This fifth of six short articles on the Second Vatican Council speaks to the longest document issued by the Council. The apostolic constitution Gaudium et spes addressed the reason Pope John XXIII called the Council: to change the relation between the Church and the world so that the Church’s mission would be strengthened and the world come to know its Savior and be rescued from its sinfulness. How should the Church, now committed to dialogue with everyone, enter into a more evangelically productive relationship to a world marked by advanced technological achievements, spreading democracy, an integrating economic system and an increasing skepticism toward revealed religion?

The apostolic constitution starts by identifying the Church with the joys and hopes as well as the grief and anxieties of the people of this age, especially with those who are poor or otherwise afflicted. In explaining who she is to the world, the Church hopes to enter into a dialogue that will explain the world to itself. While the Council was still meeting in Rome, Pope Paul VI went to the United Nations in New York, the first Pope to do so, and introduced himself to the world’s governmental representatives as “an expert in humanity.”

At a new moment in humanity’s history, the human race and its history, the Council Fathers wrote, are coming together around permanent values and new discoveries. There is a new social order, with new psychological and moral habits. In places, religion is being marginalized as too rooted in a prior moment of history. At this moment, therefore, reflection about the Church and the world needs to be grounded in mutual conviction about the dignity of the human person, made in God’s image and likeness. Human dignity is perennially threatened by human sinfulness, and the Church calls everyone to conversion of life. Christ is the new Adam, the new man, the one who establishes a world order based on truth and freedom. Death and atheism threaten this new order, but they cannot destroy it nor the Church that proclaims and embodies it.

Because Jesus is God, he brings us into the life of the Blessed Trinity; because Jesus is man, he transforms human activity into his instrument for making visible the Kingdom of God, even here and now. As God’s leaven in the world, the Church protects the “school of God’s love” that is the family. She works to strengthen marriage and respect for the human life born of it. The Church enters into dialogue with all cultures and is partner to the conversations about evolution, progress, economic and political life, peace and the international order. The document addresses each of these topics at some length.

This very broad vision of the relationship between Church and world was institutionalized right after the Council with ministries for social justice and peace, for the protection of human life and dignity, for marriage and family life, for intellectual life and communications. The Holy See itself and most dioceses have institutionalized these concerns while shoring up the faith life of Catholics themselves in efforts to renew catechesis and the common life of the Church herself, especially through various lay movements.

The Church, because of Gaudium et spes, has been on a fifty year dialogue with all the peoples and nations of the world. The conversation has sometimes been more acrimonious than those who set the course at the Second Vatican Council might have imagined or anticipated. But the course has held: the Church continuously finds new ways to introduce the whole world to its savior, Jesus Christ, the head of his body, the Church.

Francis Cardinal George, O.M.I.
Archbishop of Chicago

(Sponsored by St Paul Church)

Come have some fun with old friends and also make new ones. You will burn calories and tone up. Get ready for the summer.

Cost: $5.00
Date/Time: Every Monday and Wednesday evening from 7:30 to 8:30pm
Location: 2127 West 22nd Place (Basement of St. Paul Church)

For more information, you can check out the St. Paul Zumba Group page on Facebook here.

Whenever we celebrate the Sacred Liturgy we ought to be bringing our best. Whenever we have a Mass here at St. Paul, the Lectors ought to be the best we have, the Communion Ministers the best, the Ushers the best, the Music the best, and so on. These celebrations always belong to the whole church around the world, and always belong to the parish as a whole. In our funerals, for example, the lectors ought to be from the group of parish lectors. The cantors ought to be coming from the parish cantors, and so on. The same is true for weddings. The same is true for all of our celebrations! The various liturgical ministers should be prepared and trained and good at their jobs! The Masses we celebrate here at St. Paul, for whatever reason, belong to the whole parish and are open to the whole parish. For this reason we do not have “private Masses” here at St. Paul. A private Mass violates this liturgical theology. When someone buries their father or mother the whole parish joins the family in their sadness and offers the family consolation and hope for the future. When two young people join together in marriage, we embrace them and ask God’s blessing for them. When a child is baptized or receives first communion or confirmation, the whole parish rejoices! We are a Sacramental, Liturgical Church, and our celebrations are public. This theological understanding underlies all the decisions we make about our liturgies. When to celebrate, how to celebrate, how often to celebrate, who is involved in the celebration… all these decisions are informed by what the Church teaches us about the Liturgy and the Sacraments.

Or maybe it’s the nature of the church. When we reflect on the Catholic church, we have to remember how it is put together and who put it together. We have to think about the Kingdom of God and the desire of Jesus to save the whole world. We have to ask a few questions… among them the following: Does Jesus mean for the whole world to be saved? Does His Kingdom include the whole world? Does Jesus love us? And our enemies, too? Is every human being somehow included in the salvific will of Jesus? Even the Jews? And the Muslims? And agnostics? And Buddhists and animists and atheists? The answer is yes, yes, yes, yes, and so on.

This means that the bishop in a diocese is somehow responsible for all the souls in the territory of the diocese. This includes everyone… as Duval wrote at the dawn of Algerian independence in the 1960’s, otherwise he is only the head of a sect. In Chicago, that means the Archbishop is answerable to Jesus for all the people who live in Cook and Lake Counties. This is true whether those people recognize this relationship or not, whether they believe in God or not, whether they like it or not. This is not something the individuals choose…. It’s chosen and established by Christ. This can be difficult for us Americans to get our heads around, being that we live in a democracy and that we are modern people! We have to remember that we have dual citizenship… our modern American citizenship in a democracy is one of those citizenships. In our democracy, we make up the rules, and we choose to belong here. Our other citizenship is pre-modern. We are citizens of a Kingdom. In the Kingdom, we don’t make up the rules. And, our belonging is not a question of our desire but rather the desire of Jesus. He chose us to belong to His Kingdom.

