmother, pushed her into her car and drove off.
It was 12 days before police found her body Downstate, and for each of those nights, Kenneally led a group of parishioners to D’Elia’s front yard, where they lit candles, said the rosary and sang “Immaculate Mary,” her favorite hymn.
“The parish came around,” Heidkamp said. “It was one thing we don’t forget.”
Upstairs, in a gymnasium with a sign that reads, “Gym Shoes Only On This Court,” the walls rang out with the sounds of tambourines and guitars. Babies crawled between the folding chairs and played with blocks spilled from plastic milk crates.
This is a St. Gertrude’s mass, too, looking for all the world like some vestige of a ’60s folk mass.
The priest had just finished his thoughts on the readings, and now people were popping up from their seats, one by one, to spout their version of reality and religion.
The mass started shortly after Kenneally came to St. Gert’s. He was looking for a way to get people who had drifted away from the Catholic Church back into the fold, if not into the actual church building.
The gym mass drew back John Horan, 41, who on this Sunday strummed his guitar amid the choir.
In May 1981, Horan, who describes himself in shorthand– SSICDWSF (South Side Irish Catholic Democrat White Sox Fan), made his parents proud when he was ordained. For almost eight years, he worked as a priest.
Kenneally calls him the best preacher in the diocese.
But while in the seminary, he met Mary, an occupational therapist and a pianist in a church choir. “I loved her, but I loved being a priest,” Horan said.
In 1988, he left the priesthood, though he never sent a letter of resignation. He calls himself “inactive,” not a former priest. Two years later, he and Mary were married in a Unitarian Church.
Horan was devastated after leaving the church. “It was an amputation of part of my essence,” he said.
He tried to go to mass, but couldn’t bear to watch mediocre priests. He wandered from church to church. He checked out the Presbyterian Church and even inquired about what it would take to become an Episcopal priest.
Eventually, he happened into the gym mass at St. Gert’s. He has been going ever since, and Mary now plays the piano for the gym mass choir.
His work, helping inner-city kids go to college, is now his ministry.
Beside him, another choir member–the only African-American woman in the group–slipped away as she does every Sunday and walked across the street into the big church, just in time to serve in the usher corps–the true sacred turf in a Catholic church.
“That was the last frontier,” said Pam Backis, 49, with a laugh. “But the walls came down without a fuss.”
The granddaughter of the founder of a Baptist church, Backis became Catholic in an unusual way. While working in Atlanta, she thought she would go look at the old Catholic church across the street, a historic building that Gen. William Sherman had spared during the Civil War.
“Usually, the doors are locked, but they were open that day and I walked in and saw a priest there,” she said. “For some reason, I said I wanted to become a Catholic. It just came out. I just felt like I belonged there.”
Now the chairman of the parish council, she believes St. Gert’s is inclusive, though it still needs to do more to attract minorities. As she moved up and down the aisle with her basket, most of the hands dropping in bills and envelopes were white.
“I have to look a long time before I see my reflection,” she said, “but that has not been a problem.”
At the altar, Rev. Leopold Glueckert, a history professor at Loyola University Chicago who helps out on Sundays, said the eucharistic prayer, the holiest moment of the mass.
Outside, clouds raced across the sky, making the ruby and cobalt hues of the windows wax and wane.
In a voice sonorous and strong, the priest sang out the words that are central to the Catholics in St. Gertrude’s, in the archdiocese, in every parish on the globe:
“Let us proclaim the mystery of faith.”
———-
THE SERIES
DAY 1: The Vatican’s global challenge.
DAY 2: Protestant inroads in Latin America.
DAY 3: Africa offers opportunity.
DAY 4: Recruiting and keeping new priests.
DAY 5: Poland and the limits of church power.
DAY 6: The changing American church.
DAY 7: Inside the Chicago archdiocese.
DAY 8: Life and doubt at the seminary.
DAY 9: The lop-sided world of Catholic schools.
DAY 10: Catholic hospitals’ spiritual battle.
DAY 11: Stories of dissent and departure.
DAY 12: The changing face of one parish.
