In a neighborhood shaken by change, St. Martin de Porres Church symbolized unwavering faith
You won't really know the city till you've visited . . . St. Martin de Porres. The Chicago of the postcards is the city that tourists see. But there's another Chicago unobserved by visitors, a city that is rich with history and with the pulse of life. This is the second of five occasional stories.
As Dorothy Cobb sings, unaccompanied, the traditional gospel hymn "To God Be the Glory," her voice soars. It booms and echoes off the stone walls and high ceiling of St. Martin de Porres Church, filling every corner, from the heights to the depths, a benediction of grace.
"Praise the Lord! Praise the Lord!"
And, as Cobb sings, she looks out over the congregation of 100 or so fellow parishioners to the back of the church and the huge stained-glass window there. With the noonday sun pouring in, the window is a spectacular splash of bright colors, mainly blue, and in the center is the image of Mary, the mother of Jesus.
It is to Mary that Cobb directs her song. The image of Mary helps Cobb bring focus to her song and strength to her singing and to her life. ("It seems like she helps me make it through whatever I'm trying to get through," Cobb later explains.)
But there's more than personal significance to this. The link of Cobb's song with Mary's stained-glass window reflects a connection that St. Martin's congregation has to all the other Roman Catholics who have worshiped within these walls through more than seven decades.
This connection can result in beauty, as with Cobb's singing. But there have been times when the link was one of pain.
In the window, Mary's face is as white as snow. At her microphone, Dorothy Cobb is a rich, deep, dark brown.
The story of St. Martin's church is one that can be told, in one way or another, about many Catholic parishes and neighborhoods throughout Chicago. It's a story of common faith and racial fear. It is a story of failure: the inability of whites who prayed in the same pews to open their arms and hearts. But it is also a story of success, to which the small but vibrant African-American community of St. Martin de Porres Church bears witness.
The 12-story-high church building at 5114-30 W. Washington Blvd. -- the tallest structure in the Austin neighborhood -- is a symbol of this bitter and sweet history.
A minor architectural gem, the Tudor-Gothic structure of brick and limestone was the brainchild of Rev. Daniel Luttrell, the parish's first pastor, appointed in 1909. Initially, the parish was to be dedicated to St. Joan of Arc, but, within a year, the patron saint had been changed to St. Thomas Aquinas, the Middle Ages' leading Christian philosopher and theologian.
The new parish, mainly comprising Irish immigrants and their descendants, quickly put up its first building, a church-school at 116 N. Leclaire Ave., followed soon by a rectory for the priests and eventually a convent for the Sisters of Mercy who taught in the school.
But from the beginning, the goal, as it has been for Catholic congregations through the centuries, was to construct a more monumental church building -- a song of praise and faith in stone. In 1923, ground was finally broken.
The completed church, all but finished by the end of the next year, was a triumph, but Luttrell didn't live to enjoy it. In fact, his funeral in late December 1924 was the first mass celebrated in the new building.
Designed by an architect in the parish, Karl M. Vitzthum, the new St. Thomas Aquinas Church featured flying buttresses, gargoyles and, atop its tower, a Celtic cross. Over the entry doors was the huge stained-glass window of Mary that, decades later, Dorothy Cobb would come to love. Made of glass imported from France, the window was designed by the F.X. Zettler company, which, during the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, beat out Tiffany's for the award for stained glass.
The high altar, installed several years later, was constructed of hand-painted terra cotta and topped by a 30-foot tower made from two tons of cast bronze. Behind it was a hand-carved walnut screen with figures of the 12 apostles.
And, as if all that beauty weren't enough, in the early 1950s, Msgr. William Long, pastor at the time, ordered a redecoration of the church during which many of its upper walls were filled with paintings of biblical scenes and images of the saints. The piece de resistance, installed behind the altar, was a 50-foot-tall replica of "The Apotheosis of St. Thomas Aquinas" by Spanish Renaissance artist Francisco de Zurbaran.
The painters doing the redecoration, obviously adept at currying favor with clerical clients, put Long's face on the body of a cardinal in the center of the Zurbaran copy and also on the head of St. William over an altar dedicated to St. Joseph.
