Our Lady of Chicago

Chicago’s toplofty attempts to keep up its “greatness” are futile, even a little bit embarrassing; but the discovery of the city’s hidden humility inspires. Her skyscrapers (or skygropers as W.H. Auden would have called them) are not just handsome boasts like the John Hancock Center, but that same building’s famous X-frame laid gently on its side at Saint Procopius Abbey in the suburbs; not only the classical pretensions of Chicago City Hall, but the Icarus and Daedalus mosaics warnings of hubris across the street; not just the visible civic success of Daniel Burnham’s planning ambitions, but the fragments of Louis Sullivan’s lost buildings which haunt the Art Institute of Chicago like material ghosts. Chicago is not just Samuel Insull’s infamous “throne” (the Civic Opera house), but the memory of the same man, his ego unseated, whispering “Rose Bud” in Citizen Kane; not just the cantilevered marvel of 150 North Riverside, balanced by penthouse water tanks, but the apophatic hole left by the Chicago spire that was never built; not just her bumptious ecclesial attempt to imitate Paris by replicating Sainte-Chapelle at Saint James Chapel, but a storefront Pentecostal prayer meeting; not just her effort, at the Methodist Chicago Temple, to make the city’s tallest building a church (the reign lasted only seven years), but a lowly Easter sunrise gathering on Oak Street Beach. In short, Chicago’s strength is in her weakness, and a humble walk through Northerly Island’s decommissioned airport, now a nature preserve, is preferable to a party paradise weekend on Palm Island in Dubai. 

All of this because T.S. Eliot’s assertion that “humility is endless” applies to cities as well, to those moments when they transmogrify from Augustine’s City of Man to the City of God before one’s jaded eyes, when they reflect not only the New Babylon but the New Jerusalem as well. Which is to say, Chicago demands to be defined not just by a school of architecture, university, political machine, sports team, or style of pizza. The architect Philip Bess attempted to supply this missing dimension by re-imagining the city in After Burnham: Notre Dame Plan of Chicago 2109. The Notre Dame reference does not just recall the school in South Bend, nor is it simply a reference to the church of that title, Notre Dame de Chicago, whose Mary defiantly challenges Ceres, the goddess of grain atop the Chicago Board of Trade. But it evokes, of course, a person: Our Lady herself, “Mother of Mercy, Mother of Divine Grace, Mother of Hope” (to cite the Litany of Loreto), each of which she tenderly inflicts upon an undeserving city below.

Chicago and the Virgin Mary are no doubt in some kind of mystical cahoots. Why else would Marc Chagall have wrenched the city’s greatest Marian rose window from the guarded precincts of archdiocesan headquarters (now right by a Bentley dealership) and re-installed it, in his celebratory mosaics, in the sky above the city itself? When the thirty-four-foot tall Millenium Mary toured the city in 1999 (she has since been exiled to Indiana), or even when “Our Lady of the Underpass” supposedly appeared in a salt stain in 2005 under the Kennedy Expressway, Mary’s message should have been clear enough. Carl Sandberg may have observed Chicago’s “painted women under the gas lamps luring the farm boys,” but others among us see the city “prepared as a bride for her husband.” The poet saw the city “laughing even as an ignorant fighter laughs who has never lost a battle,” but her winning streak long broken, many now see her, still wracked with incalculable violence, weighted with Marian sorrow instead. Mary and Chicago are transcendentally tethered, so it seems to me at least; but which of the city’s many virgins get the honorary title “Our Lady of Chicago” is not so easy to decide.   

Explicit connections between Chicago and the Virgin Mary have been made for nearly three and a half centuries. When Father Jacques Marquette canoed through the area that is now called Chicagoland, he was sufficiently entranced by the Kaskasia Indians, and they with him, that he accommodated their request to return. It would be his last journey before his death. At the Grand Village of Kaskasia (now Utica, Illinois) in Holy Week of 1675, Marquette celebrated Mass before more than a thousand Indians, and (according to Dablon’s postscript to Marquette’s journals), the priest unfurled “four large pictures of the blessed Virgin,” dedicating the area to her.

The event has lately been celebrated by James Matthew Wilson’s poem, The River of the Immaculate Conception, as well as in Ruth Nelson’s fine volume detailing the many monuments to Marquette in the Chicagoland area. Even so, unless those four Virgin banners survive in a storage box somewhere, no one knows precisely what those images of Mary were. This is not to say that there are no vestiges of this cross-cultural encounter. A stunning deer hide with an abstracted Thunderbird presumably given to Marquette languishes in storage at the Musée de Quaid Branly. (Considering how little survives of Illini material culture, I wonder if the tribe’s contemporary descendants, the Peoria Tribe of Oklahoma, should ask for it back.) Still, it is really anyone’s guess what those original four Our Ladies of Chicago looked like. And this, fortunately enough, invites our unfettered speculation. 

