The parish buildings of the former St. Mary of the Assumption Roman Catholic Church are still handsome, noble-looking religious structures, even as they sit vacant and very much in need of repair.
Normally it takes a miracle to restore and reactivate a complex of religious buildings like this. Then it turned out last week that St. Mary’s — shuttered, half-forgotten and tucked away on the farthest reaches of the city’s South Side — is the new pope’s old childhood church.
Maybe not quite a miracle, but could it be next best thing?
“I feel blessed to be part of such a important and historic turn of events,” said Joe Hall, who bought the campus at a 2020 auction in hopes of housing his social services nonprofit, JBlendz Enterprises, there.
Unique church with a common problem
Located at 138th and Leyden Avenue, in the Riverdale neighborhood, the old St. Mary’s parish consists of a school, a rectory, a convent and an annex building.
And then there’s the church itself, built in 1957. Though a midcentury building, the church wasn’t one of the Chicago Archdiocese’s many boundary-pushing modernist churches of the time.
But the brick-and-limestone building was contemporary enough — a then-current day interpretation of a traditional Catholic church featuring a sweeping gable roof that meets at a bold, two-story limestone front entrance boasting a large, stained-glass window and a sculpture depicting the Virgin Mary.
A bell tower sits at the rear of the building.
St. Mary has a nice design turn or two, while remaining modest enough to fit in with the postwar, single-family homes that grew up with it in Riverdale and Dolton, the latter being Pope Leo XIV’s hometown.
By 1978, 2,000 of those families attended the church, according to the two-volume book, “A History of the Parishes of the Archdiocese Chicago.”
Pope Leo XIV’s was one of them.
But St. Mary’s membership had significantly dwindled by 2011, and the archdiocese closed and sold the entire parish to a real estate company that later put it up for auction. That’s where Hall stepped in.
“The former St. Mary of the Assumption building is unique for its connection to the youth of the first American pope, but it is sadly not unique as an example of an empty former house of worship,” said Kendra Parzen, advocacy manager for the preservation group Landmarks Illinois.
“We believe that the ideal outcome for such buildings is that they continue to serve the surrounding community in a new way — as a community center, arts facility, or even as housing,” she said.
“We originally bought it [for our] workforce education program,” Hall said. “I teach solar energy. I teach telecommunications, and I have a DJ apprenticeship [program]. And so I needed a campus that would house all of these different programs — and we also do social services as well.”
Hall also said he’s been talking to congregations interested in holding services in the church, once it’s fixed up.
And he wants the completed campus to have a food pantry named for the pope.
‘We need to protect these buildings’
Hall said he and his solar energy students were in class last Thursday, watching live news coverage of the pope’s election.
“And then my phone starts blowing up,” he said. “My wife has been calling, my mom’s been calling, and one of my friends that lives in the area called and said, ‘Hey, something happened at the [church] building. ... There’s a lot of news cameras down there and police officers. There’s some people out standing outside. I don’t know what’s going on.’ ”
Then Hall found out.
“I said, ‘Oh my God, I’m on my way,’ ” he said. “It was such a shock. I flew down there to the building, and then I opened up the church so people could go in and take pictures.”
Hall said he hopes the papal connection can help his efforts to save and reuse the parish buildings.
Preservation Chicago Executive Director Ward Miller agreed.
He said at the upcoming May 16 meeting of the Commission on Chicago Landmarks program committee, his organization will recommend the city create a thematic landmark district that would include “many, if not all, of the sites and buildings associated with our new Chicago-born pope.”
Said Miller: “We need to protect these buildings, communities and stories in Chicago, much like Rome [does].”
Meanwhile, the complex needs plenty of costly restoration and repair. Hall said he believes it could take $800,000 to $900,000 to rehabilitate the campus.
“That’s all?” I asked. “That seems pretty low.”
“I think with the right resources and the right people, things can be preserved,” he said. “The church is actually in pretty solid shape. ... The school’s foundation is solid. It just needs the right team. I have no doubt in my mind that we are going to preserve it as much as we can.”
Contributing: Robert Herguth
