Archdiocese of Chicago
The Archdiocese of Chicago is a Latin Church ecclesiastical jurisdiction, an archdiocese of the Catholic Church located in Northeastern Illinois, in the United States. The Vatican erected it as a diocese in 1843 and elevated it to an archdiocese in 1880. Chicago is the see city for the archdiocese and the province.
On September 20, 2014, Cardinal Blase Joseph Cupich was appointed Archbishop of Chicago. The cathedral parish for the archdiocese, Holy Name Cathedral, is in the Near North Side area of Chicago.
The archdiocese serves over 2 million Catholics in Cook and Lake counties, an area of. The archdiocese is divided into six vicariates and 31 deaneries. An episcopal vicar administers each vicariate. The archdiocese is the metropolitan see of the province of Chicago. Its suffragan dioceses are the other Catholic dioceses in Illinois: Belleville, Joliet, Peoria, Rockford, and Springfield.
Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, archbishop of Chicago from 1982 to 1996, was arguably one of the most prominent figures in the American Catholic church in the post–Vatican II era, rallying progressives with his "seamless garment ethic" and his ecumenical initiatives.
History
1600 to 1800
During the 17th century, the Illinois Country was part of the French colony of New France, which was under the jurisdiction of the Diocese of Quebec.The first Catholic presence in present-day Illinois was that of a French Jesuit missionary, Reverend Jacques Marquette, who landed at the mouth of the Chicago River on December 4, 1674. A cabin he built for the winter became the first European settlement in the area. Marquette published his survey of the new territories and soon more French missionaries and settlers arrived.
In 1696, a French Jesuit, Reverend Jacques Gravier, founded the Illinois mission among the Illinois, Miami, Kaskaskia and others of the Illiniwek confederacy in the Mississippi River and Illinois River valleys. During this period, the French-Canadian and Native American Catholics in the region were under the jurisdiction of the bishop of the Diocese of Quebec in New France.
With the end of the French and Indian War in 1763, the British took control of Illinois. Their rule ended after the American Revolution in 1783 when the British ceded Illinois and other Midwestern territories to the new United States. In 1795, the Potawatomi nation signed the Treaty of Greenville that ended the Northwest Indian War, ceding to the United States its land at the mouth of the Chicago River.
1800 to 1840
In 1789, Pope Pius VI erected the Diocese of Baltimore, covering the entire United States. In 1822, Alexander Beaubien became the first person to be baptized as a Catholic in Chicago. By 1826, the Vatican had created the Diocese of St. Louis, covering Illinois and other areas of the American Midwest.In 1833, Jesuit missionaries in Chicago wrote to Bishop Joseph Rosati of St. Louis, pleading for a priest to serve the 100 Catholics in the city. In response, Rosati appointed Reverend John Saint Cyr. a French priest, as the first resident priest in Chicago. Saint Cyr celebrated his first mass in a log cabin on Lake Street in 1833. At a cost of $400, Saint Cyr constructed St. Mary, a small wooden church near Lake and State Streets. The first Catholic church in the city, it was dedicated in 1833. The next year, Bishop Simon Bruté of the new Diocese of Vincennes in Indiana, visited Chicago. He found only one priest serving over 400 Catholics. Brulé asked permission from Rosati to send several priests from Vincennes to Chicago.
In 1837, Saint Cyr retired as pastor of St. Mary and was replaced by Reverend James O'Meara. He moved St. Mary to another wooden structure at Wabash Avenue and Madison Street. When O'Meara left Chicago, Saint Palais demolished the wooden church and replaced it with a brick structure.
1840 to 1850
erected the Diocese of Chicago on November 28, 1843. It included all of the State of Illinois, taking territory from the Dioceses of St. Louis and Vincennes. In 1844, Gregory XVI named Reverend William Quarter of Ireland as the first bishop of Chicago. On his arrival in Chicago, Quarter summoned a synod of the 32 priests to begin the organization of the diocese.Quarter secured the passage of a state law in 1845 that declared the bishop of Chicago an incorporated entity, giving him the power to hold real estate and other property in trust for religious purposes. This law would allow Quarter and future prelates to construct churches, colleges, and universities in the archdiocese.
Quarter invited the Sisters of Mercy to come to Chicago in 1846. Over the next six years, the sisters founded schools, two orphanages and an academy. One of their projects was the St. Xavier Female Seminary, a secondary school that attracted students from wealthy Catholic and Protestant families. St. Mary of the Lake University, the first university or college in Chicago, opened in 1846. Quarter died on April 10, 1848.
