Father Mac

[chicago]

suntimes.com/output/news/cst-nws-mac01.html

Monsignor Ignatius McDermott dies

January 1, 2005

BY LISA DONOVAN AND MICHAEL SNEED Staff Reporters

He walked Chicago’s streets ministering to, by some estimates, thousands of Chicagoans addicted to drugs and alcohol.

Along the way, Monsignor Ignatius D. McDermott – forever known as Father Mac – became known as the city’s living saint.

As he aged, those who worked closely with the Roman Catholic priest and founder of Haymarket Center, a drug and alcohol rehab facility on the city’s near West Side, suggested he slow down.

His response? “I can always rest in eternity.”

On Friday, friends believed he found that final resting place.

Father Mac died after a short illness about 11 a.m. Friday. He was 95.

Longtime friend, Emeritus Bishop Timothy Lyne, said it’s hard to believe that the force behind such a huge ministry is gone.

“His 68 years [in the priesthood] were spent taking care of people in need. He rescued people in the grips of alcoholism and convinced them they were good,” said Lyne, who administered Thursday the anointing of the sick to Monsignor McDermott. “His great virtue was convincing people not to give up on themselves, even when others might have.”

He was echoed by Archbishop of Chicago Cardinal Francis George.

“Monsignor McDermott’s priestly heart reached out to those whom others might overlook or forget,” the cardinal said Friday.

’Heavy hearts’

He was also a force for change in the lives of those he worked with, said Raymond Soucek, who has served as president and chief executive officer of the Haymarket Center since 1989.

“We at Haymarket Center have as our mission continuing the work Father Mac started 29 years ago today when the first clients were received at Haymarket Center,” Soucek said. “We will start the new year with heavy hearts, but with a renewed commitment to that mission.”

The Rev. McDermott was born on July 31, 1909 on Chicago’s South Side. He attended St. Gabriel Catholic School before studying and later graduating from the former Visitation Catholic School.

He was ordained in 1936 after studying at Quigley Preparatory Seminary and Mundelein’s St. Mary of the Lake Seminary.

But his ministerial path would be forever cemented beyond the walls of that which he studied.

While on leave from the seminary in 1930 he worked at Arlington Park racetrack. His daily commute from downtown meant traversing Chicago’s notorious “Skid Row.”

That was how he began ministering to the homeless and alcoholics who populated the area.

In 1946, Father Mac was named assistant director of the Chicago Archdiocese’s Catholic Charities. His office at 126 N. Desplaines St., was only a “pop fly” removed from the core of Chicago’s most notorious area for the down and out, according to Soucek.

Next to Father Mac’s offices was the Desplaines Street police station, with its holding area mainly for alcoholics, and the room location of what commonly was labeled “The Drunk Court.”

Founded Haymarket

He walked Skid Row nightly, visiting saloons and the ailing in flophouses, Sousek recalled.

After a full career both as a parish priest and Chicago Archdiocese administrator, Monsignor McDermott, then 65, moved to co-found the then Haymarket House.

On Christmas Eve, hours before he would have celebrated his well-known midnight mass at the now Haymarket Center – famous for its brevity as well as the priest who said the service, Monsignor McDermott was admitted to the hospital.

In his final days, the sports fan who often used football, baseball and basketball analogies in his sermons (and whose license plates read “Sox04”) talked about how the Bears and its owners – the McCaskeys – had been so generous to Haymarket Center.

He also had a final request: Someone must get on the phone and wish former Gov. George Ryan a “Happy Holidays” and let Ryan know that the monsignor was praying for him. It was a tradition for Monsignor McDermott to call his close friend at Thanksgiving and Christmas.

Monsignor McDermott suffered from diabetes and respiratory problems, and had tuberculosis while in the seminary. He died on the 29th anniversary of the founding of Haymarket Center.

A funeral mass will be celebrated by the cardinal at 10:30 a.m. Wednesday at Holy Name Cathedral. Visitation will be held from 2 to 9 p.m. Monday as well as Tuesday, in the chapel at Haymarket Center, 932 W. Washington.

 

[chicago]

**Father Mac fought for down and out

BY THOMAS ROESER**

The death of Monsignor Ignatius D. McDermott at 95 (on the 29th anniversary of the institution he founded, Haymarket Center) severs a vibrant link between the Roman Catholic Church in Chicago and the city’s social and political history. Known as “Father Mac” by everyone from former President Gerald Ford and a host of Illinois governors and mayors to the last wanderer who stumbled in from the street to his famed Haymarket Center, he was a colorful humanitarian with a South Side Irishman’s zest for wit, storytelling, politics and sports.

