Rev. Steve McKinley was lighting candles at Libertyville’s Our Lady of the Blessed Sacrament chapel Saturday evening when he saw a small piece fall from the ceiling, followed by a rumble.
“I yelled: `Get out! Get out!'” McKinley said.
About 15 people who were in the chapel preparing for a devotion service did just that. They scrambled to get out as a 40-by-40-foot piece of the ceiling collapsed on the often-packed pews.
Two people were treated for non-critical injuries, said a nursing supervisor at Condell Medical Center in Libertyville.
Two other people were treated for minor injuries on the scene, said Assistant Chief Robert Key of the Libertyville Fire Department.
None of the four injured was identified.
A group of about 50 women, who were visiting the chapel as thousands of pilgrims do annually, was scheduled to enter the chapel within minutes of the collapse, which occurred around 6:45 p.m.
“I shudder to think what it would have been like on a Sunday morning,” said McKinley, the rector and guardian at Marytown, a 12-acre Conventual Franciscan friary and national shrine of St. Maximilian Kolbe.
The group of parishioners was preparing for devotion at the chapel, which is the centerpiece of the Marytown complex.
McKinley said a parishioner who had been sitting in a pew where the ceiling section landed had left shortly before the collapse because she had a stomachache and wanted to lie down.
“Good thing she did,” he said.
Our Lady of the Blessed Sacrament, the site’s main chapel, was modeled after St. Paul Outside the Walls, one of four patriarchal basilicas in Rome. It was built to memorialize the 1926 International Eucharistic Congress, the first held in the U.S.
The chapel features stained-glass windows, columns, an altar constructed from nine types of imported Italian marble and a ceiling covered with gold leaf.
Key said it was too soon to tell Saturday night what caused the collapse, but he called it the result of an “integrity issue,” not weather.
McKinley said there had been no history of problems with the ceiling.
Mass and all services will be postponed there indefinitely, he said. The spirit will continue elsewhere.
“Buildings can be rebuilt,” he said.
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jageorge@tribune.com
