It has been a more transparent and community-focused process than we have come, over decades, to expect from the Catholic Church. And still, the announcement on Sunday that St. Catherine-St. Lucy Church will be closed before the end of June is the least surprising outcome of the entire multi-year Renew Our Church drama that has played out in Oak Park and across the Chicago Archdiocese.
From the start, in a time when there aren’t enough priests, there aren’t enough Catholics filling pews and making donations, church buildings continue to age, and maintenance is deferred, the necessary outcome of Cardinal Blase Cupich’s effort had to be fewer churches.
And if there was going to be a consolidation of Oak Park’s four Catholic churches, then the odd church out was going to be St. Catherine-St. Lucy. It has the smallest and the least well-heeled congregation.
That doesn’t ease the sting for those current, and so many former parishioners, of this remarkable parish.
In our news story today, Bill Cragg, a longtime church member, rightly points to the distinct eras of this church, which has always straddled Oak Park and Austin.
When the church and school opened decades ago, both were packed with Irish Catholics drawn equally from both neighborhoods. Then in the 1960s and into the 1970s, came Chicago’s mortal sin of racist resegregation of the West Side. Greed in the real estate industry, capitulation by institutions, including the church, and the utter failure of machine political leaders, maximized fear in ethnic whites who abandoned their neighborhoods in a block-by-block pattern that decimated Austin and other communities.
It took decades for the Black West Side to regroup, to claim its political power and to declare its pride of ownership in Austin.
All of this left St. Catherine’s and then in the 1970s the addition of the shuttered St. Lucy church in Austin, as that rare institution working to keep serving both Oak Park and Austin. White Oak Park families abandoned the well-regarded parish school and many left the parish church as well.
What grew and teetered and then settled was a dynamic school serving a Black student body mostly from Austin and not particularly Catholic and a small, determined and racially diverse group of congregants.
This is one of the most interesting stories in the complicated history of race in Austin and Oak Park.
Now the church will close, its future unknown. To the great credit of the Catholic community of Oak Park, Fenwick High School and some muscular nonprofit support, the school only gets stronger and will survive as the rare Catholic school without a church. The Neighborhood Bridge effort providing outreach to the West Side seems sincere and real and will continue to operate from the old rectory. Other nonprofits will also share space on the campus at Washington and Austin.
So now it is a third era for St. Catherine-St. Lucy. May it have purpose, necessary resources and leadership worthy of its new mission.