St. Thomas Today
St. Thomas of Canterbury, founded in 1916 in Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood, also continues to serve the local parishioners of Mary, Mother of God in a variety of ways. The church has a long history of lingual multi-culturalism and along with its daily masses in English, it holds a mass in Vietnamese and Lao on Sundays and incorporates Vietnamese Christian stylistic elements into its contemporary architecture and art. St. Thomas is the home of Mary, Mother of God’s outreach ministries which maintains, among other community services, a soup kitchen that serves warm meals to the community every Tuesday and a food pantry that provides groceries to those in need every Monday and Thursday morning. On the Mary, Mother of God website, under the St. Thomas of Canterbury tab, they ask for volunteers and donations for both their soup kitchen and food pantry.
The following text is a transcript of a life-long Catholic and volunteer within the soup kitchen Dennis Donelon. He has volunteered for over 20 years, and details his relationship with the Church, what being apart of the soup kitchen means to him, and why it is important to not only St Thomas, but to the community as a whole.
To listen to the full audio, or read the transcript, follow the links below the sample.
[D.D.] Jim always talked about some of the different miracles. So back to the time when there was fights going on. Jim was about to get beat up. And by some of the guests, and out of nowhere, these two big black gentlemen showed up. He'd never seen him before. doesn't know who they are, didn't know who they are. But they came and stood right behind him. The people stopped, sat down, everything dissipated. And they were gone.
[K.O.] Wow.
[D.D.] I don't know if they're angels, but —
[K.O.] That's incredible. Kind of sounds like.
[D.D.] The other time, this is more of a funny side. Something happened with a soup got burned, and you can’t serve that. And they used to burn the pot quite a bit — I used to clean this pot. Anyways, the soup was just not salvageable. And we didn't know what was going to happen. Next, right now there's a knock at the door. And the person has a food truck coming from some event. And they've got hundreds of hotdogs precooked, wrapped in oil backs, and they're looking to donate, that became the dinner.
Canterbury House, a parish ministry created in the wake of the MMOG merger, is hosted in St. Thomas of Canterbury church and serves as a mutual aid organization modeled after the Catholic Worker movement. Canterbury House Director James Murphy, with help from parishioners, has been holding a homecooked weekly Wednesday dinner for migrants, many of whom are staying in local shelters. This current project emphasizes the need to accept and care for those in need, particularly migrants, and is another example of the important role St. Thomas continues to fulfill in meeting the social service needs of the Uptown neighborhood.