Baran-Unland: Goodbye, St. Bernard Joliet

I’ve had “attend Mass at St. Bernard” on my calendar ever since I learned that this Catholic church was closing.

But I never made it to my childhood parish on the east side of Joliet until its final Mass on June 22.

St. Bernard began in 1911 to serve Ridgewood’s growing Catholic population. Masses were held at A.O. Marshall School – where I attended kindergarten in the mid-1960s – until the original church building was completed in 1914.

The current building cost $200,000 and was dedicated in 1958. St. Bernard paid off its remaining debt of $45,000 in 1989, when St. Bernard had 288 families. By then, my family no longer belonged to St. Bernard.

My family moved from Chicago to Joliet’s east side in 1962 or 1963. I made my first Communion and confession at St. Bernard, was a reader at the podium for daily Mass in seventh grade and sang in the all-student choir in fifth, sixth and seventh grades.

But the most memorable photograph is the one I snapped of my younger sister making her first Communion.

The girl who walked with her was the future aunt to my oldest grandson. And the couple in the background was her parents – the parents of my future son-in-law.

Priests during my family’s time at St. Bernard include the Rev. William McDade, the Rev. Edward Poff and the Rev. Roger Kaffer, a weekend assistant.

Kaffer often visited my house to talk with my father, an architect who designed two additions at Providence Catholic High School in New Lenox: the Sacred Heart Gymnasium – Kaffer had a strong devotion to Sacred Heart – and the Bishop Blanchette Learning Commons.

Years later, Kaffer became my school principal at Providence and – still later – auxiliary bishop of Joliet. Kaffer invited my husband and me for a breakfast that he prepared in his home when I wrote a Local Flavor column for the Herald-News.

June 22 was the first time I’d stepped into St. Bernard since the early 1990s, and that was the first time since 1974. Little had changed – from the confessionals to the pews to the statues to the stained glass windows, decades slipped away.

During the post-Mass blessing outside at the entrance, I saw a bare patch of land between the church and a house, where the convent once stood. My best friend in third grade, dead more than 20 years, once lived in that house.

I walked the sidewalk down High Street to the parking lot behind the church, right to a spot at the end, where a very young me once studied iridescent colors of motor oil in a rain puddle while I chomped on a candy necklace.

Then, I walked up High Street to the parking lot across the street, where St. Bernard School – which opened in 1949 with 300 students – once stood, remembering family friends on High Street.

The late Rev. Lawrence Martin Jenco was the brother to one family friend. Jenco was the only priest ordained from St. Bernard’s (1959), and my family attended a private Mass that he celebrated in a home.

I attended St. Bernard School through seventh grade and just missed the merger with St. Cyril’s and Methodius in fall 1974 because my family moved to New Lenox.

I stood in the empty lot and took a picture of the old house that I looked upon from the second floor of my third-grade classroom. I dreamed of raising 10 children in that house and thought it strange to look up at the house instead of down.

I headed to the church hall in the basement. My earliest memory is sitting on a folding metal chair while my father placed a glazed doughnut on a paper napkin in front of me.

I remembered where the Mother’s Club set up its annual bazaar and where each of my three science fair projects stood.

For all this reminiscing, I didn’t return to St. Bernard for the memories. I simply wanted to stand where my faith life began and thank God for it and honor it.

Bishop Ronald A. Hicks said during the final Mass that God knows our next steps. He implored those present to step out in faith and “create a new reality in his name.”

The reality is that everything changes except God. We can’t open a new door without closing the old one. We can’t say “hello” without first saying “goodbye.”

Even the founding families of St. Bernard left something to start something.

The Rev. Chris Groh, a longtime pastor of both St. Bernard and St. Mary Magdalene, also spoke during the Mass. Groh said the “focus of our faith centers on hope.” He said, “God is with us in our journeys.”

A new journey begins for the Diocese of Joliet on July 1. But that’s OK.

“No matter where we are or where we will go,” Groh said, “we will go in the presence of the almighty God.”