Black Catholics at Joliet's Sacred Heart Church worry what its closing will mean

Jeanette Hamilton had never thought about leaving the congregation of Sacred Heart Catholic Church. But she did occasionally attend a Baptist service to get an additional dose of African American spirituality.

That changed for her in the 1980s, when the Joliet parish began incorporating traditions of African American Catholics into its services — such as hosting revivals and singing from the "Lead Me, Guide Me" hymnal.

Now, though, after decades of cultivating and preserving an identity as a home for Black Catholics in Joliet, Sacred Heart could soon lose that, Hamilton and other long-time parishioners fear.

Sacred Heart will be closed this summer, its congregation to be merged with three others as part of the Diocese of Joliet’s reconfiguration plan.

Diocesan officials have blamed declining Sunday Mass attendance, financial troubles and costly building repairs and, though, the diocese faces potentially costly settlements over accusations of clergy sex abuse, won't say how much of an impact those costs are having.

"I feel like I’m going to be like the Israelites wandering in the desert," Hamilton says. "I’m going to be wandering around looking for that same spirit, and I don’t think it exists — in fact, I know it doesn’t exist — anywhere in the Joliet Diocese."

Bishop Ronald Hicks, who heads the diocese, informed parishioners in a letter this month that the Rev. Michael Lane and the Rev. J. Rodolphe Arty, who is from Haiti, will serve the new, merged parishes, which will include members of Sacred Heart, St. Paul the Apostle, St. Patrick and St. Jude. The four congregations, which also include white and Latino parishioners, will have worship services at St. Paul and St. Patrick. It's unclear whether the newly consolidated parishes will change names.

In the letter, Hicks said Lane and Arty want to bring the congregations together "in a spirit of unity and hope.

"They also both desire to serve the Hispanic and African American communities and are committed to establishing a weekly Sunday Mass in the style and traditions of the Sacred Heart community," Hicks said in the letter.

He and Sacred Heart officials declined interview requests.

Hamilton says parishioners question whether their traditions will continue because some African and Caribbean priests are even more traditionally Catholic than many Americans.

"African American — we’ve worked so long to try to get this across — that experience is different from any other experience," Hamilton says. "The African American experience with slavery, getting out of slavery and fighting [for] civil rights — that is different. And you just can’t lump into anything because of skin color or because of appearance. It’s totally different."

Not just ‘that little church . . . on South Ottawa Street’

Nationally, an estimated 3 million people identify as Black Catholics, making up about 6% of Catholic adults in the United States, according to a Pew Research Center report in 2022.

Sacred Heart is listed as the only church in Illinois — outside of the Archdiocese of Chicago — with a predominantly African American parish by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.

The Chicago area had one of the most significant populations of Black Catholics — more than 80,000 — around the 1970s, a population that was fueled by the Great Migration of Black people who moved from the South, according to Matthew Cressler, author of the book “Authentically Black and Truly Catholic: The Rise of Black Catholicism in the Great Migration.” Some moved to Chicago having practiced Catholicism in the South, Cressler says, and others converted after attending church-run schools in their new neighborhoods.

He says that growth coincided with changes in the Catholic church as well as the Civil Rights Movement and Black power movement that helped shape the modern identity of Black Catholics.

"Certain groups of Black Catholics who really embrace the Black power movement start to say, well, we should be incorporating this new consciousness, this new identity, these newly embraced practices into what it means to be Catholic," Cressler says. "So our worship in our Catholic mass should include music and ritual and clothing that is authentically Black."

In recent years, a point of tension over the diversity of Black Catholics — which include those from the Caribbean and African nations — is that differences emerge on social justice issues including the LGBTQ community and gender, Cressler says.

Hamilton’s family story reflects a history that many African American Catholics in Chicago share. Her mother migrated to Illinois from New Orleans in the 1940s and joined Sacred Heart, already a practicing Catholic. When she was young, Hamilton, 75, remembers most of the church's members were of Irish or Italian descent.

A 1986 report written for Sacred Heart’s centennial says one pastor in the 1970s had concerns for social justice during the Civil Rights Movement and created a more welcoming atmosphere for Black Catholics.

Hamilton says changes started to take place in the 1980s, when the church hired a Black director of music, who oversaw the choir.

Revival services that brought in guest pastors who offered lively sermons helped solidify Sacred Heart’s identity, according to Jennifer Johnson, a member of the church about 35 years.

African Americans from varied religious backgrounds joined the congregation for those services and became more familiar with the world of Black Catholics, and a hall that was often rented for use by the broader Joliet community helped raise the church's profile, according to Johnson.

"Sacred Heart wasn’t just that little church sitting there on South Ottawa Street," she says. "It became known. It was almost like we were put on the map."

Fear of losing Black Catholics

When Andrew Lyke visited Sacred Heart for the Archdiocese of Chicago to consult for its marriage ministry, he was so intrigued by what he experienced that he made the nearly 30-minute drive the next Sunday with his wife to join the congregation.

"We had never experienced a parish that was about half-Black, half-white and the liturgy, the style, the spirituality was Black gospel," says Lyke, who grew up in St Sabina Catholic Church in Auburn Gresham. "We visited a lot of churches, and we just never saw that dynamic. And we felt very much at home there because it had such a strong emphasis on social justice."

Lyke, who no is longer a member of Sacred Heart, says he can see why many fear the loss of that identity. He says it will be important for the diocese to listen to the congregation and for the pastors to have a vision of cultural and spiritual inclusion.

"When you shut down Sacred Heart, the fear is: Are they shutting down Black Catholics?" Lyke says.

Delor Adams, 73, worries that some parishioners could abandon the Catholic church when Sacred Heart is closed. As she prepares to undergo hip surgery, Adams says she has written letters to find a way to keep the church open.

She has attended the church for about 20 years, though it's a 40-minute drive from her Naperville home. Now, she's unsure whether she will continue.

"Sacred Heart is a different Catholic church," Adams says. "It’s alive with people, people who get along together, people of different colors, races and whatever. And that’s going to be taken away. And I don’t know where everybody is going to go."

Hamilton and Johnson worry about losing ties to the community that surrounds the parish. They cook free weekly meals and stock the food pantry. They question whether some will be able to travel to the new location for those meals and food.

"The initial steps of cooking somewhere else — that’s the same," Johnson says. "But the people that we’re serving is not the same."

Hamilton says she doesn't know whether she has the energy to fight to establish Sacred Heart's identity in a newly consolidated congregation. The church already had lost many core members during the early days of the coronavirus pandemic.

"We're just totally ignored and pushed in without any recognition of our uniqueness," she says.