Chicago, Illinois

Chicago, Illinois serves as the setting for a crisis that briefly displaces even the city’s weather as the subject of conversation. Its gray December skies and approaching snow provide a public backdrop to the shock caused by Brendan Cronin’s conduct at an early Mass at St. Bernadette’s.

Winter City and Parish Exception

The first Sunday morning in December arrives cold beneath a low gray sky. Snow begins as scattered flakes in the afternoon, with heavier-looking white cover expected by early evening to conceal the city’s grime. From the Gold Coast to the tenements, residents talk about the storm. In Catholic homes throughout St. Bernadette’s parish, however, the subject is what Brendan Cronin did during the early Mass. The contrast makes the parish incident feel like a disturbance within ordinary urban life: the weather occupies the city at large, while the church community shares a more immediate shock.

The Parish in Chicago

The chapter places Stefan Wycazik in his rectory office after he has celebrated early Mass and eaten breakfast. A view through a large French window shows bare, snow-crusted trees in the courtyard; he tries to reserve the morning for himself, but his thoughts return to Cronin and the parish’s reaction. Wycazik has led the Church of St. Bernadette for nearly eighteen years, making the parish the central local institution through which the crisis is registered. The storm may cover the city’s streets, but it does not quiet the talk within the parish.

A Wider Priestly History

Chicago also frames Wycazik’s attempt to make sense of Cronin by recalling the work that preceded his current post. After ordination, Wycazik served in a small Illinois farm-country parish, where he took on much of the work for an elderly rector, Dan Tuleen. Later, assigned to a suburban Chicago parish, he was expected to help Francis Orgill through problems with alcohol. These recollections establish Wycazik as a priest accustomed to carrying responsibility and guiding others; Cronin’s behavior unsettles him precisely because it resists the familiar problems he has previously known how to manage. The city thus functions both as the setting of the parish’s public disturbance and as the present point from which Wycazik measures his professional past.