On October 3, 1848, Pope Pius IX appointed Reverend James Van de Velde of the Society of Jesus as the second bishop of Chicago. During his brief tenure in Chicago, Van de Velde built two elementary schools, a night school for adults, an employment office, and a boarding house for working women. After the 1849 cholera outbreak in Chicago, he established residences for the many children orphaned by the epidemic.
1850 to 1860
Van De Velde opened the Illinois Hospital of the Lakes in 1851, the first hospital in Chicago. Suffering from severe rheumatism during the harsh Chicago winters, Van De Velde persuaded the pope in 1852 to appoint him as bishop of the Diocese of Natchez in Mississippi. The Vatican erected the Diocese of Quincy in 1853, taking Southern Illinois from the Diocese of Chicago. The Diocese of Quincy later became the Diocese of Alton and then the Diocese of Springfield in Illinois.In December 1853, Reverend Anthony O'Regan was appointed as the third bishop of Chicago by Pius IX. During his tenure, O'Regan purchased property for the construction of several churches and Calvary Cemetery in Chicago. A systematic administrator and strong disciplinarian, O'Regan generated significant dissatisfaction among his clergy. Many French-speaking congregants accused him of stealing their property. In 1855, the Sisters of the Holy Cross founded an industrial school in Chicago for girls, both Catholic and non-Catholic.
Frustrated by the opposition he faced in the diocese, O'Regan submitted his resignation in 1857 to the Vatican, which accepted it in June 1858. The pope appointed Bishop James Duggan of St. Louis as the apostolic administrator of the diocese.
On January 21, 1859, Pius IX named Duggan as the fourth bishop of Chicago. Duggan faced challenges in Chicago: the legacy of the decade-long lack of leadership in the diocese, the aftereffects of the financial panic of 1857, and of the American Civil War. German Catholics were hostile to an Irish bishop. Irish-born priests were hostile to Dugan's stand against the Fenian Brotherhood: he denied the sacraments to anyone tied to this secret society. Some clergy faulted Duggan for failing to support the University of St. Mary of the Lake, which closed in 1866 due to financial problems and low enrollment. In 1859, Dugan founded the House of the Good Shepherd in Chicago as a residence for "delinquent women".
1860 to 1880
After Duggan returned from the Second Plenary Council of Baltimore in 1866, he began to exhibit sign of mental instability. When he left Chicago for a European trip, several diocesan priests wrote to the Vatican, questioning Dugan's mental health. Three years later, in 1869, Pius IX sent Duggan to a sanitarium in St. Louis and appointed Monsignor Thomas Foley as coadjutor bishop to operate the diocese. In 1870, a Jesuit educator, Reverend Arnold Damen, established St. Ignatius College in Chicago.In October 1871, the diocese suffered nearly a million dollars in property damage in the Great Chicago Fire, including the destruction of St. Mary's Cathedral. In 1875, Foley dedicated the new Cathedral of the Holy Name in Chicago, designed by architect Patrick Keely. Foley invited the Franciscans, Vincentians, Servites, Viatorians, and Resurrectionist religious orders to establish parishes and schools in the diocese. In 1876, disagreements between Foley and Mother Mary Alfred Moes of the Sisters of St. Francis of Mary Immaculate of Joliet led her to relocate her order to Minnesota.
In 1877, the Vatican erected the Diocese of Peoria, taking several counties in Central Illinois from the Diocese of Chicago. Foley died in 1879,
1880 to 1900
In 1880, the Vatican elevated the Diocese of Chicago to the Archdiocese of Chicago making it the metropolitan see for all of Illinois. At that time, it transferred five more counties to the suffragan Diocese of Peoria. Pope Leo XIII named Bishop Patrick Feehan from the Diocese of Nashville as the first archbishop.From 1880 to 1902, the Catholic population of Chicago nearly quadrupled to 800,000, mainly due to immigration. While the existing Irish and German communities expanded, Polish, Bohemian, French-Canadian, Lithuanian, Italian, Croatian, Slovak and Dutch Catholics arrived in the archdiocese, bringing their own languages and cultural traditions.
During his tenure as archbishop, Feehan founded 140 new parishes. Fifty-two of them were national parishes serving particular ethnic communities, staffed by religious orders from their home countries. The parishes provided the new immigrants with familiar fraternal organizations, music, and language, safe from xenophobia and anti-Catholic discrimination.
In 1881, Feehan established the St. Vincent Orphan Asylum and in 1883 the St. Mary's Training School for Boys. They were followed in 1887 with the founding of St. Paul's Home for Working Boys. A strong supporter of Catholic education, Feehan promoted it with an exhibition at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago "Archbishop Feehan believed a strong system of Catholic education would solve the problem of inconsistent religious instruction at home, and unify a rapidly diversifying Catholic America." He also brought the Vincentians to Chicago to start what is now DePaul University.