Roamin’ Catholics
Welcome to the Church of the Holy Family, which attracts anywhere from two to twenty worshipers for 1 PM Sunday mass in a second-floor loft shared with Lutheran, Episcopal, and Jewish congregations at Grace Place, 637 S. Dearborn. If the vestments and liturgy don’t seem much different from what you’d find at Old Saint Mary’s a few blocks east, that’s as it should be, says Reverend James Alan Wilkowski, bishop of the northwest diocese. The 44-year-old south-sider, son of the late Daily Southtown columnist Warren Wilkowski, will have you know that he and his flock are as Catholic as anyone else. They just aren’t Roman Catholic. They’re members of the Independent Holy Catholic Church, founded in 1980 by Episcopal and Roman Catholic priests on both coasts who wanted to set up a special ministry for AIDS patients but didn’t find their superiors sufficiently supportive.
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“We’ve always been a church for the disenfranchised, people who aren’t getting the gospel anywhere else,” says Wilkowski, noting that disaffected Roman Catholics–including himself–make up most of the fledgling denomination’s 500 members nationwide. For some that disaffection is only temporary. “We get people who’ve had an argument with their Roman pastor, so they come to check us out. They may come back for a few Sundays. Then they kiss and make up with their priest, and we don’t see them anymore. And that’s great. If we can help people sort things out, then go back home, we’ve performed a service.”
“I thought it was a joke and hung up on him the first two or three times,” says Wilkowski. But it was no joke: Wilkowski was ordained in May 1996 and consecrated bishop only 14 months later. He harbors no illusions about his seemingly meteoric rise in the church hierarchy. “Mickey Mouse or Daffy Duck would have received the zucchetto if they’d have had a master’s of divinity degree.” Wilkowski twirls the purple skullcap, symbolic of a bishop’s rank, on his finger as he speaks. “Remember, all these trappings are the signs of a servant.” Christ, he points out, would have had little use for church leaders “who parade around in ecclesiastical drag expecting everyone to kiss their rings.”
And while the Independent Catholics favor artificial birth control, he says, they oppose abortion as strongly as the Roman Catholics. Wilkowski has more reason than most for being emphatically pro-life. “I was adopted. If I’d been conceived in the 1970s or 1980s instead of the 1950s, I probably would have ended up in a petri dish or a vacuum tube.” Even so, Wilkowski’s church stops short of condemning those who make what he considers the wrong choice. “We try to counsel people against it,” he says, “but when they walk out that door, they have to make decisions based on their own consciences. That’s also what this church is about.” o
