Go Trib! With some boots on the ground in Oak Park!  As in obit for Fr. Bill Kelly, pastor emeritus of St. Edmund:

He [earlier] served at St. Catherine of Siena Roman Catholic Parish, which has since closed.

This is very big news to parishioners of St. Catherine-St. Lucy, as they go to mass in the huge Gothic structure at Austin and Washington, as recently as yesterday. [See below: Trib corrects itself.]

But let’s not pick exclusively on Chi Trib.  Oak Leaves, whose “Oak” is the one in “Oak Park,” also has it:

He was assistant pastor at St. Catherine of Siena Parish in Oak Park from 1968 to 1975. The parish is now closed.

Have I missed something?  The parish of my youth closed? 

I have my own memories of Fr. Kelly, the most genial of men, faithful to his calling and full of common sense.

I spent an evening for dinner in a parishioner’s house with him and his boorish St. Charles Borromeo pastor.  Bill was stuck with the guy, but never gave any sign of bitterness or complaint.

Later, as St. Edmund pastor he had an over-enthusiastic ex-priest parishioner who at a parish meeting flashed his “celebret” — written permission to say mass and hear confession in a given diocese — which had clearly expired, in a moment of 1970s church-style point-making. 

I forget what the issue was as Bill explained it, but I remember Bill’s wise unwillingness to react after the fact with more than an implied “Can you believe this guy?”

In the wars big and small that even now, though far less than in those heady days, exercise Catholics, he demonstrated an enviable aplomb.

More:  This is wild.  The horse’s mouth has the ridiculous characterization of Bill Kelly’s parishes as all closed but St. Edmund!  That would be your smart, media-savvy, heads-up Archdiocese of Chicago, recipient of millions annually from pew-sitters of every stripe, calling St. Catherine of Siena closed!

Did I say horse’s mouth, or horse’s something else, and in the plural?

This I did say — with regard to St. Catherine-St. Lucy being in the Catherine of Siena building — to the reader who alerted me:

Lucy was merged in 1974 — while Kelly was still at St. Catherine — with Cath of S., moving into its big church, the Lucy building becoming a Baptist church.  Lucy had covered Austin neighborhood and Oak Park north of Lake.  Yes, Virginia, there still is a St. C. of S., tho not in the bureaucratic minds of chancery officials, for whom tidy designations are everything.

–An obituary for the Rev. William J. Kelly on Monday stated that the St. Catherine of Siena Roman Catholic Parish had closed. To clarify, the church merged with another and exists today as St. Catherine of Siena-St. Lucy Roman Catholic Parish at 38 N. Austin Blvd., Oak Park.