St. Ita Roman Catholic Church
Saint Ita’s Roman Catholic Church is the oldest church within Mary, Mother of God and was founded on July 1, 1900. The founding priest, the Rev. John Crowe, established the parish in the Guild Hall on the southwest corner of Bryn Mawr and Winthrop for Irish Catholics in the Edgewater neighborhood of Chicago. The church initially included fifty-three families, whose children attended Sunday school and, starting in 1904, primary school in the hall’s basement.
The parish soon outgrew the Guild Hall and broke ground on a new building they would design in the French Gothic style on April 7, 1924. Construction was completed and the building dedicated on October 9, 1927. The church remained a center of Edgewater’s Irish Catholic life for much of the twentieth century, until the neighborhood’s shifting demographics brought new parishioners from primarily Cuba and, eventually, elsewhere in Latin America. The parish began to offer masses in Spanish in the 1966. While the Archdiocese of Chicago merged the parish with St. Thomas and St. Gregory in 2020, St. Ita’s continues to serve as the public face of the new community.
This exhibit tells St. Ita’s story.