Dr. Leon Kelleher isn’t sure whose voice it was.
But a voice rising from behind him during a tour of Holy Family Church in Chicago four years ago volunteered Kelleher’s services for the gold-leaf gilding restoration needed on the church’s 19th Century statue of St. Patrick.
“But I thought about it and I thought, well, a couple of weekends probably,” said Kelleher, director of the dentistry section at Rush Medical Center.
More like a couple of hundred.
His work completed after four years, Kelleher and his wife, Sharon, this week moved the 6-foot, statue, regilded in 23-carat gold, from the workplace in the center of their Hanover Park living room to the Glen Ellyn garage of Irish restoration artist Patrick J. Caddle.
Caddle will repaint the statue’s face and hands, along with the Celtic cross and smattering of shamrocks on its clothing. It then will be returned to its niche on the east side of the church’s high altar in time for a March 14 rededication service.
The statue, carved from oak with layers of plaster and clay, depicts St. Patrick with bishop’s vestments draping his body. His garments, crosier and miter were gilded in golf leaf.
The statue was the first one placed in the 19th Century church by its founding Irish and German immigrant parishioners.
The church, owned by the Jesuit order, was saved from threatened demolition in 1990 and is nearing the end of a $3.9 million renovation, according to Rev. George Lane, a leading member of the church’s Preservation Society.
Kelleher was right that regilding the statue with the overlapping layers of small gold-leaf squares would take just a few weekends. But the preparation took years.
“The statue, in the original condition that we got it, was very badly damaged, a lot of chipped plasters and cracks and fingers missing.” Kelleher said, all of which he eventually repaired. “But the first thing we had to do was strip it down to the plaster.”
Chemical strippers couldn’t be used on more than a dozen coats of paint. Instead it had to be delicately picked off.
Every once in a while the, Kellehers would get a telephone call.
“Father Lane would call,” laughed Sharon, “and ask `Sharon, may I come make a pilgrimage to see St. Patrick?’
“I told him he was worse than that pope,” said Leon, about Pope Julius III who commissioned Michelangelo to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and, according to lore, would rage at him for taking so long. “You won’t let me work.”
