Last Sunday I drove to the western suburbs with my girlfriend to visit friends in Lombard, hear the bagpipe concert at Cantigny Park in Wheaton, and dine at my mother's house in Roselle. Having a busy afternoon, we planned to attend an earlier Mass than the usual 12:30 Tridentine High Mass at St. John Cantius. Our plans to visit the Shrine of Christ the King having been thwarted by the Chicago Triathlon, we ventured due west on North Avenue, reaching St. John Vianney Church in Northlake in time for the 10:00 Low Mass.
St. John Vianney Church is perhaps the ugliest ecclesiastical building in the entire Archdiocese. Following the muddled iconographic notions of the modernist architect, it was built in the vague shape of a fish, complete with concrete scales on the exterior; somehow, this did not make it any less of a drab Stalinist polyhedron. The interior looks and feels somewhat like a high school cafeteria built in the 1970s, with mosaic scenes from the life of Christ on the walls in small square tiles, defined by imprecisely sketched black outlines and irregular geometric areas of brown and light blue. The altar is in the stylized likeness of two hands holding up a square paten.
The parish, however, has been staffed by very fine priests for decades; it is my understanding that Rev. Charles Fanelli, currently the pastor of St. Thomas More on the South Side, was instrumental in making it an haven of orthodoxy in the Archdiocese, establishing traditional devotions and the first parochial chapel for perpetual exposition of the Blessed Sacrament in the state. It is one of the only parishes that continues to distribute Holy Communion at the rail.
This year, a newly formed society of priests was allowed residence at the parish. Called the Apostles of Jesus Christ, Priest and Victim, it counts as its current members Rev. Dwight Campbell and Rev. Ben Reese of the Diocese of Peoria, and Rev. Eduardo Garcia of the Diocese of Ponce. The priests assist the parish, and celebrate the Tridentine Mass every Sunday in the humble downstairs chapel. The charism of the society is apparently to set a world record for the greatest positive difference between the quality of liturgy and the quality of architecture in a single parish.
Judging by the pictures displayed here of a Tridentine Mass celebrated on the Feast of the Assumption in the upper church rather than in the crypt, they are well on their way to success.
