I WAS AWAKENED THIS MORNING TO THE NEWS THAT MY CHILDHOOD PARISH IS, ER, CONSOLIDATING

 

3/10/21

I was awakened this morning to a report on Chicago’s WBBM Newsradio that my childhood parish, St. Walter, is being closed.   Okay, technically, it’s not being closed; it is being “consolidated” with the neighboring St. Benedict in Blue Island and the reasonably nearby St. Peter Claver in Robbins into one parish to be named later.   However, as veteran reporter Bernie Tafoya put it, regular Masses will be held only at St. Benedict, St. Benedict Pastor Monsignor Dennis Lyle will be the pastor of the new parish, and, while St. Walter will remain a sacred space and will be used for funerals, school Masses, and the like, there will be no regular Sunday or weekday Masses there.    So, terminology aside, St. Walter is being closed.

 

A few months ago, this would have come as no surprise.   For years now, every time the Archdiocese of Chicago announced school and/or parish closings, I listened attentively, nearly certain that St. Walter would be on the list.   It is, and was, even in its heyday, back when yours truly was in school there, a small parish, built for the baby boom.   The entire parish covers roughly only a square mile.   The church is relatively small.   The school originally had twelve classrooms and, at its peak, we had fifty students, give or take a few, in each classroom.   Now the school has been reconfigured with fewer classrooms and has about 100 students, give or take a few, about the number that Sisters Monica and Jeremy handled in two of the original classrooms.   St. Walter is a small parish getting smaller, and always operated in the shadow of nearby gargantuan parishes like St. Cajetan, St. Benedict, St. Barnabas, and St. John Fisher.   When our students in one of the many Catholic high schools that were available to us on the south (or, in yours truly’s case, the west) side were asked what parish we were from, we usually had to explain where St. Walter was.    Students from the aforementioned giants were relieved of this burden; everyone knew, say, St. Barnabas while St. Walter was generally identified with something like “just south of St. Cajetan.”   That’s okay; we were content with quality over quantity.   But I digress.

 

In January of this year, however, we got the news that St. Walter School was consolidating with St. Benedict School, with lower grades going to St. Walter and upper grades going to St. Benedict.   This was taken, at least by yours truly, as good news; the two schools could concentrate resources to better serve their increasingly economically challenged students.    And, given that the school would continue in some capacity, it was assumed, at least by yours truly, that St. Walter Parish would continue to soldier on.   So, in the wake of the school announcement of only a few months ago, the closing of St. Walter Parish came as something of an ironic and strange surprise.

 

For a number of reasons, this is not going to be one of those “How dare the Archdiocese close my parish!” diatribes that pop up like kudzu in the wake of such closings.   First, I have little standing to write such a piece.   While I proudly went to St. Walter School and the Springfield Dominicans and their lay colleagues did wonderful things for me, like teaching me to read, write, calculate, and behave, the last of which took a long time to sink in, my connection to the parish is clearly not as great as those who live there.   While, off the top of my head, I can name four of my classmates who still live in the parish (Dan Niersbach (Sorry if I’ve butchered that spelling, Dan!), John Barajas, Tom DuBois, and Mark Maloney, I live nowhere near St. Walter.   I stopped going to church there in about seventh grade.   My mom had something of a disagreement with the “new” pastor at the time.  I won’t name the late good Father; most former and current parishioners know already know his name and he wasn’t the most popular guy in the parish.   That he succeeded the founding pastor, who, despite a reputation for gruffness, had found his way into most of the parishioners’ hearts, probably didn’t help him win the hearts and minds of his flock.    At any rate, believe me, once you got on the wrong side of my mom, you stayed there.    So we started going to church at Sacred Heart, which sits about 100 feet east of the eastern boundary of St. Walter, and I have been going to Sacred Heart ever since.   Our kids were all confirmed at Sacred Heart.  I am a lector and Minister of Communion at Sacred Heart.   While I used to go there at least once a month, in these COVID restricted times I find myself going there just about every week; from my experience, the-powers-that-be seem to take COVID more seriously in the Archdiocese of Chicago than they do out here in the Diocese of Joliet.   But, again, I digress.   Going to Sacred Heart results in my driving through St. Walter Parish, and right by the church and school, on a nearly weekly basis.   So there’s that connection.   Further, my parents, despite having moved out of the neighborhood decades ago, were buried from St. Walter.   I generally go to reunions, formal and informal, we have for our class and honorary members thereof, and the 2005 50^th All School Reunion, held in the church parking lot, was one of the best parties I’ve attended in my life.   Further, I am in touch with a lot of my classmates and others from the neighborhood.   More on this later.   Finally, when COVID restrictions and what I considered the lax approach to the pandemic displayed by parishes out here combined with an inability to get to Sacred Heart forced me to “attend” Mass on television, I send my weekly contributions to St. Walter.   So it’s not as if I have no extant connection to the place.