That visage is one of the many white faces that still look down on the congregation today. But there are few white faces in the pews.
In the late 1960s, as African-Americans began to move into Austin and attend St. Thomas Aquinas, whites fled. Within two or three years, the neighborhood around the church had gone from all white to virtually all black.
"The enemy was the real estate developers," says 86-year-old Justin McCarthy, one of the few whites to remain in the community. Panic peddlers would call homeowners and tell them that the incoming African-Americans were going to drive down the value of their properties. "It was purely economics," says McCarthy.
But, in truth, it was more. Many of the whites who lived in Austin had a deep-seated antipathy toward blacks. They didn't want blacks as neighbors, and they wouldn't have blacks as neighbors. So they left, just about all of them.
The pain of that blanket rejection must have been deep for the African-Americans moving into the parish at the time, but, today, black parishioners talk about the white flight philosophically.
Nathaniel Ruben, who began attending St. Thomas in 1970, says he'd hoped the neighborhood would remain integrated: "But you know the old saying: Blacks move in; whites move away. It's funny -- we can work together, we can socialize together, but we can't live together." Of course, it's not funny at all.
The vast majority of the whites who moved away were Catholic. Most of the African-Americans who moved in were not. So it was a much smaller congregation that worshiped at St. Thomas over the next 20 years. Then, in the late 1980s, the church was closed.
St. Thomas was consolidated with two nearby parishes, Resurrection at 5072 W. Jackson Blvd. and St. Mel-Holy Ghost at 4301 W. Washington Blvd. (Since 1985, the archdiocese has closed nearly 70 parishes through such consolidations because of declining memberships and rising costs.)
The new, combined parish was named St. Martin de Porres in honor of the 17th Century mulatto physician who, because of his work among the sick and poor of Peru, is that nation's patron saint of social justice. Church services were held in the chapel at the still-operating Resurrection grade school. But the St. Martin parishioners, like those of St. Thomas more than 60 years earlier, wanted to build a church of their own, and they asked Cardinal Joseph Bernardin for help with the $1 million project.
The cardinal seemed open to the idea at first, but later he decided to renovate and reopen the old St. Thomas Aquinas church building instead, at a cost of $700,000. For those who had worked long and hard on the plans for a new building, Bernardin's decision was a sharp disappointment. Even nine years later, the wounds remain tender for some church members.
Yet, despite that setback, the St. Martin parish members have drawn together and made the new (old) church building their own.
A bronze bust of St. Martin is prominently displayed just inside the front door, and a life-size statue of the saint has its own niche, just behind where the parish choir and musicians set up for services.
And near the bust of St. Martin is a baptismal font that was fashioned out of parts of the fonts from the three original churches: the bowl from St. Mel, a blue mosaic lamb from Resurrection and a glazed terra cotta relief of the baby Jesus from St. Thomas.
Once again, the old St. Thomas building is a comfortable, elegant place of worship.
Yet, for Elizabeth Becnel and most other St. Martin parishioners, the church is more than stone and glass. "The building itself, I like," says Becnel. "The stained-glass windows are absolutely beautiful, especially when the sun is shining. But it's not so much the building. It's what's in here."
She crosses her hands over her heart.
It's the people, she says, who pray and sing and smile and weep together inside the church building's walls. And, each Sunday, as Becnel drives to St. Martin's from her home in Hillside, she can't wait. "I'm excited because I know that I will be worshiping with my church family," she explains.
"When I turn the corner -- Ah! I'm home."
Chicago Tribune Magazine, September 12, 1999, page 17, Patrick T. Reardon author.
| [Illustration] | |||||||||||||||
| PHOTOS 4; Caption: PHOTO (color): A procession of altar boys heralds the start of Sunday mass at St. Martin de Porres Church in Austin. PHOTO (color): Two girls dressed in their Sunday best take advantage of a lull in the liturgy to squeeze in a quick nap. PHOTO (color): A worshiper prays against the brightly colored backdrop of stained- glass windows installed when the church was still known as St. Thomas Aquinas. PHOTO (color): St. Martin de Porres Church stands in the background of gritty urban life that some days may include a basketball game with a makeshift hoop. (Magazine, page 2.) Tribune photos by John Lee. |
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