CHICAGO (IL)
Chicago Magazine
BY ELIZABETH FENNER
Beyond the metal barricades and phalanx of cops blocking off State Street, inside the massive stone-walled Gothic cathedral, right near the polished wood confessionals, the TV cameramen checked their cables. And checked them again. For November 18 was no ordinary news day. In half an hour, every station in the city would interrupt its usual broadcast schedule to beam out live coverage of the two-hour Mass formally installing Blase Cupich as the ninth archbishop of Chicago. It would be the culmination of more than eight weeks of near-daily reporting on what this mild-mannered 65-year-old was planning (he won’t live in the cardinal’s mansion!), doing (attending a bishops’ conference in Baltimore!), and saying (“People in Chicago are much like the people in Omaha, where I grew up. They work hard, they pray hard”).
Such wall-to-wall media coverage of one religion’s change in leadership is hard to imagine in any other big American city. You wouldn’t see it in New York or L.A., for example. But Chicago, as if you needed reminding, is different. It’s the city whose first European settler was a Catholic priest. Run for decades by Catholics. And continually flooded with Catholic immigrants, at first from Western Europe and these days mostly from Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America. More Catholics live here than do members of any other single religion. Heck, even Rahm probably knows what parish he’s from.
If you tuned in to Cupich’s installation and saw the 1,000-plus priests, bishops, civic dignitaries, and other invitation-only guests streaming into Holy Name Cathedral on that freezing November day, you might believe Chicago is just as robustly Catholic as ever. But looks can be deceiving. In 1980, Catholics made up 43 percent of the total population of Cook and Lake Counties, the territory encompassed by the Archdiocese of Chicago. Today they constitute about 35 percent, or 2.07 million people, according to an exclusive poll conducted by Fako Research & Strategies for Chicago in November (see full poll results here). That figure correlates with the downward trend reported in other studies.
Meanwhile, 14 percent of the residents of those two counties—more than 800,000 people—used to be Catholic but have left the church. Put another way: For every 10 Catholics here, there are now four ex-Catholics. Among those born in the United States, the exodus has been greater still. Says Susan Ross, who chairs Loyola University’s theology department, “If it weren’t for Latino immigration, the church in Chicago would be losing many more people.”
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