Expat Catholics

In Chicago and Milwaukee, immigrants from Africa, Latin America and Europe convene to practice faith and fellowship while keeping their cultures alive

by Garan Santicola

In August of 2022, Kenyan Catholics from across the United States gathered in Chicago for the 11th Annual Swahili Mass and Convention. Nearly 250 people took part in

a three-day event that featured inspirational speakers, a charismatic healing Mass, and traditional music, dance, dress and food. On the final day, women from the community gathered outside the Church of the Holy Family to dance Auxiliary Bishop Robert J. Lombardo, CFR, into the church for the celebration of a Swahili Mass.

“It was very colorful,” says Fr. Paul Kalenzi, SJ, a Chicago-based priest who grew up in Kenya and now works on an ambitious effort to raise funds for a new Jesuit University—Hekima University—in Molo, Kenya. Father Kalenzi also helps Kenyans in Chicago perpetuate the faith, culture and solidarity that was so vibrantly on display at the 2020 convention. Once a month, he offers a Swahili Mass at the Church of the Holy Family, which was the first home of Jesuits in Chicago and has a long history of serving immigrant communities. The network of Chicago area Kenyan Catholics is small, around 70 people, and when they gather, the joy and comfort is palpable.

“They rejoice when they find themselves together with other Kenyans, to speak Swahili to each other or to pray in that language, and they say, ‘I feel very much at home. I’m able to sing this song that I sang when I was a child, and here I am with my country people.’”

In Milwaukee, Fr. Tim Manatt, SJ, serves as pastor of both St. Patrick’s and Our Lady of Guadalupe, parishes separated by 10 blocks on the city’s south side. Together, they serve several hundred Hispanics, most of whom have roots in Mexico. But families in the two parishes also come from Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, Costa Rica and Peru.

Milwaukee is home to the largest Mexican cultural festival in the United States. There, local children and young adults perform traditional music and dance, just as they do at their parishes on Dec.12, Day of the Virgin of Guadalupe, which is a national holiday in Mexico.

“We retell the story of Juan Diego and the apparition of the Virgin Mary,” Fr. Manatt says.

During Spanish language Masses Fr. Manatt weaves Ignatian contemplation into his homilies three or four times a year. “It’s a change of pace,” he says, “and it also honors people’s backgrounds because oftentimes I’ll say, ‘Imagine you’re back home in Mexico or in Puerto Rico or Central America, or maybe you’re on the back porch of your home here in Milwaukee.’ So the Exercises can be a way to honor people’s places of origin.”

Back in Chicago, Polish immigrants have maintained a vital community in the Portage Park neighborhood for more than 100 years, most recently at the Shrine of the Sacred Heart Jesuit Millennium Center. Polish-born Fr. Stan Czarnecki, SJ, arrived in 2001, and in his earliest years, the seven or eight Masses said in Polish on a given weekend would attract 4,500 worshippers. One Sunday Mass for young families routinely drew 1,000 people.

“Can you imagine?” Fr. Czarnecki says. “A thousand people every Sunday. Young families with children, young adults.”

Socio-political factors relating to immigration and work opportunities have led many Polish immigrants to return to Europe, and today about 2,000 people attend weekend Masses. About half of them live in Portage Park, one of the largest Polish communities in Chicago, but the rest travel from elsewhere in the city and beyond, as far as 60 miles away.

“We are welcoming these people, and they feel at home in a foreign country where they need some support,” says Fr. Czarnecki, who now serves at nearby Loyola Academy, where he continues to cultivate a connection to cultural roots through the school’s Polish Club. He also stays in touch with the Sacred Heart Mission, which is now served entirely by Jesuits from Poland.

Love of family and community is at the heart of efforts to preserve traditions of faith and culture for all three of these immigrant communities.

The Polish community of Chicago and Hispanic community of Milwaukee reflect the Jesuit mission at its most vibrant, meeting the spiritual needs of large numbers of immigrant and first-generation families adjusting to a new country while maintaining ties to their homelands. But it is the much smaller community of Kenyans in Chicago that offers a perspective of hope for all immigrants that the future might not entail a loss of cultural roots.

“The African continent today has the youngest population in the world, and that includes for the Catholic Church,” says Fr. Kalenzi. “In one generation, we might have a majority African church. Demographically, there’s a huge shift in Catholicism around the world. I can only speak of my hope that in the same way we had missionaries coming from the West to Africa, to bring the faith to evangelize the continent of Africa, we might have something similar happen in the reverse. You see that in the number of African priests who have come to serve, and not only African but also Indian and Latino priests as well. And so, they bring their own cultures and in some small ways might contribute to a new revival of the faith here. So that’s what I hope will happen one day.”