For some time, I’ve thought that it would be cool to get a list of all the Catholic churches in the Archdiocese of Chicago and each day visit a church whose patron’s feast was that day. Finally, I got around to downloading a list, making a spreadsheet and finding the feast days for the saints. It was occasionally a challenge. For example, the Archdiocese has five Saint James churches. But there are two (or three, depending who you ask)¹ Saint Jameses in the Bible and none of the churches seemed to identify which Saint James they were named for. That said, some parishes actually had pages about their patrons which was helpful for my project. There are some 360 churches on the archdiocesan list, but with duplicates of saints and holy days, plus a handful of churches without associated saints, not every day ends up having a church to visit.
So having this list, I decided to go ahead and start the parish visitations today, with Saint Rita of Cascia. I had a choice of a parish on 63rd street or the national shrine which is apparently at the high school near 79th street. I decided going to the high school would be weird so I looked at the parish’s website, saw they had weekday mass at 8a and trekked down there.
Only to find out that they weren’t doing mass that morning, but they would have a mass at 7p to celebrate St Rita’s feast.
I returned that evening (after a visit to the Art Institute of Chicago) and found a church packed with parishioners. Once Mass began, I found that we had:
- one bishop
- two deacons
- three nuns
- four priests²
plus, a little girl dressed as St Rita herself and an Eastern Rite cleric whose presence was explained at the end of Mass, but only in Spanish and between the acoustics and my hearing, I had no idea what was said about him.
I suppose if I had bothered to learn anything about St Rita before I went, I wouldn’t be surprised that it’s a parish run by the Augustinians (St Rita was an Augustinian nun). But despite this being an Augustinian parish in Chicago, as near as I can tell, Pope Leo never served here (although he did teach physics at the high school).
The parish is—at least at this Mass—overwhelmingly Latino and the Mass, while nominally bilingual, was predominantly in Spanish. Alas, these older churches don’t take well to amplification so I had a hard time following anything spoken, regardless of language (and again, my bad hearing doesn’t help with that).
No church visit tomorrow, since that’s one of the gaps in the calendar, and I’m not sure about this weekend since I have the kids, but I do intend to continue this project.
- There are two apostles, James the Great and James the Less, plus James the Brother of the Lord who may or may not be the same person as James the Less. James the Less/Brother of the Lord has his feast on May 3rd, James the Great on July 25th.
- I couldn’t resist the counting format once I spotted the pair of deacons.
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