I have just spent ten days in Chicago with my fellow Catholic Herald contributors Gavin Ashenden and Mark Lambert. The trip, like everything we do together, was entirely providential. Fr Christopher Landfried contacted us having been inspired by some of the work we have been doing in the UK and hoping to build a network of faithful Catholics supporting one another across the pond.
The prospect of going to the murder capital of the US may have been daunting for some, but not for us, hardened as we are by life in Shropshire, Leigh-on-sea and Welwyn respectively. We brought our rosaries and weren’t afraid to use them.
Once we had recovered from jetlag, we began a whirlwind tour of Catholic life in this vibrant city.
We found ourselves stepping into Romans 5:20 as we saw that “where sin increased, grace abounded all the more”. Fr Chris had arranged for us to visit and give talks at several parishes, schools and seminaries across the city, and had ensured that there was a perfect balance between sacramental nourishment and eager evangelisation so that what came out was more of God and less of us.
Any prejudice we might have had that the Americans have no sense of history and tradition was immediately blown away as we visited one beautiful church after another, soaking in one sacred liturgy after another; sung vespers, reverent Novus Ordo, and the Traditional Latin Mass.
(In front the church of St Mary of the Angels, Chicago: (from left) Fr Christopher Landfried, Gavin Ashenden, Mark Lambert, Katherine Bennett, Fr Ryan Brady)
In the true “both/and” style of the Catholic Imagination the sublime was sometimes joined by the bizarre. On one somewhat eccentric occasion, at a local radio station full of Gods wonderful misfits (us included), we were guided in the most menacing Divine Mercy chaplet imaginable as an enormous bald-headed, gun-toting gentleman from the deep south very forcefully led us in prayer.
Our days were spent travelling around the city in Fr Christopher’s $1000 car (now full of my biscuit crumbs) and as might be expected from a Catholic Roadshow we happily spent the car journeys singing hymns together, praying the rosary and wondering where we could purchase alcohol.
Everywhere we went we were given a warm welcome. Gavin spoke eloquently about the beauty of the Catholic faith, Mark shared moving details about his own faith journey, and I talked about lost femininity. There was a real sense of mutual strengthening, support and a desperate need for the connections that we were making.
We attended an inspiring conference put on by the Institute on Religious Life (IRL), with not one trousered nun in sight. Sr Alicia Torres spoke beautifully about Eucharistic revival and Kathleen Beckman about spiritual warfare.
Fr Christopher then arranged for us be shown around the city by Fr Ryan Brady of the Priestly Society of the Holy Cross. Gavin greeted him by declaring that he looked every inch the Chicago mobster (which he did) to which he laughed and said it was not the first time he had been told this. It turned out that his family were from the same small town in Ireland as mine and that he only knew one priest in the UK, who happened to be the priest responsible for bringing me back in to the Catholic Church. God was moving in every encounter we made.
Fr Ryan was everything a priest should be; a tough man uncompromising in truth, deeply human and compassionate, broken and healed, ordinary yet extraordinary…..the stuff of saints! Gavin interviewed him for the Catholic Herald’s Merely Catholic Podcast, which is well worth a listen.
Our trip ended with a visit to the Canons Regular of St John Cantius.
It was here that I broke.
I began to weep like a child as we took in the beauty of the church itself, the seemingly endless relics – a thorn from the crown of thorns here, a kneecap of St Fulgentius and a bloodied glove of Padre Pio there – and the visceral song that penetrated deep within while simultaneously raising to the heavens above; the transcendent and the immanent, feminine and masculine, God and Man, body and soul, the hypostatic union restoring all that fell away in the Garden of Eden.
When Gavin asked if I was having a nervous breakdown, the only thing that seemed to express what was happening to me was a beauty “break-in”. The wonderful Fr Joshua Caswell looked up at the men and said, “be gentle with her, she has been traumatised by beauty”. And so it was.
After drinking homemade limoncello with the canons, signing Jerusalem in their drawing room and listening to one of the brothers do a mildly successful British/Australian accent, we were told about their mission to restore the sacred.
“Today it’s not hard to see that our world, our country, our city, and even our lives are often like broken jugs,” said Fr Caswell, referring to the miracle of St John Cantius. “So much is shattered and in need of restoration…but that brokenness – that felix culpa – can lead to an even greater restoration, to something deeper than if we had never been broken at all.”
It suddenly became clear to each one of us why we were there. It was St Cantius’ miracle of the broken jug that inspired this new community of priests and brothers to “restore the sacred” in the Church, in the world and in their own lives, so as to pursue not only their own sanctification, but also the salvation and sanctification of all people in all places. Being broken ourselves, we understood more keenly than ever that in all that we do, we too desire only this.
(Mark, Katherine and Gavin visiting the University of St Mary of the Lake, Mundelein Seminary, Chicago)
The windy city may have taken my mantilla, but it blew a wind of change through each one of our hearts, calling us more deeply to join our brothers and sisters across the pond and do what little we can to restore the sacred, which is hidden, but not lost, in our post enlightenment world.
We give thanks for the support of Fr Christopher Landfried, a brave and holy priest, without whom we would not have been able to take this leap of faith into Catholic Chicago.
(Main photograph: St John Cantius parish, Chicago | Tom Gill via Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
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