St. Sabina and St. Adalbert - I

I lived in the Chicago area from 1987 to 1992. During my time in Chicago, a young activist priest was making a name for himself on the South Side of Chicago. He was a relentless crusader for the poor who lived in the area surrounding his church, St. Sabina, which sits in one of the meaner neighborhoods on the South Side. This priest was a relentless scourge, full of righteous rage against the absentee landlords and liquor store owners, the people he saw who were profiting from the misery of the community he represented. The priest's name was Father Michael Pfleger.

We would hear about Father Pfleger from time to time on television - he was young, telegenic and articulate and was an interesting contrast to the scholarly, gentle churchman who led the Chicago Archdiocese at the time, Joseph Cardinal Bernardin. At the time, I remember thinking that while Father Pfleger was unorthodox in his style and a bit of a publicity hound, I admired him for his tenacity and his willingness to get out into the community instead of tending to his own garden.

During this time frame, Mrs. D and I were planning our own wedding. Jill is a South Minneapolis girl and had attended Annunciation while she was growing up, but her parents had moved to Golden Valley and were now attending Good Shepherd. Once we had announced our engagement, Jill's parents approached the pastor at Good Shepherd about the possibility of having the wedding there. Since Jill was not a member of the parish, the pastor told my in-laws that we could not be married there. That meant we needed to find another church. As it happened, my mother-in-law had a childhood friend who was a Catholic priest who served a small, struggling parish in the Frogtown neighborhood of St. Paul. The priest's name was Father Timothy Kernan and the parish was St. Adalbert. Father Tim was delighted to perform the service. And for the next decade, Fr. Tim and St. Adalbert would become a huge part of our lives.

Outwardly, Father Tim Kernan wasn't much like Father Michael Pfleger. Fr. Tim was a generation older and became a priest at the dawn of Vatican II. He grew up in the Bryn Mawr neighborhood west of downtown Minneapolis as part of a sprawling Catholic family. His father was a physician and for years was one of the team doctors for the University of Minnesota football team. Father Tim was gruff and sometimes cantankerous, but one of the most generous men I've ever known. He also was an alcoholic and although he'd conquered the bottle by the time he came into our lives, the effects of years of heavy drinking had left his health in a precarious state. But just as Fr. Pfleger was at the helm of a troubled parish in a troubled neighborhood, so was Fr. Tim.

At one time St. Adalbert had been the beating heart of a large Polish community that lived in and around Frogtown and the North End of St. Paul. The parish had served the neighborhood for over 100 years and the distinctive twin steeples of the church are visible for miles. By 1991, most of the old families had long since moved on to the suburbs and the neighborhood had deteriorated greatly. One could see abandoned houses and prostitutes plying their trade on the streets surrounding the church. With less than 200 families remaining as parishioners, it didn't look good for St. Adalbert when Fr. Tim arrived in the late 1980s.

Fr. Tim knew right away that if St. Adalbert was to survive, it had to change. Just as the Poles and Italians had arrived in St. Paul 80-100 years before, there were new Catholics arriving, refugees from an oppressive regime yearning to practice their faith in a new land. Father Tim decided to welcome these new arrivals to St. Adalbert. The refugees were from Vietnam. These new parishioners arrived in most cases by way of refugee camps in Thailand, generally with little more than the clothes on their backs. Many of the elders had fought alongside American troops during the war and many were persecuted once the Americans had left. Fr. Tim gave these people a place to worship and a place to establish their own community in a strange new land.

Jill and I were married at St. Adalbert in 1991 and we moved to St. Paul a year later. At the time, while we were grateful to Fr. Tim for giving us a place to get married, we weren't really thinking about becoming parishioners at St. Adalbert. We weren't regular churchgoers during our time in Chicago - during the five years I lived in Oak Park, I may have darkened the doorstep of Ascension Church no more than 20 times in total. We found an apartment in the Macalester Groveland neighborhood and were living only four blocks away from Nativity, the proud parish that serves the area. But we sensed something about Fr. Tim and what he was trying to do. And we decided that we wanted to be a part of it. So we began making our way back to Frogtown. And we became part of something.

Tomorrow: Fr. Tim and the role of the activist priest