Because the Archdiocese of Chicago is so large, the territory is divided into different parishes. Everyone in the counties of Cook and Lake belongs to one or another of these territories. Everyone… Catholic and non-Catholic alike! This is true whether the person recognizes and acknowledges this relationship or not. The pastors in the individual parishes are answerable to Jesus for every soul within the territory of their parish, in the same way the Archbishop is for the two counties of the Archdiocese. We are modern people, though, and we can get to thinking that we choose our parishes… that they are somehow voluntary organizations. This is never the case in the Catholic church. In Canon Law, there are two kinds of parishes, “national” parishes and territorial parishes. National parishes are established to serve people of a particular ethnic group, be they Poles or Irish or Slovak or Mexican or whatever. Any person of the particular nationality is by birth able to be a member of this kind of a parish. Obviously, we don’t choose the nationality of the family we’re born into! The other kind of parish is territorial. We make a choice of where we live, and we automatically belong to a parish. There is no requirement to “register” in a parish. A way to think of this is to recall the way counties are arranged in Louisiana. They’re called “parishes,” a pre-modern term left over from when Louisiana was Catholic territory.

If a parish begins to perceive itself differently, if it begins to perceive itself as a “destination” church, or somehow a voluntary organization, it has lost its essence as a Catholic parish and is in danger of becoming a sect. Once, I was talking about this reality with a parishioner. I told her there were some parishes where people chose to attend Mass because they liked the music, or the preaching, or the priest, or the Mass times, or whatever… and that these parishes worked to maintain their excellence in one or another of these areas to draw parishioners. St. Paul called this getting your ears tickled! She commented that this was a “Catholic version of Willow Creek.” She was right. People who make the decision to attend a parish that’s not their own are missing some of the essential nature of the church and the role of the church in changing the world.

What is a parish, then, and what’s it supposed to do? To answer the question, we have to look at what the disciples of Jesus are supposed to do. We are all called to give our lives away in love. Those of us who are married are to give our lives away to our spouses and children. Those of us who are not are still called to empty ourselves in imitation of Christ and in the service of love. A parish is the place where we go and pray, are nourished by the Sacraments and then go and change the world. It provides a space where we can develop relationships with our neighbors and the families around us and make a concrete difference in the lives of those people. In a big city like Chicago, it functions like a small town. Even today some of the families in Chicago see the parish that way and relate to each other and the parish in that way. It is the center of their lives. It’s where people go to connect to each other and to the Lord, and to give back to the Lord and their neighbor in gratitude. Let us ask the Lord to strengthen our faith and our parishes, to teach us to love one another in the way He desires, and to avoid turning our Catholic church into a sect.

Come have some fun with old friends and also make new ones. You will burn calories and tone up. Get ready for the summer.

Cost: $5.00
Date/Time: Every Monday evening from 7:30 to 8:30pm
Location: 2127 West 22nd Place (Basement of St. Paul Church)

For more information, you can check out the St. Paul Zumba Group page on Facebook here.

$50 per person

Saturday, June 30, 2012
2127 West 22nd Place
Chicago, IL 60608

Catering by IL Vicinato Restaurant – (Meal includes: Bread, Salad, Side pasta, Main entree and Desert)

6:00 – 7:00pm: Cocktail Hour with Domestic Beer and Wine (Cash bar for imports and mixed drinks)
7:00 – 8:00pm: Four Course Dinner Served
8:00pm – 11:00pm: Dancing with live Music

For more information, contact the church rectory at (773) 847-7622.

On February 22nd, St. Paul’s administrator, Father Jose Marino Novoa, Father Richard Todd, associate pastor, and the school principal, Ms. Susan Dzikas, were notified that St. Paul – Our Lady of Vilna school would be required to merge with St. Ann’s School. The main reasons were finances and the age of St. Paul’s 1892 school building. The archdiocese could no longer afford to subsidize the school as it so generously did to the amount of over $200,000 yearly. The solution was to merge.

The parishioners, parents of the students and business community objected. It would have a negative effect on the community and pastoral work. Meetings with the archdiocese were requested and granted. A serious dialogue began. The archdiocese set four criteria based on what makes a school viable and self supporting. If the criteria were met, they would consider a reversal of their decision.

Parish committees began to work on the criteria with the help of Pilsen Neighbors. Soon 230 students were registered. A one week fund drive began during the Sunday Masses and $30,000 was collected. Our alderman, Daniel Solis, stepped in to help. Parishioners and the business community collected $104,000 in a week. Mota Construction made a study of the stairwells and presented a plan. A strategy was prepared with the help of Pilsen Neighbors for a future executive board to assist the school to secure funding in future years. The challenges given by the archdiocese were met and ready.

All this was presented at a meeting on April 28th to the pleasant surprise of archdiocesan representatives. The parish demonstrated leadership and unity. Archdiocesan engineers reviewed the construction study. Drawings would be made to assure proper compliance with city code. The representatives of the parish left the meeting in an atmosphere of great hope. This is what they shared when they met the parents and children of the school who held a prayer procession outside of the offices of the Archdiocese during the meeting.

On May 12th, the Office of Schools called to meet with the parish administrator, principal and representatives of the parish. The answer was given. The school would remain open. The parish celebrated this with great joy! We can continue our ministry with the children.