A Eulogy for St. Michael Parish

Last week marked one year since Bishop Benedict closed my parish, St. Michael the Archangel, on Chicago’s far South Side. The final service ever held there turned out to be my daughter’s baptism, though none of us knew that at the time. I’ve been carrying that strange mixture of blessing and grief ever since. Indeed, a trusted confident once told me that my entire relationship with the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church has been “filled with loss.”

To understand why this particular loss cuts so deeply, I’d like to share the vision that once lived there — one that, I fear, was never fully understood by the hierarchy, clergy, and my fellow layman.

In early 2018, with Justin Tse, Grace Yu, and my now-wife, Summer Fields founded the St. Mary of Egypt Social Justice Fellowship. The name came from my late mentor and post-colonial psychoanalyst Fr. Myron Panchuk.

St. Mary’s story became our compass: a woman who wandered into the desert not to escape the world, but to face herself, shed her pride, and intercede for others. And St. Zosima, who left the safety of his monastery to meet her, reminded us that the Church, too, must leave its comfort to witness transformation.

The “desert” for us was not sand and heat — it was West Pullman, a neighborhood abandoned by white flight, disinvestment, and the very Ukrainian community that once built a church there. Yet it remains home to hundreds of thousands of people. People whom the Gospel commands us to see, to serve, to love.

Our vision was simple: a parish where disenfranchised neighbors could gather for spiritual, social, and economic nourishment; a place of mutual liberation between Ukrainians and Black Americans; a laboratory for the spirit of Pentecost — “to preach to all nations”, not just to follow wherever Ukrainian immigrants happened to move next.

When you build a church, you consecrate a place. God does not need a temporary home, even if people sometimes do. To abandon a neighborhood while still claiming apostolic mission is, frankly, a contradiction. Our community still owes penance for the segregation, neglect, and injustice our neighbors continue to bear. I’ve heard a lot of euphemisms about the neighborhood in the last few days—some more accurate than others, and some more racist than others.

The fact is that, as Christians, we cannot abdicate our duty to our neighbors, Samaritan or Black, Ukrainian or American, rich or poor, plentiful or paltry. I’ve heard that “there were no people”—how dehumanizing, not only to the few people who called the parish home, including the Grod, Szpur, Okruch, and Worobel families (yes, mention them by name!) but to the people who truly live nearby. This is not some ghost town in the rurals of Western Canada or Siberia. It is a community with hundreds of thousands of people. Different from us, yes, but people nonetheless.

For a time, St. Michael’s felt like the beginning of that penance — and maybe even redemption. Summer and I were ready to live on-site in the rectory when nobody else was willing to. We asked to open the church during the week, to pray Vespers and Molebens, to gather people, to build something new and ancient at once. We knew we might have to make difficult decisions, like choose to turn off the expensive gas boiler and pray in the cold just to be able to afford it. That is when we became an inconvenience — a priest would have to drive across town, unlock the doors for us, and let us in on a weekday. This is where we collided with the wall that ultimately doomed us: clericalism.

We were told nothing could happen without a priest physically present. No key, no trust, no delegation — even though laypeople across the world are entrusted with far more, and indeed Lumen Gentium, the Dogmatic Constitution of the Church, requires it. And so, despite our willingness to reside there, to take responsibility under proper canonical supervision, the doors remained closed. We prayed our services at home, or in borrowed basements, or wherever we could. A missionary impulse smothered by the fear of letting the laity breathe.

When I joined the parish in 2016, I knew its days might be numbered. Many parishes have faced that, including some of the most thriving ones in Chicago today, including St. Nicholas Cathedral. Part of me even supports closing the parish as it was. What pains me is how it ended — without acknowledgment, without ceremony, without even warning. I was told not to post anything about the closure online, even as I feared people would still show up on Sunday morning expecting Liturgy. If not for a post from an online provocateur from Pennsylvania over a year later, the Eparchy likely still wouldn’t publicly admit to closing the parish. A parish is a living body. When it dies, it deserves a funeral, even if it’s only a few people in a crumbling building.

