The Beginnings of St. Thomas
St. Thomas Sixty-Year Commemorative History
Learn more about the first sixty years of St. Thomas of Canterbury Church directly from the paster in 1976, Reverend Michael Rochford.
In the winter of 1916, a particularly severe snowstorm made it difficult for many of St. Ita’s parishioners to make the trek to Sunday mass. In response, several families requested that Archbishop of Chicago George Mundelein create a new parish for the Irish Catholic families who lived in Uptown. Mundelein agreed, but only if the community could sign up at least five hundred families. According to parish lore, they returned the petition in just four days, and St. Thomas was born.
Even though it was largely Irish Catholic families who advocated for the formation of St. Thomas, a glimpse of the parish’s future soon appeared with the variety of European ethnicities who also joined the church. As the Reverend Michael Rochford wrote for the sixty-year commemorative anniversary of the church, “Though Irish surnames predominated, the parish lists, baptisms and marriages at the time, indicate a wide variety of European backgrounds.” While this generation represented many nationalities, they all had an “American” outlook, according to Rochford, which shaped the values of the parish.
Lacking a building of its own, St. Thomas initially held mass in a local theatre. Yet while the church lacked its own sanctuary, founding Father Franci O’Brien rented a house that served as both a rectory and a parish school. From an initial class of sixty students ranging from kindergarten to fourth grade, the school grew to occupy a combined church and school building that the archdiocese completed in 1917.
