Demand Cardinal Cupich Resign

Sacred Ground: How the Archdiocese of Chicago Forgot What These Buildings Mean

Cardinal Cupich has destroyed churches in the Chicagoland area and the collective memory of so many communities.

There is a particular kind of grief that has no name in English, though perhaps it should. It is the grief of returning to a place that once held everything — your baptism, your parents’ wedding anniversary Mass, the funeral of a grandmother who said the rosary every night without fail — and finding it shuttered, sold, repurposed, gone. It is the grief of a community that was never asked.
This is what the Archdiocese of Chicago, under the leadership of Cardinal Blase Cupich, has given to thousands of Catholic families across this city through the Renew My Church consolidation program. And it deserves to be named plainly: it was a betrayal.
Not a financial one. Not an administrative one. A spiritual and communal one.
These parishes were not assets. They were not line items on a diocesan balance sheet, depreciating structures whose square footage could be optimized for better use. They were sacred ground. They were the places where Chicago Catholics — immigrant families, working class families, families who sacrificed enormously to build and maintain these institutions across generations — brought the most important moments of their lives. A church is where you carry your dead. It is where you present your children to God. It is where you return, year after year, and the familiar smell of candle wax and incense tells something in your body that you are home.
When Cardinal Cupich’s administration moved to consolidate and close parishes across the city, the framing was managerial. Declining attendance. Aging infrastructure. Unsustainable costs. These are real considerations, and no one pretends that dioceses face no financial pressures. But the manner in which these decisions were made — with minimal transparency, with communities left to learn of closures with little meaningful input, with properties moving toward sale before parishes had fully processed what was happening — reflected a fundamental confusion about what these buildings are.
You do not liquidate sacred ground. You do not sell off a community’s spiritual home the way you might sell off a parking lot.
Chicago Catholics deserved better. They deserved honest conversations about finances, presented openly, with real numbers and real options. They deserved genuine consultation — not the performance of listening sessions where decisions had already been made — but authentic participation in the future of institutions their families built and sustained for generations. They deserved leaders who understood that closing a parish is not closing a business. It is amputating something from the living body of a neighborhood, and the wound does not close cleanly.
The buildings matter beyond sentiment. A neighborhood parish is an anchor. It is a place where people gather outside of commerce, outside of obligation, simply as a community. When it closes, something goes with it that cannot be replaced by telling people to drive to the next parish over. Community is not fungible. Belonging is not transferable on a spreadsheet.
And when those buildings — Our Lady of Victory, and so many others — are then sold, often to buyers with no connection to the communities that built them, repurposed into schools or commercial ventures or left to deteriorate, the wound deepens. The families who worshipped there for decades are left to understand that in the final accounting, their grief was someone else’s real estate opportunity.
Cardinal Cupich has positioned himself as a reformer and a modern leader. But modernity is not an excuse for the absence of accountability. The Catholics of Chicago are not shareholders to be managed. They are the Church. They built these parishes with their labor and their donations and their faith across more than a century. They were owed transparency. They were owed a seat at the table. They were owed a leadership that treated their attachment to these sacred places not as sentimentality to be overcome, but as something holy in itself.
That is what was lost. Not just the buildings. The understanding that these places were never the Archdiocese’s to dispose of in the first place.