My last time in the building was this July, when I removed the icon of Black Jesus, Risen in Glory, that our fellowship had lent. We'd hoped the icon, adapated into our Byzantine tradition, would hearken a resurrection of the neighborhood, our parish, our city, and our community. That icon has since been shipped to our Metropolitan Cathedral in Philadelphia — itself a cathedral in a predominantly Black neighborhood. In that relocation, something of our dream continues breathing.

I’m thankful, too, that the iconostasis found new life in Richmond, Illinois, though it hurt that its origins went unacknowledged.

And I remain deeply grateful to the priests who served there, flawed, perhaps misguided, and human as they may be:

• Fr. John Lucas, who gave twenty-five years of quiet, often thankless service. He was, and is, a wounded man often shunned by the Church hierarchy. He was deeply distrustful of authority for reasons understandable once you get to know him. He is a deeply nostalgic man, yearning for the past he once had, instead of striving for the future I want my daughter to have. He has issues with mobility and communication, and was overwhelmed by the things he would take on — yet profoundly spiritual and loyal to our tradition. Whatever fell into disrepair, the parish survived because he stayed when so many others left.

• Fr. Liubomyr Mandziuk, who fought for the parish with a full heart. I was proud to stand beside him — translating for him — when we visited the Alderman (himself a young Black Catholic) and the Ward Superintendent. The icons, chalice, censer, tabernacle, and books I donated to St. Michael’s, especially after it was looted, are now used in his Portland mission. I am grateful for that. Unfortunately, I believe he was set up to fail, expecting the church to attract throngs of recent Ukrainians immigrants as shameful stereotypes about "the south side" flew around the community. I still give him and his beautiful family my deepest respect for being willing to renovate the rectory, clean up the mess, mobilize volunteers, and, perhaps most importantly, live there two nights a week for a whole year.

And yet, one moment from 2018 continues to sting: when I presented a comprehensive plan to re-found St. Michael’s as the St. Mary of Egypt Mission, the protosyncellus dismissed it with, “I detest the term social justice.” With that, an entire Gospel-shaped initiative, one inspired by the underground Church and drive by lay zeal, was effectively buried. Ukrainians, once a marginalized people themselves, abandoned the responsibility to evangelize where they had once planted their church — choosing ethnic chaplaincy over apostolic mission. You can read that plan here, in full.

Despite some efforts to go about it without explicit canonical approval, our efforts moved from St. Michael’s into the virtual space — Justin had to take a job in Singapore, Grace moved to Barcelona, and I spent a few years in Ukraine.

For the past year since our parish closed, my little family and I have felt adrift. Homeless. Without a parish whose values align with what we tried to build. The closest thing to spiritual home for us now is the Saint Gabriel Institute in Washington, D.C., some 700 miles away — one of the few places where the missionary spirit still bridges cultures, races, and languages with intention and joy. Like at St. Michael’s, people sing with their full heart at the St. Gabriel Institute. Missionary work is holistic. Fr. Iourii Koslovskyy, the director, takes people’s enthusiasm and matches it. Unfortunately, in my experience as an American-born English-speaker, nothing in Chicago systematically or strategically embodies what the St. Mary of Egypt Fellowship stood for. I have to literally travel out of state to get it.

And yet — a grace remains.

The building will not be left to rot, like so many others in the neighborhood. Beacon Light Ministries, whose own church burned down, purchased St. Michael’s. I am glad — truly glad — that they will inherit this sacred space. I pray that Bishop Jerome Powell tends it more lovingly than our community did. May he pray before Mykhailo Dmytrenko’s monumental Last Supper fresco, and beneath the stained glass depicting Ukraine’s saints and martyrs — windows into a heritage that deserves care.

I look forward to visiting once they’ve moved in.

There is grief in all of this, yes. But there is also clarity. A parish died without a funeral, but its vision — the one born in a desert, carried by St. Mary of Egypt, whispered by the Holy Spirit — is still alive. And it will find a home again.