Category: Catholic nerd pilgrimage

When I was planning this project, one of the things I really wanted to do was to visit as many of the Black Catholic parishes of Chicago as I could. Black Catholic worship is such a spirit-filled activity that it shouldn’t be missed. Today I attended the Easter Vigil Mass at St Benedict the African…

It’s been a while since I’ve been able to go to a church for my Catholic Nerd pilgrimage, but I made it to St Richard church on the Southwest side of Chicago for a Good Friday communion service.¹ The area is part of the city’s expansion to the southwest after the second world war and…

Looking like a misspelling of “santita,” Saint Ita was an Irish saint and the church named for her was presumably originally an Irish parish although the neighborhood has changed a great deal and the Mass I attended was in Spanish. Part of a three-church parish which also includes St Thomas of Canterbury. These two churches…

Old St Mary’s has the newest church building I’ve seen so far (I’m pretty sure it’s the newest church building in the city and quite possibly the whole archdiocese, which is ironic given its name) although the parish is also simultaneously the oldest parish in the city. Of the new church buildings I’ve seen I’m…

As a person of a certain age, the name Sylvester brings up a particular cat and his catchphrase, “Thuffering thuccotash!” Needless to say, this is not the namesake of St Sylvester Church but rather the fourth-century Pope of that name (whose papacy was the ninth-longest recorded).  The church (part of a two-church parish) is located…

St Thomas of Canterbury is located in the Uptown neighborhood of Chicago, an area that is undergoing gentrification, pushing out the poor residents of the neighborhood, albeit not completely as evidenced by the fact that there was a group of people waiting for the church’s food pantry to open when I arrived for the morning…

Our Lady of the Holy Family parish was created by the combination of the former Notre Dame de Chicago and Holy Family parishes on the near west side. The latter of these two was later returned to the Jesuits from the archdiocese and it now serves as a chapel to St Ignatius College Prep as…

I tend to feel like anything much past Harlem Avenue is Iowa so Streamwood is a suburb that I would not have been able to place on a map before heading out to St John the Evangelist yesterday. I have a new candidate for newest church building in the archdiocese with this one which was…

Driving east on 37th Street, I saw the bell tower of Nativity of Our Lord Parish looming over the houses and 2 and 3-flats that populate Bridgeport east of new Comiskey,¹ a strong reminder of the days when a home parish was a key marker of self-identity in Chicago. But only once I was inside…