On Sunday morning, a priest born to Irish immigrants will
again recite prayers in English and Church Slavonic to a small group of
worshipers, many of whom brought their faith to Chicago from faraway Belarus.
Together they will close Christ the Redeemer Catholic Church, the only parish
in the United States serving Belarussian Byzantine Catholics.
And then they will leave the building, a
converted firehouse at 3107 W. Fullerton Ave., to St. Peter and Paul Romanian
Catholic Mission.
"You receive a gift," said Rev. John McDonnell. "And pass it
on."
This closing chapter in the life of a parish is also part of the story of
Chicago, one of immigrant waves and unquenchable faith. The church, established
in the late 1950s, provided a place where liturgy dusted with the mysticism of
the Byzantine rite was combined with allegiance to Rome. It also provided a
home away from home for a small slice of a community that fled Belarus for the
promise of America and the comfort of Chicago.
But after years of declining membership, the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of
Chicago reluctantly decided to close the parish. The number of Belarussian
Byzantine Catholics was never large, even in Europe, McDonnell said. Part of
the reason is that what is now Belarus was, for most of its history, part of
the Soviet Union or, before that, other empires.
Its crossroads location, wedged in a neighborhood that included Poland,
Lithuania and Russia, often produced a competition between Roman Catholicism to
the west and Orthodoxy to the east.
"The majority of the people in Belarus, if they were religious, they would
be Orthodox," McDonnell said. Those who practiced Catholicism were often
ethnic Poles.
Because of the Soviet Union's efforts to quash religious freedom, immigrants
from Belarus who came to Chicago after World War II arrived hungering for a
place to practice their faith, whatever their tradition. In the late 1950s,
Belarussian Catholics began banding together, meeting for a time at Josephinum
High School and later moving into the remodeled firehouse.
"It joined together everything," said Vera Romuk, 71, who spent four
years in refugee camps after World War II before coming to Illinois in 1949,
settling in Peoria and later Chicago. "We preserved our culture here. Our
customs, our traditions."
The church flowered under the leadership of the late Bishop Vladimir
Tarasevitch, a Belarus native who arrived in Chicago as a teenager in 1939,
entered the Benedictine community four years later and in 1958 began serving as
pastor at Christ the Redeemer. He spoke 11 languages, including Hebrew and
Latin.
To accommodate parishioners who did not understand Belorussian, the parish
began holding the liturgy in English in the early 1960s.
Since then, Romuk and her physician husband, Witold, have seen the church
thrive and then slowly ebb away. At its height, about 80 families were
associated with the church. In the last few years, perhaps 20 worshipers showed
up for Sunday services. The Romanian mission has been sharing the church
facilities since 1995.
"People moved to other states," Vera Romuk said. "Others either
became sick and stayed at home or went to nursing homes."
Romuk's church directory is filled with the names of those who died during the
last five years. But there are survivors too. Helen and Frank Gazzolo, both 72,
were married in the church in 1964 and still attend services. English speakers
from Skokie, they were drawn by "the beauty of the liturgy," Frank
Gazzolo said.
Another English speaker lured to the church was its priest, McDonnell, who was
brought in by Tarasevitch.
Having some familiarity with Russian, McDonnell could recite prayers and read
some scripture in Church Slavonic, the language used for the Belarussian
Byzantine Catholic religious texts. He savored the setting and prayer text, and
reflected on the differences between the Latin and Byzantine rites.
"In one sense, the tradition of the Latin West is to reflect more of an
openness between priest and worshiping community," he said. "Here,
the emphasis is on the mystery of God's presence between God and the
community."
But there is more to the church than mystery. There are memories, too, baptisms
and funerals, feasts and weekly services--now all coming to a close.
"Of course, nothing is forever," Frank Gazzolo said. "I'm
grateful to God it lasted as long as it did because of the special nature of
the church."
It fell to McDonnell, parish administrator since 1995, to oversee the closing
of the parish and help the community come to terms with the end of an era.
Late last week McDonnell was still searching for the right words for Sunday's
final homily.
"What helped our community deal with the closing is Christ the Redeemer
was established for an immigrant community," he said. "And we're
handing it over to another community of recent immigrants."