Short History of Oak Park

Congregation Or Chadash – Congregation of New Light – was founded in 1975 as a response to the discrimination and isolation experienced by Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Jews in mainstream synagogues.

FAQ.

Read:

* Thomas Day, Where Have You Gone, Michelangelo? and Why Catholics Can’t Sing

* James Hitchcock, Recovery of the Sacred

* Rudolph Otto, Idea of the Holy

Read Day a few years back.  From him got realization of priest as center of attention during mass, miked, dominating the proceeedings.

Read Hitchcock recently.  He has a calm, reasoned indictment of reform since 70s, but not as indictment.  Emphasize calm and reasoned.  Wonderful book.

Am reading Otto, who gets down to the ineffable aspect of God-knowledge.  So far, 50 pp into it, and he’s clearly offering a reasonable alternative to the drily rational.  More later on him.

If you do not have a church home, or your church is not a home to you, we invite you . . . .  Our church is open to anyone looking for a spiritual home . . .

says the Ascension Church bulletin in its front page boilerplate “welcome” message.  Nicely put.  “[O]r your church is not a home to you” addresses itself neatly to the variously disaffected.  “[O]pen to anyone looking for a spiritual home” bespeaks inclusion without hitting us over the head.

While at this, note that the three Oak Park Catholic parishes that began in Oak Park — St. Catherine of Siena moved here from a half mile east down Washington Blvd. — have names that could also be Episcopal or Lutheran.  Ascension has its counterpart on N. LaSalle Street.  St. Edmund and St. Giles are both English and pre-Reformation. 

It’s as if a certain politesse called for Catholics to sound not too Catholic, as Our Lady of this or that or St. Patrick’s or, God forbid, St. Francis Borgia, S.J.  No need, again, to hit anyone over the head with your identity.

Woman next to me at the Mary Jean Connelly funeral mass on Monday at Ascension Church had an uncle who was “hanged by the British” in 1920. He was 18 and had been captured after ambushing soldiers, one of whom was killed.

There was no talk of that at this service for Mary Jean, who died at 74 after an illness during which her six children and husband tended her. Being prayed for at home by a group that included her pastor, Fr. Larry McNally, she joined in but when they were finished, called for prayers for others she named. (My nephew’s wife died at 40 a few days earlier. At her burial service, her Lutheran pastor told the same story: his wife prayed with Shelly, then Shelly said let’s pray for others whom she named.)

The Irish factor was pronounced nonetheless, and why not? She was a Walsh. Her “big brother” Bob, a Catholic deacon, wound up comments at the end in near-matter-of-fact manner that contrasted with the emotionalism that had interjected itself earlier.

Not from Fr. McNally, who delivered the sermon during mass and in strikingly unassuming manner captured the drama of her life with its element of hope and joy — and persistence, as in his story of being prodded by her to visit a sick person and there pray for her. “I’ll see you there,” he told her. “I’ll pick you up,” she said. “I know the way and won’t get lost. I’ll see you there,” he said. “I’ll pick you up,” she repeated. “What time?” he asked, resigned.

The singing and poetry reading was sentimental and beautiful. The song leader, Gussie Mastrantonio Lenehan, having performed and led throughout, accompanied by a fiddler and piano, wound things up with Mary Jean’s favorite, which she sang a capella, “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.”

Tags: Mary+Jean+Connelly, Ascension+Church, Rev.+Larry+McNally