More than anything else, he was an old-fashioned priest, always wearing his clerical garb, who continually visited hospitals to console the ill and friendless, went almost daily to wakes and visited prisons. He was intolerant – with government and church bureaucracy. It led him to crusade for the decriminalization of the inebriate – and, at an age when most men slow down, to co-found the finest facility for the addicted, Haymarket Center.

He was slangy and tough with a blowtorch temper in his youth. The son of Irish immigrants, he had that group’s love of strict sexual morality. He identified strongly with his church’s past imagery, such as the sweet smell of incense during high mass and the description of residences by parishes.

Always a rebel

Like all great men, he was both progressive and conservative – but always a rebel. At Catholic Charities he drove his bosses nuts with his creative evasion of the bureaucracy. Not content to administer from a desk, he launched a personal apostolate to the down-and-outers on Skid Row. He rankled some at Charities because he was an entrepreneur rather than manager. The church tried to give him a pastorate at a comfortable parish near the University of Chicago. He turned it down, saying his parish was Skid Row. Finally, the church bureaucrats eased him out, claiming he was too old. He fooled them by founding Haymarket Center. Joined by Dr. James West, a surgeon, and a business team led by John (Jack) Whalen, he took a new lease on life and hit his stride in his late 80s. But with style, always with style.

Hitting .400

He presided as a sports-jargon-talking patron saint of the addicted. Sports-writing was what he wanted to do if he had not become a priest. Always he pushed sports metaphors. If you pleased him you were a .400 hitter, hit a long ball or, switching games, you were a great downfield blocker. In times of trouble you took two and hit to the right (meaning “take your time and act shrewdly.”) A smart person was a pinch-hitter for Augustine or Aquinas. He would go to Notre Dame games but in recent years would secretly push for its opponents because he felt the school was too money-centered, too arrogant.

He followed sports avidly, particularly his beloved White Sox. The Sox was the team for Irish Catholics because it was South Side and Catholic-owned. More than 70 years later, McDermott recalled a day in the mid-1920s when Babe Ruth came to Comiskey Park. As a kid he went with his father and brothers to see the Bambino. They brought their own home-made lemonade. As the time came when Ruth moved up to bat, little Ignatius who had been imbibing too much lemonade had to respond to nature’s call and walked down the bleachers to the restroom below. His brothers, Al and Mike, shouted: “You’re crazy! Babe’s coming up to bat! You’ll miss it!” No use and as he moved down through the stands, Ignatius groaned at the lost opportunity. Then, as the stands above him roared with excitement, Ruth hit a mighty blow. The ball rocketed through the stands and rolled at his feet on the ground floor of Comiskey at the door of the men’s room. When he climbed back to the bleachers, his brothers yelled, “You missed it!” But he didn’t. He held Ruth’s ball aloft. He told that story for 85 years.

For generations, the name McDermott was synonymous with political clout in the Cook County Democratic Party. For much of his life as a young priest, Ignatius was regarded as Jim McDermott’s kid brother. Jim, 14 years older than he, was the oldest of the eight. In 1955, Jim made a bid to become chairman of the Cook County Democratic Party against Richard J. Daley. A car fatality robbed Jim McDermott of a key ally and Daley went on to become chairman and ultimately mayor. Since then, Irish pols who have notoriously long memories, trace the beginning of bad blood between the McDermotts and Daleys, which ended when the current Mayor Daley asked Jim McDermott’s kid brother to manage the homeless problem at O’Hare.

(continued)

 

[chicago]

Vatican II concerns

Theologically Father Mac believed in Vatican II but he fretted about sudden liturgical changes in his church that seemed more a prelate’s whim than anything else. “You know who I’d like to talk to in the Great Beyond?” he told me. “John XXIII. I’d ask him how Vatican II was so twisted that they destroyed so many great things in the Church.” He idolized Cardinal George Mundelein who ordained him and strongly defended Cardinal John Cody who was under fire from dissident priests.

He kept his views about Cardinal Joseph Bernardin largely to himself but he never forgot how the prelate replaced him as an adviser on clerical alcoholics with a cold form letter. His relations with Cardinal Francis George were always warm.

Father Mac has left strict orders in his will that no sermon be delivered at his funeral mass. And actually, there need not be any. The most eloquent testimony has been his life poured out in service to others. His motto was the admonition of St. Vincent De Paul: “When you no longer burn with love, others will die of the cold.”

Thomas F. Roeser, a contributor to the Chicago Sun-Times commentary pages, is author of the biography Father Mac: The Life and Times of Ignatius D. McDermott, Co-Founder of Chicago’s Famed Haymarket Center.