The sober-minded among us might suggest, of course, that they were images of the Immaculate Conception. After all, Marquette’s fondness for the Marian dogma after which he named the Mississippi is well known. The four mysterious images should therefore be associated with statues of the Virgin Immaculate at the Art Institute of Chicago today. At the same time, seeing that Marquette was a Jesuit, maybe the images evoked the Madonna Della Strada, Our Lady of the Good Road, patron of the Society of Jesus. After all, she still has a lakeside chapel in Chicago run by Marquette’s Jesuit brethren today. Poised by the water, the chapel’s baptismal font happily merges with Lake Michigan itself. 

The two remaining mystery images can only be filled out with robustly Catholic Chicago Virgins. Surely among them would be Our Lady of Guadalupe in honor of the shrine now erected to her along the Des Plaines river that Marquette once canoed, or the many Guadalupe murals that enhance the Pilsen neighborhood. Finally, there is Our Lady of Częstochowa at Saint John Cantius, Chicago’s pre-eminent traditional Catholic parish. The icon was blessed by Saint John Paul II and even boasts the name “Our Lady of Chicago.” 

So, there you have it—four Virgins illustrative of Catholic Chicago, filling the blank spots left for us in the historical record. These Catholic Virgins cover everything, just as Chicago’s Madonna della Misericordia covers all good Catholics at Our Lady of All Angels church. The reason that church audaciously echoes Michelangelo’s dome at Saint Peter’s, and Raphael’s Stanze della Segnatura has been replicated in the apse of Saint Hedwig’s, and why Saint Adelbert’s (tragically closed!) is an architectural echo of Saint Paul Outside the Walls is mirrored, is clear: if Constantinople was the second Rome and Moscow the third, Catholic Chicago is the fourth. The Roman lady wins. 

But in a city of so many Eastern European and Russian immigrants, we should expect the second and third Romes to plead their cases as well. Catholics may boast a few miraculous Madonnas in Chicagoland, but none of the fame and stature of Our Lady of Cicero at Saint George Antiochian Church, who wept myrrh in 1994 and can still be seen today. Even so, if thirty years old is too young for your miracle working icons, how about roughly 2000? For a time, Chicago boasted a miracle-working icon said to be painted by Saint Luke himself, the Theotokos of Tikhvin. It was relocated to the city during the Soviet era, kept in Louis Sullivan’s resplendent Trinity Orthodox Cathedral. The Theotokos of Tikhvin has since been replaced by a copy, and the original returned to Russia; but the compassionate eyes of the copy have the same effect. Orthodox Chicago also boasts the glorious Dormition at New Gračanica, a replica larger than the original fourteenth-century church in Kosovo. There in addition to an unexpected image of Sophia herself, Mary is surrounded by disciples arriving at her funeral on clouds that resemble flying carpets. Still, a Virgin even larger has now stolen the show in the form of a mosaic overlooking Route 53 from Saint Mary’s Coptic Orthodox Church, as if the seventeenth-century Ethiopian Orthodox Madonna so prominently displayed at the Art Institute had escaped from the museum to win admirers beyond. This highway Virgin announces to the nearby Des Plaines Guadalupe enthusiasts that there is an indigenous African Virgin in town as well.

As Bridget Heal and others have shown, the Protestant Reformation did not unseat Our Lady—not even, it turns out, in Chicago, home of “Our Lady of the Broken,” a statue of Mary rescued from a trash can. The Virgin and Child in the Clouds by Rembrandt resides in the Art Institute, where even the accompanying angel gets vertigo as he ponders the mystery of the Word made flesh. The city even boasts a Protestant Dormition by Rembrandt as if to steal, or at least borrow, the thunder from New Gracaniča. Then there is the great English apparition: Our Lady of Walsingham. An impressive shrine to her in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, has long stood not far from the point of Marquette’s departure on his last mission to the area, but under Protestant, not Catholic, auspices. As if to drive home the point, there is another Walsingham statue in the narthex of Chicago’s Episcopal Church of the Ascension. Finally, as Kymberly Pynder has shown, black Christs and black Marys have been filling Chicago for more than a century, and they are largely (although not exclusively) Protestant. Perhaps the best of them (not mentioned by Pynder) may be at the Harold Washington Library, where Mary of the Sacred Heart floats away from embittering polemics and welcomes us in her innocence.

