Two suburban Catholic parishes that had been slated to close or fold into another congregation July 1 have gotten a reprieve, but exactly why and for how long is unclear.
The Diocese of Joliet — the arm of the Catholic church for DuPage, Kendall and Will counties led by Bishop Ron Hicks — announced in February that a slew of parishes were closing or consolidating, including Oakbrook Terrace’s Ascension of Our Lord Catholic Church that was scheduled to merge into a Lombard parish.
St. Patrick Church in Wilton Center, in Will County, was scheduled to be merged into another parish in far southwest suburban Manhattan.
While the nearly century-old St. Patrick church building was likely to be closed at that point, Ascension’s church was expected to be downgraded to a “secondary worship site” with an uncertain long-term future.
But both remain open and active, at least for now.
“We’re very hopeful, we’re prayerfully hopeful,” says longtime Ascension parishioner Suzanne Burgess. “We’re doing everything we can to make it a vibrant parish and something the bishop should be proud of. It’s hard to evangelize if you’re going to close a church.”
Neither Hicks nor his aides would comment, declining to return emails and calls.
After the Joliet diocese put Ascension and St. Patrick on the chopping block, congregants from both parishes filed appeals on April 1 with the Vatican, the worldwide headquarters of the church now led by Pope Leo XIV.
They argued that Hicks’ reasoning — which focuses in part on declining attendance and finances — is faulty.
There’s a formal process bishops must follow if they want to close a parish. If congregants believe rules weren’t adhered to, or the justifications were flawed, they can ask the Vatican’s Dicastery for the Clergy to intervene and reverse course.
While that’s often unsuccessful, the Vatican office last year did overturn Hicks’ parish closure of St. Joseph Catholic Church in Joliet amid an earlier wave of parish consolidations.
In that 2024 decision, the Vatican didn’t buy into Hicks’ arguments about money, saying St. Joseph “appears to more than sufficiently meet its financial obligations and possesses ample savings.”
The Vatican also addressed Hicks’ claims that the Slovenian community that’s long been part of St. Joseph was evaporating, saying Hicks “presented no information to justify the assertion of the near disappearance of the Slovenian community.”
Hicks could have appealed the ruling but let it stand, so St. Joseph was reestablished as a fully operating parish.
This time, Hicks may be waiting to hear back from the Vatican before moving too quickly on Ascension and St. Patrick, says Brody Hale. He’s an attorney serving as an advisor to both parishes on their appeals, and who was involved in St. Joseph’s appeal.
All Hale knows for sure is “they weren’t killed off” and are “still functioning” as parishes “at this time.”
The future is “very very murky.”
Hale says such appeals can take six months to a year.
The Vatican office, headed by Cardinal Lazzaro You Heung-sik of South Korea, had no immediate comment.
Although Ascension remains open, its longtime pastor was recently reassigned and the number of Sunday masses dropped from two to one.
St. Patrick used to have three masses a week, and now there’s one, says parishioner Jerry Kinsella, who helped spearhead its appeal.
“We’re holding onto hope and prayer, a lot of prayer,” he says, noting the congregation dates to the 1800s and has been through a lot over the years.
The first church “blew away . . . the second and third churches burned to the ground, and the fourth church,” the current one, was dedicated in 1929.
“You think about what all the folks ahead of us went through so we could have this church,” Kinsella says. “That’s what hurts.”
Hicks’ February decrees on St. Patrick and Ascension both say the “principal motivation for modifying this parish is a concern for souls and the good of the faithful.”
Diocesan officials have cited “budgetary issues” as one of the broader reasons for embarking on what they call “targeted restructuring,” which has involved a number of other recent parish closings and mergers. As of July 1, that includes parishes in Villa Park and Carol Stream.
But Hicks’ office won’t say how the decades-old priest sex abuse crisis has played into the financial challenges the diocese now faces.
Millions of dollars have been spent on legal settlements with victims, though Hicks has refused to divulge the total financial cost or otherwise discuss the topic.
Before he became the Joliet bishop, Hicks was a top aide to Cardinal Blase Cupich as the Archdiocese of Chicago was going through a similar pruning of parishes.
Left standing, though under a new name, was Hicks’ boyhood church in South Holland.