For Dorothy Banks, a Sunday without 10:30 mass is an anomaly. “I’m there except if I’m in the hospital or out of town,” she says. “If I do miss, four or five people will call to see where I’ve been. I go to hear the Word, that’s the main thing, and to set an example for my children.”
On Sunday, June 9, the newly constructed east site of Saint Benedict’s celebrated its first anniversary. That morning, as usual, the Bankses arrived just as the early-morning mass was letting out, and Dorothy, a short, stout woman of 62, greeted her friends. “Oh, now here’s Miss Martin,” she said as she embraced one woman on the way inside. Another woman brought news of a chum who was out of the hospital. “Why dahlin’ that’s wonderful,” crowed Dorothy.
The building lacks the splendor of the new Holy Angels Church in Kenwood-Oakland, a $4.5 million solar-heated edifice that opened in June on Oakwood Boulevard, designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill to replace the original, which was destroyed by fire five years ago. But like Holy Angels, Saint Benedict’s represents the dreams not of the Irish and Germans who first settled Englewood but of the African Americans who live there now.
In 1962 Dorothy and her family moved to Englewood, where they started attending Saint Brendan’s Church at 67th and Racine. Lois and her brother, Charles Jr., entered the school there, while Louise attended a neighboring Catholic school with special-education classes. From her house across Ogden Park Dorothy could see the church spire. Later she would work for a decade in the bindery at R.R. Donnelley, but it was Saint Brendan’s that would form the centerpiece of her existence.
Ill health forced Smith to retire in 1964, and most of the white parishioners left with him. By the time Father Robert Burns took over in 1968, Saint Brendan’s membership was made up of a couple of hundred black families and maybe 30 white ones. Burns was “a sweetheart,” says church stalwart Irene Martin, but he was also a man who recognized the obstacles he faced in maintaining his church. Most of Englewood’s blacks were not Catholic. Moreover, it was middle-class African Americans who generally converted, and Englewood was becoming woefully low-income. “But instead of viewing this as a disaster,” says Burns, “we preached a gospel that this was a great opportunity for people to adopt a faith, educate their children, and share the opportunity to embrace the Catholic church.”
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The proposal troubled no one more than Father Ron Kondziolka, the new pastor at Saint Brendan’s, whose school was slated for closing. Kondziolka had come to Saint Brendan’s in 1983 from a church in Little Village. At Saint Brendan’s he found an underpopulated school, a dwindling number of Sunday worshipers, and rising operating costs. Just to heat the church for an hour on Sunday cost $500, the same amount being gathered weekly in the collection plate, relates Arthur Eiland, the loyal parishioner who kept the books. The annual operating budget for Saint Brendan’s, both school and parish, stood at close to $400,000, but the accumulated debt was $180,000. “We were never technically on subsidy,” says Eiland; “the archdiocese made us loans. But it was the same thing.”