One can go further afield still. Mosque Maryam, formerly Saints Constantine and Helena Greek Orthodox Church, claims to be one of the few mosques in the country that is named after Mary. On my tour of it, several Nation of Islam gentlemen boasted that the mosque, which still bears decorative shafts of Eucharistic wheat on the remaining altar railings, functions as a womb for spiritual transformation. Elegant Guanyins, that is, female Bodhisattvas, guard the entrance to the Asian collection at the Art Institute; rival Hindu goddesses fill sumptuously carved edifices such as the Hindu Temple of Greater Chicago (once, I’m sorry to report, open to random visitors on the same day that a Catholic church nearby refused me weekday entry due to lockdown protocols). Marc Chagall’s White Crucifixion hides a Jewish Mary, her son staring at the six candles that intimate how he would suffer in the Holocaust to come.

This brings us to the irreligious, whose unvirginal Marys now rise to towering heights. In the absence of God, politics—the Spirit of Progress that tops the Montgomery Ward Building, the Statue of the Republic that survives in Hyde Park from the World’s Columbian Exposition—or sex—the Aphrodite of Knidos at the Art Institute, for whom a head would be superfluous—or nature—Lorado Taft’s exquisite personifications of the Great Lakes—becomes God. Secularism, its blandness offset with packets of freeze-dried pagan flavoring, has triumphed. Perhaps this is what Marquette’s four banners really foretold. 

Marquette’s four original Virgins are lost, like his own famously elusive body, and the quest for one single, winner-take-all Our Lady of Chicago may be overweening. But in the silence that follows this surrender, Mary still speaks, if not to a city unable to collectively hear her, at least to individuals themselves, no less so than she spoke to Marquette. 

At least that is what happened to me. So much of the Chicago I used to know has been gentrified away. The festively gridded streets of Old Town have been colonized by Crate & Barrel; the John Lennon and Jimmy Hendrix mural on Belmont Avenue has been replaced with a Target; the gritty dance venues of Wicker Park are now luxury condominiums; the folk venues in Rogers Park that captured my youthful heart in the 1990s have vanished like a puff from a clove cigarette. 

But it is hard to gentrify the Virgin. Hence, the Our Lady of Lourdes grotto is still there just north of where I would cluelessly wander in Wrigleyville. Near Wicker Park, in what is surely the greatest monstrance in the city, Mary presides above the Ark of the Covenant, the Eucharistic bread emanating from her womb. And the Vietnamese Virgin Mary, Our Lady of Le Vang, now resides near the Rogers Park neighborhood that enchanted me. Even if the congregation she was appended to has merged with another parish, the statue, for now, endures. And she endures near where I now live on the outskirts of Chicago as well. 

One isn’t supposed to have mystical encounters with the Queen of Heaven in the suburbs, of course, but sometimes Mary doesn’t co-operate with such assumptions. It was Mother’s Day, that secular American leftover from the Marian month of May, and I was on my way to a generic yard-enhancing emporium to buy a garden arbor, the installation of which was to be our big afternoon event. En route, it struck me that the church I’ve been trying to get a look at, Queenship of Mary in Glen Ellyn, might be open. On each of my visits thus far it had been deserted.

I was correct. The parking lot was packed. As I put on my mask to enter, I considered the possibility that I would not be welcome. I was, after all, a white man about to enter, unannounced, an all-Vietnamese church. Hoping that fears occasioned by recent shootings could not forestall Christian hospitality, I made my way in. 

This was not my first visit among Vietnamese Catholics. I had already been to Carthage, Missouri, where tens of thousands gather annually to honor Our Lady during the Marian Days, a devotion that coalesces around an image of Our Lady of Fatima (one who appears to be one-upping Buddhism by adopting the Varadramudra pose with her hands).

The Vietnamese also have their own Marian apparition, Our Lady of Le Vang, who predates her younger Portuguese sister by more than a century. Devotion to Our Lady of La Vang is increasing around the United States. In Orange County, California, for example, a large shrine to Our Lady of La Vang is being constructed, its Frank Gehry-inspired swirls large enough to complement the celebrated architecture of Philip Johnson’s Crystal Cathedral (once the pulpit of the televangelist Robert Schuller and now an actual cathedral). Not far from the seat of the Diocese of Orange is another major church dedicated to her in Santa Ana; its pilgrimage center also under construction, set up to imitate the conditions of the original apparition in the jungles of Vietnam. 

I had visited those sites as well, and my mention of them is what satisfied the person who greeted me at the door at Queenship of Mary. He told me this was my lucky day. Normally the statue of Our Lady of Le Vang is kept in storage, but on Mother’s Day (and a few other days as well) she is brought out for display. I looked from the crowded narthex through glass windows to the main church, where the sermon was proceeding in Vietnamese, and saw her just to the right of the pulpit. He encouraged me to take a photo, but told me that if I came back in a half an hour I could see the statue up close for myself.