 

The second reason this is not a “Don’t Close My Church!” screed is the realities the Archdiocese faces.  The demographics simply are not in our favor.   Fewer people go to church, fewer people still go to Catholic Mass regularly, and the population, Catholic and non-Catholic, of the city is falling.   We can’t keep every parish open and St. Walter is a logical place to close for the reasons I outlined above; it is small, was seemingly purpose built for the baby boom, and is surrounded by bigger parishes that themselves could use more parishioners.    Also, though I may be off a year or two on this, St. Walter was established in 1953 and the church and school were completed in 1955.   Our founding pastor, Father A.W. Peterson, who referred to himself as “the Swede,” was a very practical man who spent every dollar like it was his own; consequently, the church and school can best be described as purposeful.   They are solid structures intended to serve their function in an economically efficient manner.    They are by no means ornate like some of the churches and schools in the old neighborhoods.  A friend from St. Ignatius High School, Ed Figlewicz, grew up in St. Adalbert’s Parish in Pilsen, which, while still standing, was closed several years ago.  That was a 100 plus year-old parish and church that was stunningly beautiful, an architectural masterpiece built with the pennies of Polish immigrants and maintained with the pennies of Mexican immigrants.  I had another friend at Ignatius, now Dr. Ted Walczak, of whom I have lost track, who went to St. John of God about four blocks south of the stockyards.   That, too, was an architectural masterpiece built by Polish immigrants and it was torn down years ago.   I could name several more of such awe-inspiring churches that were not spared when the Archdiocese was faced with having to close parishes.  As much as I feel an attachment to St. Walter, it is a new and relatively modern parish compared to those old ethnically based parishes.   And, for now at least, St. Walter is not going to be razed.

 

So while I won’t get up on some kind of soap box and demand that St. Walter remain open and, until the January announcement regarding the school, I was fully anticipating this day, I am deeply saddened by its closure for reasons that many of you, being Catholics who grew up in the ‘60s, ‘70s, and before, can easily understand.  In that era, the parish, with its Masses, other Sacraments, school, and social events, was an enormous component of your life.   Again, we weren’t one of the big ethnic parishes in one of the old neighborhoods; the section of St. Walter in which I grew up (west of Western from 115^th to 119^th) could almost be described as a kind of Naperville of its day…a new neighborhood (in the ‘50s) of brand-new homes adjoining an older, more established neighborhood east of Western.   But our parents brought with them from those old neighborhoods the traditions with which they had been imbued, the most salient of which was the primacy of the parish.   So we went to school at St. Walter.   We went to Mass at St. Walter (in our case, until about seventh grade, as I mentioned above, and that exodus didn’t make us all that unique among St. Walter parishioners at the time, but that is grist for another mill).   Our moms belonged to the St. Walter Women’s Club.  Our dads belonged to the Holy Name Society and played cards with a group of guys called the Retlaws.  (Spell it backwards.)   We played football and basketball for St. Walter School.   When people asked you where you lived, you didn’t say “around 118^th and Western; you said “St. Walter,” regardless of whether you were Catholic, Protestant, Greek Orthodox, or Jewish and, had St. Walter been a bigger parish, everyone would know where that was.   By the way, the latter three groups were collectively known as “Publics.”   Why?    As little kids, we reasoned that we were Catholics because we went to Catholic school, so our friends who went to public school must be Publics.   It sounded quite reasonable at the time and the name stuck even when we were old enough to know better.   That should give those of you who are not familiar with the culture how engrained such things were.

 