So off I went to the yard depot store, grabbed an arbor, and returned. I was welcomed back to the church, shown a diorama of Vietnamese martyrs, and handed a carnation. The Mass had ended, and the statue stood atop a mountain of flowers, dressed in blue, as were so many of the women present that day. I joined the line of venerators. The father in front of me carefully directed his daughter to honor Christ’s presence in the tabernacle first, and only then to approach the image of the Vietnamese Virgin and Child. The girl dutifully deposited her carnation in a basket before the statue and scurried away. It was just me and Our Lady of Le Vang. 

A generation ago (to employ the biblical understanding of a generation as about forty years) my father and grandfather had both served the American army in its mission to fight communism in the jungles of Vietnam. I had visited the Vietnam War memorials in Washington, D.C., Maya Lin’s necessary tear in the national fabric. I was also aware of The Three Soldiers, Frederick Hart’s attempt to offer some figurative complement to Lin’s remarkable minimalist lament. But no state-sponsored commemoration—not even Ken Burns in his harrowing Vietnam documentary—can equal a visit to a shrine of Our Lady of La Vang. 

Only a jungle apparition can redeem what happened in those jungles, and it is in those jungles that she appeared. Long before the Portuguese children saw her in 1917, Our Lady revealed herself to persecuted Catholic Vietnamese who had been driven into the bush by the government in 1798. She told them how to be sustained by the plants, the healing saps of the same jungles that would be covered centuries later with Agent Orange.

Devotion to Our Lady of La Vang in the very country that once dropped bombs upon those jungles is testimony that the healing saps are flowing again. Perhaps this was the Virgin intimated by Marquette’s banners. If that sounds outlandish, consider that it was on Asian taffeta that the images had appeared. Before their mission to the Americas the Jesuits had already reached the Far East, where the faithful accepted Christianity not as appendage of a distant civilization but as truth.

I was thinking too small, it turns out, when reflecting upon Our Lady of Chicago. I was limiting myself to the artificial boundaries of the city. I ought to have considered the suburbs in which I currently reside, the watershed of the Illinois, Des Plaines, the Great Lakes systems known to Marquette, and even the Jesuit missions to the Far East. I was thinking about the population I was most familiar with, neglecting the rapid diversification of the more affordable areas. She who has been named “wider than the heavens” is always wider than we think. Moreover, if the ill-conceived goddess movement of the Seventies was launched (according its founder Carol P. Christ) in protest of the Vietnam war, here was a Mary—no goddess, but the Mother of God Himself—who offered an enduring answer to the movement’s concerns, and who is actually from Vietnam. 

I squared up before the statue with my carnation and looked up and saw not Mary’s hands of blessing, but Christ’s. His toddler fingers reached out like a slow-crashing wave. It crashed on veterans and their children, on settlers and refugees; on Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant Christians, especially on the Vietnamese evangelical church in Wheaton just one town away. It splashed on those outside Christian faith, and even on those foolish enough to think they needed no faith at all; on the south, north and west sides of Chicagoland at once, on the exurbs and suburbs and on what is left of the countryside beyond; on the original peoples who have been hunting in this area for at least fifteen thousand years; it came like a great wave of mercy swelling from the glacial, primordial, baptismal meltwater of what we call the Great Lakes. Such is the secret to this (and every) landscape. How else to account for Vietnam’s unnoticed reverse invasion of America with this jungle apparition of love? “If you had mercy on everyone,” it seemed as if Mary then told me, “you would live in paradise.” But unlike her divine child, I do not. This is why I so often inhabit my self-made hell. 

Our Lady of Chicago is then, for this pilgrim at least, the unhurried Virgin from the land to which this land brought war. The hand formed in her womb is the healer of the conflict that engulfed my fathers. “The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some count slowness,” wrote the once-impatient, sword-wielding Peter, but we count slowness poorly still. It turns out that Christ’s blessing hand in this statue is as powerful as Christians claim it to be. What keeps us from seeing so is our unwarranted expectation for speed. 

Were you to tell a Vietnam War protester in 1970 that an indigenous Vietnamese Virgin would one day tenderly envelop America, he would have dismissed you as a lunatic. But healing has taken place. It will be no different, of course, with the wounds we inflict upon one another now. This is the hope that Marquette’s Virgins, in all their variety, represent. The co-mingling crises that destroy lives in the present are certain sites of a cure yet to come. But that is for someone else to remark upon, in respect to another city, in another forty years.

Matthew J. Milliner is associate professor of art history at Wheaton College. He is the author of The Everlasting People (2021) and Mother of the Lamb (2022).