Further, we still identify with St. Walter and still keep in touch with the people with whom we went to school.   In my case, I see Jim Carroll at Sacred Heart at least a few times a month.   Over the last few months, I’ve had a small medical setback and nearly instantly heard from four guys (five if you count Jim, who got the word out), Joe Sparacio, Tom DuBois, Paul Watson, and Kevin Scannell from St. Walter.   In that conversation, Joe pointed out that he is my oldest friend; we used to play in the home-made sandbox in my backyard before either of us even started school at St. Walter.   I now and again share stories with Mark Maloney, the only guy with whom I went to kindergarten (We were all “publics” in kindergarten; St. Walter didn’t have a kindergarten.), grade school, and high school, and with whom I would have gone to college had either of us gone to our second choice.  I don’t think I enjoy conversing with anybody more than I enjoy conversing with Mike Graber, one of my closest friends from my class.  When I get off the phone with Mike, my wife says, calmly and confidently, “You were on the phone with Mike Graber, right?”  She knows from the nearly incessant laughter these calls generate.    I’m sorry I missed Rich Ruebe, another Walter’s guy who was my college roommate, the last time he was in town from Texas; I won’t miss him next time.   I picked up the phone a few months ago to hear from John McErlean, another Walter’s guy, known as “Big John,” who recently retired as a captain from the Chicago Fire Department.  The call made my day, even though we didn’t talk about much of anything other than how the world was going to hell in a handbasket, one of my favorite conversational topics.   I recall a weekend when my wife and I were in Lake Geneva.  I was in the bathroom when my wife called out “Hey, get out here; your buddy John McErlean is on the news;” he had just emerged from a literally burning building from which he had saved a little girl.   Ed James, one of our more studious classmates, used to run a pharmacy in the neighborhood, and seeing him when the guys would get together was always a joy.  While I always enjoy running into Jimmy Cavallini at our occasional formal or informal reunions, he sometimes get overly enthusiastic about recounting tales of our youth best left untold, usually involving guys like Pat O’Sullivan, Tim Kelleher, and Paul Griffin, and plenty of Budweiser.  Whenever I see John Barajas, it’s so good to see him, I don’t know whether to laugh or cry just thinking of the stories he and I could tell of our perhaps not optimally spent youths.     When Jay O’Reilly, maybe the most loved guy in our class, died about a year ago, just before COVID hit, the funeral parlor was jam-packed with people…most of whom were from St. Walter.   And I got to see guys there like Marc Gustafson, whom I hadn’t seen since eighth grade.   My brother-in-law and sister bought a car a few months ago from Paul Napleton, of course, another St. Walter guy.  Paul informed me that two of the Lazzara siblings, Al and Nancy, sent their regards.   I regularly correspond with Mary Beth Turek, who was Mary Beth Delaplane back at St. Walter, still hoping that some of her brains would somehow transmit themselves to me over e-mail; I think she has an IQ of about 9000 and went on to ace the engineering program at Notre Dame back when women in engineering programs could be counted on a couple of hands.   I saw Mila Grady, who was Mila Wasik (I hope I haven’t butchered that spelling as well!) when we went to St. Walter, at my daughter’s graduation from the University of Iowa Nursing College; Mila is, or at least was at the time, on the faculty there.   I occasionally run into Barb Prindiville and the former Mary Ellen Tatro, now Mary Ellen Tatro-Mendoza, who went to St. Walter with my sister, Maribeth, at Sacred Heart.  And, finally, Tom DuBois’ parents have long been like a second set of parents to me, and to many of the “kids” at St. Walter; they have been to all of our kids’ confirmations and, before COVID, my wife and I would visit them after Mass and bring them Communion, and hope to resume that practice soon.  I’m running on here and I doubtless have unintentionally left out several people whom I will regret leaving out as soon as I publish this, but I would have run on a lot more had I mentioned the people I talked with at the “big party” in 2005, the aforementioned reunion in the parking lot, that people are still talking about 16 years later.   I mention all the people I have mentioned because they, along with many others, are so important to me and I am still in touch with them…fifty years after graduating from school with them.   That is what growing up in a parish, at least in the ‘60s and ‘70s, did to you.   And, by the way, if you’ve had the pleasure, or will have the pleasure, of reading my books (See below.), you’ll recognize some of these names; many of the characters are named, more or less randomly, after people I grew up with in and around the neighborhood.  And, again, I apologize to those who have somehow slipped through the cracks; they are all important to me. 

 

I understand why the Archdiocese has to close parishes.   And, though I don’t live there any more and hence don’t have many grounds for opining one way or the other, I can see why St. Walter was selected for closure, which it calls “consolidation.”   Further, this news certainly didn’t come out of the blue, though the school announcement in January certainly threw us a curveball.   Finally, our tradition at St. Walter is perhaps not as rich as those of older, more ethnically cohesive parishes.   Still, and many of you can understand this, the parish in which we grew up was a focal point of our lives.   I won’t be so dramatic as to say that when the parish dies a piece of us dies, but it certainly hurts.   Thank God the good things, and especially the good friends, that St. Walter provided us live on in our hearts, minds, and lives.

 

 

 

 

 

See my two books, The Chairman, A Novel of Big City Politics and The Chairman’s Challenge, A Continuing Novel of Big City Politics, for further illumination on how things work, or at least used to work, in Chicago and Illinois politics…and to see a few names you might recognize.